More and more people are comfortable interacting with devices using their voice. How does that change the world of marketing?
In this episode of the award-winning Here’s Why digital marketing video series, Mark Traphagen shares key insights from Google on how voice assistance is changing our world.

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Transcript

Eric: Mark, usually I’m the one talking about the rise of digital personal assistants and voice interactions with devices, but you had the opportunity to cover a keynote session on this topic at SMX West. Share with us what you learned.
Mark: We heard from Marco Lenoci, who’s the head of Google Product Partnership for the Google Assistant product, and he not only shared with us what Google Assistant can do now and what they’re working on for the future, but also the implications of the rise of voice assistance for search marketers.
Eric: I think one of the important things for people watching this show to be clear on is where we are with the volume of voice interactions with devices, which I call it rather than voice search, by the way, because it’s not all really search.
We’re not at the point where voice has taken over the world yet, and it’s important to understand that, but by 2020, it should be a significant percentage, which might be 5% or 10% of interactions with devices. That’s enough to matter to a lot of brands, and if you’re going to be ready for that, you have to get going on it now.
With that context, why don’t you go over some of the implications?
Mark: Okay, the things Marco shared with us. So, he gave us five key insights at the end of his talk, and that’s what I want to concentrate on.
I think one of the most important things is that we’re seeing that voice is about action. You said it before, it’s not all search, and that’s true.
In fact, Google data shows that there’s 40 times more action-oriented interactions in voice than in search. So, people using voice with devices are about doing things, getting things done. It’s not about finding the coffee, which is what you would be looking for on search, but ordering the coffee and expecting it to be ready when you arrive at the coffee shop. So, start to think about the actions your customers want to take: less passive discovery, more action to completion.
People also expect more conversations with their devices. In fact, Google data shows 200 times more conversations going on in voice assistance and voice-assisted devices than in search. So, this means we’re moving from keywords to something more dynamic. Keywords are still important, search is still so important, but in this world… Well, let me give you an example.
Doing a traditional search, you’d be searching for something like ‘weather’, and then your zip code, right? But now, we’d ask things to a voice-assisted device or a digital personal assistant like, “Do I need an umbrella today?”
We expect that device to understand, when we say, “Do I need an umbrella today?”, I’m asking a question about the weather. There’s also an expectation that the location is understood. Your device knows where you are, so the assistant should know where you are, and what time of day it is, and as I said, that ‘an umbrella’ implies, “Is it going to rain today?”
Marco told us that there are actually 5,000 ways users can ask for an alarm to be set on Google Assistant, just as an example.
Also, he told us that smart screens are changing everything, and by smart screens, we mean devices that interact by voice but still have a display of some type. Google says that nearly half of the people who are using voice also use touch input on a screen together with it.
So some things still need to be seen. We still live in a multi-modal world. That’s the way we interact as humans. That’s the way we expect these devices to interact.
The fourth insight is that daily routines matter. These devices are becoming more and more able to know things like the time of day, where I am, this is what I’d usually be doing that time of day. For example, this is the time I usually drive home, so do I want to hear my favorite podcast?
Developers need to be thinking in terms of day and time to be there when users need them most. The concept of micro-moments in marketing takes on a whole new context in this.
The fifth and final insight is that voice is universal. We already know how to do it. Keyboards and tapping are still not totally natural for humans. Voice is.
Eric: Yes, that’s really interesting, and some of the research that I dug up in my investigations into voice shows just how universal voice is. People don’t realize, for example, that a baby in a mother’s womb can recognize the mother’s voice as distinct from other voices. So, it’s actually something that’s innate.
Anyway, cool insights overall. What practical actions should we be taking as digital marketers?
Mark: Lenoci shared three takeaways.
The first is, show up. Be there. Be involved with this. Make sure your content, services, and apps are available on Google and across its various services, including developing things for Google Assistant, like we’ve been doing at Perficient Digital, and Amazon Alexa, and all these different things that we’re working with now.
The second is, speed up. Don’t just create experiences. Think about the micro-moments where you can assist. So, “I want to know, I want to play, I want to buy this, I want to go here,” being present at those moments. How can you make that easier and faster for your customers and prospects?
And the third takeaway is, wise up. Take advantage of the info coming out from Google and others who are involved in this marketplace about how to build for that world.
Eric: Thanks, Mark. And your suggestion about the focus on helping people in the moment, right now, is a really important one. That’s how these technologies get adapted by people or adopted by people, really, is when the technology makes it so much easier than the alternatives.

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Content marketing is a complicated and relatively young practice. What really matters to achieve success?

In this episode of the award-winning Here’s Why digital marketing video series, Mark Traphagen gives you the three top priorities to get ROI from your content strategy.

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Resources

• Your 3 Top Content Marketing Priorities for 2019
• Why You Should Build Content Marketing Bridges
• See all of our Here’s Why Videos | Subscribe to our YouTube Channel

Transcript

Eric: Mark, content marketing is a complex topic. What would you say are the most important things content marketers should be pursuing right now?  
Mark: I have three priorities that I try to follow myself. Number one is to balance quantity and quality, two is to prioritize content hubs, and three, build content bridges.  
Eric: All right, let’s take those one at a time then. Start with balancing quantity and quality in your content.  
Mark: In the old days, the conventional wisdom was to create as much content as you can. In an upcoming video in our “Here’s Why” series you’re going to talk a little bit more in detail about what that means and what that looks like in terms of balancing those two things.  
Let’s talk for a moment about why it seemed to used to make sense to just create as much content as you possibly can.  
Before social media, for example, almost all content had a short lifespan. Most people got their content through an RSS feed or email notification and that was it; it was gone forever. Now with social media, if you’re doing it right, you can take your best content, your evergreen content, promote it again and again and again so more people see it.  
Also, Google hadn’t yet shifted its focus fully to content quality and user-value. All the traditional signals are still there in Google, but these are things that they’ve done a lot better with in recent years. So having really great quality content now can become evergreen in search where Google keeps promoting it even if it’s older, if it’s still relevant.  
And finally, everyone was playing catch up back then because most brands lacked sufficient quality or quantity of content. I think those are the reasons why they concentrated on quantity. Now Google’s shift to machine-learning driven content quality has swung the pendulum the other way where content quality has become more of a priority.  
So the ideal I think is—and this is if you have the capacity and the resources to do this—is to put as much as you can toward that high-quality user-focused, highly-relevant content. If you have the capacity, fill that in with shorter posts in between other kinds of content so that you keep top of mind but you’re giving lots of context around your content.  
Eric: Let’s talk about the importance of content hubs. 
Mark: Yes, and this is something I learned from you, and I love it now because I see what it does in our own content and that of our clients, for sure. So, once you get a quality content mindset, content hub creation is the next step.  
Let’s talk about what a content hub is. At the most fundamental level, it’s a centralized curation of your content around one of your main topics.  
You can have multiple content hubs on your site, but each one is centered around one of the things you really want to be known for. So blog content we know gets pushed down and disappears. A hub creates a better user experience, because everything that the user wants to know about that topic they can find in that one place, but it also helps search engines to see what you should be known for.  
Examples on our site include our hubs built around our research studies. Because of those, we’ve got number one ranks for over a year now for “mobile versus desktop,” “digital personal assistants,” and many other high–volume keywords that are really important to our business.  
Eric: Right. And I think what most people don’t realize is that in a blog construct—this is a little bit of research work I did—75% of the content that goes in a blog are things that Google really shouldn’t index. And like you said, that content gradually disappears over time as it descends in the hierarchy. 
Mark: And it should, right? 
Eric: Yes. But in a content hub, you have the big advantage of really controlling where everything shows up which is great.  
But the last priority you mentioned is building content marketing bridges. What do you mean by that?  
Mark: First of all, I have a lot more detail about that in another “Here’s Why” episode and also a blog post that I published about it, but let’s talk about the basic idea.  
A content bridge means bridging the gulf between brand goals and consumer wants and needs. I see the most successful content has the right balance of both. You can be out of balance either way too much, trying to engage consumers but little about your products or services or what your brand is really about, or the other way of just trying to sell, sell, sell that people don’t want to see with no helpful informational content.  
So you want to find the bridge, the balance between those two. 

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We know we should use social media to promote our content and engage with our customers, but what about strategic partnerships?

In this episode of the award-winning Here’s Why digital marketing video series, Mark Traphagen explains why building strategic partnerships that can boost our brand and energize our content may be one of the best investments of our time on social media.

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Resources

• Social Media Strategies You Can Use to Boost Your SEO

Transcript

Eric: Mark, you’ve been heavily involved in social media for many years now, but the field has recently been changing a lot. What are you doing differently these days because of that?
Mark: It’s certainly true there’s been a whole bunch of disruption in the past year. The field’s always like that, but more than I’ve ever seen before.
Some examples:

• Organic reach is at an all-time low. It’s been going down for years, but it’s almost nonexistent for some brands now.
• More restrictions on automation, especially Twitter, but all the networks are pulling back on how much we can do to automate.  
• And privacy concerns, reducing targeting options, making it harder to do certain things that you used to always be able to do before.  

I think it’s still important to keep the time-tested fundamentals going, things like promote your content—obviously– engage with your audience, the stuff you always hear. But you know, Eric, there’s another powerful use for social media that many overlook.
Eric: What’s that?
Mark: Using social media to build strategic partnerships to help spread your brand message.
Eric: What exactly do you mean by that?
Mark: A couple of things, Eric.
First of all, the strategic partnerships that we’re talking about here are noncompetitive resources with whom you can work cooperatively. So, these could be influencers, as we always say, but they don’t have to be
It’s anyone with whom you can co-create things that are better than the sum of the parts, or it could be anyone who could provide you an opportunity to be seen by their audience.
Eric: Got you. Why is social media such a great place to find or foster these kinds of partnerships and how do you do it?

Mark: Don’t forget that social media is “social” media. We always think about that in terms of engaging with our customers or prospects. But the more personally active you are in social media, like, the more opportunities you have to discover potential partners.
It’s also a great place to nurture those real-world acquaintances that you’ve met at conferences, meetups, and other places, into relationships that can become partnerships. So, there are many ad hoc opportunities to be helpful or just social, in order to get on their radar screen.

Let me give you a personal example. You know Steve Rayson of BuzzSumo.
Eric: Yes
Mark: I spent years developing a relationship with him online through social media, and that led to me being able to get the opportunity to break the news of BuzzSumo’s groundbreaking study of the decline of social sharing over the last several years. That was such a great opportunity, and my article for Search Engine Journal went viral and actually helped them promote their study. So, it was a mutual, cooperative thing.
Eric: That’s awesome.
What are your key takeaways to help us build partnerships like that through social media?
Mark: I’d advise that in this year you switch more of your social media time and strategy to intentional partnership building. Keep doing those fundamentals but do more partnership building.

Keep an updated list of the strategic relationships that are most important to you and make sure they get regular attention, and remember you’ve got to give to get.

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Can the way people talk about your brand online actually affects the things Google will rank you for?

In this episode of the award-winning Here’s Why digital marketing video series, Mark Traphagen explains how Google might use mentions of your brand in social media to discover more of what your brand is about.

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Resources

• 3 Social Media Strategies You Can Use to Boost Your SEO
• Does Google Use Online Brand Mentions for Search Ranking? – Eric Enge with Gary Illyes at Pubcon 2017
• See all of our Here’s Why Videos | Subscribe to our YouTube Channel

Transcript

Eric: Mark, there’s little doubt that social media is a great way to increase awareness for your brand, but can that have an effect on your SEO?
Mark: It’s tough to say for sure, but there’s some good hints it might.

You did an onstage keynote with Gary Illyes of Google at Pubcon. I remember he said two ways that brand mentions might be used by Google.
One of those was it could alert Google that the brand is an entity worth paying attention to. But it could also help Google know what you should rank for; maybe things that you’re not currently ranking for. If a lot of people are talking about you for that thing, maybe that’s something Google should be looking for.

Eric: Did you just say that mentions of your brand on social media can help you rank higher?

Mark: No, I didn’t say that. And the distinction is subtle but important. Let’s get the exact quote here from Gary Illyes.

The context in which you engage online and how people talk about you online, actually can impact what you rank for.

“What you rank for.” Notice that’s the word, not how high you rank. So Google may use the context of online mentions to discover things you should have a shot at ranking for that you currently don’t, as I said.

Eric: So, what can you do then as a brand to take advantage of this?

Mark: First, I would build a real audience of true brand fans. You want to cultivate the people who are going to talk about you in the ways that you want them to, the positive ways that will give Google those clues.

Then fan the flames of that audience. Create conversations. Keep them going. And then create and promote content that comprehensively covers what your brand is about. Give Google every possible clue who you are, what you should rank for.

Eric: Thanks, Mark. This is part two of a three-part series on social media and SEO. Watch for the other two episodes to learn more.

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Unfortunately, search engines don’t put much weight on social media as a provider of reliable ranking signals. But that doesn’t mean social media isn’t important to your SEO strategy.

In this episode of the popular Here’s Why digital marketing video series, Mark Traphagen explains how to use social media to increase your chances of earning natural links to your content page. This is part one in a three-part series on social media and SEO.

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Resources

• 3 Social Media Strategies You Can Use to Boost Your SEO
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Transcript

Eric: Mark, as we kick off this series on how social media can boost SEO, let’s ask the big question first. Do social media engagement metrics and links directly impact SEO?
Mark: The short answer to that is no.
There are reasons behind that, and those reasons really lead me (and I think they’ve led you as well) to believe that Google is telling the truth when they emphatically state, as they have for years, that they don’t use social as a signal.
Now, what are some of those reasons?

1. One of them would be social is just a very weak and unreliable signal overall. For one thing, Google doesn’t even try to index all of social media. So it’s an incomplete signal, and Google doesn’t like incomplete signals. They don’t know if they’re getting the information they need from it. It’s much harder to trust the authority of a profile versus that of a site in the way that Google relies on sites from links and things like that.
2. And engagement doesn’t really communicate anything definite. We see Facebook backing away from “likes” as an indicator of something that should be promoted to its own users.
3. Also I think it’s very significant that most of the major social sites no longer pass on engagement metrics through their API to our sites. We can’t even show those numbers in many cases. So if they don’t think it’s important, it’s probably not important.
4. Finally, links are the big thing in SEO still, and almost all social media links are no-follow. So, again, they don’t even pass on any authority.

Eric: If links and social media posts aren’t direct ranking signals, why do you say social media can still be an effective link building strategy?
Mark: Sites won’t link to content they’ve never seen, right? And social media is still an effective way to promote your content. You need to get it seen? Use social media to get it seen.
That doesn’t mean just posting randomly in social media. There’s the importance of building the right audience. You want an audience that matters to you. You want to use paid social to target people like journalists, bloggers, other media figures, and influencers who when they see your content might see it as the kind of thing they want to share with their audiences, again increasing the opportunities for links.
Eric: Got it. So, what are some specific things people should do then on social media to increase their chances of earning links to their content?
Mark:

• Never publish a piece of content without a plan for how it would be promoted on social media.
• Keep a constantly updated list of your evergreen content and share it different times and days on different networks to maximize the exposure.
• And foster strategic relationships with influencers and writers in your niche. In another video of this series I’m going to talk more about that.

Eric: Thanks, Mark. Watch for parts two and three of this series on how social media can boost your SEO.

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Google publishes regular updates to its Search Quality Raters Guidelines. What should content marketers take from them?
In this episode of the popular Here’s Why digital marketing video series, Mark Traphagen explains what the guidelines are and how their recommendations can help you do better content marketing.

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Resources

• Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines (PDF)
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Transcript

Eric: Mark, why don’t you start by explaining what the Google Search Quality Raters Guidelines are? And since that’s a mouthful, maybe we’ll just refer to it as SQRG for the rest of this video.
Mark: That sounds like a great idea, Eric.
For a number of years now, Google has contracted a group of people who are trained to evaluate the quality of the top search results for a given query. The SQRG is the training manual and handbook for those raters. It helps them understand what Google thinks is a high-quality page that completely satisfies the needs of the reader.
Eric: Do we have access to those guidelines?
Mark: We do now. We didn’t always; they used to be considered top secret. But a copy always somehow kind of leaked out. Many of us suspected that Google allowed the leaks because they really wanted to be nudging us toward the standards in those documents.
But in any case, starting a few years ago, they’ve made available a public copy of the document each time it’s updated.
Eric: And what are the search quality raters actually doing?
Mark: Their job is to help Google search ranking engineers evaluate how their algorithms are doing at providing us with the best search results. Their feedback helps those engineers to know where they might need to tweak an algorithm to get better results that will satisfy real human users.
Eric: Do the guidelines tell us Google’s ranking factors, at least as far as content on the page is concerned?
Mark: No, they don’t. I mean, at least not in any direct way.
The guidelines are not meant to delineate specific ranking factors. In fact, Google’s John Mueller emphasized this in a recent webmasters hangout when he said, “It’s not the case that we take the quality rater guidelines and, one-to-one, turn them into a code that does all the ranking.”

However, I think they are still highly useful to any of us who do content strategy or creation for two reasons.
First, hey tell us about the kind of pages and content Google aspires to have ranking highly in their results. Now, as John Mueller put it in that same video, they give some idea of where we would like to hit with regards to search.
So even if you can’t map things in the guidelines, one-to-one, with specific ranking factors, if you’re striving to improve those things, you’re closer to becoming a site Google wants to rank well.
Second, we should always remember that bringing in organic search traffic isn’t the only job for our content. It’s just as important, and maybe even more important, that our content pages are truly useful, helpful, complete, easy to use for our real human site visitors.
Our content is often the first impression someone has of our brand. It’s your first salesperson. You should want to present your best face, and the SQRG is really an excellent tutorial on creating high-quality web pages for real humans.
Eric: To finish up, can you share one insight from the guidelines that would help our viewers create better content?
Mark: There’s a concept that flows throughout the entire document that I think sums up Google’s take on quality content, that’s known by the acronym E-A-T, or EAT, which stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness.
Google is clear that they don’t use that all the time. It’s more important on sites that are your money/your life type sites, but I still believe that focusing on those standards is the most important goal you can have for your content marketing.
Let’s start with expertise. Your content creators need to know what they’re talking about. In the internet age, it’s way too easy for people to discover errors or miss directions.
Next, work to build authority in your space. This takes time because you have to build a track record of content that both influencers and regular people come to rely on.
And finally, be trustworthy. Don’t take any shortcuts that could compromise your reputation. Respect your audience, and they will repay you with their attention.

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More companies than ever are using content marketing, but do we have any proof that it actually works?
In this episode of our award winning Here’s Why digital marketing video series, Mark Traphagen shares some interesting stats from a study that show just how effective content marketing can be in bringing in and retaining customers.

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Resources

• Does Content Marketing Actually Work? The Data Says Yes!
• See all of our Here’s Why Videos | Subscribe to our YouTube Channel

Transcript

Eric: Mark, content marketing has been all the rage for several years, but how do we know it works?
Mark: It may seem like something you have to take on faith, but now thanks to some research by metrics firm ProfitWell, we have some solid data on its effectiveness.
They took a deep dive into 3,000 businesses that subscribe to their service, some of which use content marketing and some that don’t. They also had access to the behavior of 30,000 consumers who use those sites.
Eric: And what did they find?
Mark: To start, they showed that while content marketing might seem like an expensive investment, it is cost effective compared to other forms of marketing. For example, they found that content marketing is about 30% less expensive than paid channels in terms of cost of customer acquisition. They also stated that companies with blogs get 67% more leads.
[Tweet “Companies with blogs get 67% more leads than those that don’t.”]
Eric: Content can be effective in bringing in new customers, but does it help a site retain customers?
Mark: According to the ProfitWell data, it does. They saw a 5% to 10% better retention rate for companies that deploy content.
But obviously, the biggest benefit is on the customer growth side. In fact, the companies that consistently use content see about a 30% higher growth rate than those that don’t.
Eric: Those are some pretty amazing stats.
Mark: I do think we need to provide a caveat here. No one should take from these results that simply posting content in and of itself will make this magic happen.
I think it’s a safe bet that the companies in the data sample that drove the positive results up employ a well planned and executed content strategy that does a great job of covering the whole buying cycle. ProfitWell’s stat that almost half of buyers view three to five pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep seems to back that up.

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The dismal truth is that most brand content marketing fails. It performs poorly because it can’t bridge the gap between brand goals and prospect needs and desires.
In this episode of our popular Here’s Why digital marketing video series, Mark Traphagen shares how to build bridges to your target market with content marketing.

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Resources

• The Content Marketing Bridge: Linking Brand Goals to Prospect Needs
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Transcript

Eric: Hey, Mark, what’s a content bridge?
Mark: Eric, it’s a metaphor I use for a key characteristic I’ve observed about the most effective content marketing. And by effective, I mean content that actually produces results for the business publishing it.
Eric: Why a bridge?
Mark: If you have two pieces of land, separated by a chasm, you need a bridge to move people from one to the other. In marketing, every business starts with a chasm between the goals of the business, what the business wants to achieve, and the prospects that want to reach.
Effective content successfully builds a bridge between the two that not only allows prospects to cross over it–in other words become qualified leads or customers–but encourages them to do so.
[Tweet “Successful content marketing builds a bridge between business goals and prospect needs.”]
Eric: How do you build content marketing bridges then?
Mark: Let’s start with the main goals of the two land masses the bridge is supposed to connect.
Now, on the one side is your business. I call this Brand Island. Brand Island is populated by the purpose, intention, and reason for the existence of your brand. It’s why your business exists. That goes beyond to make money and into the specifics of your products and services, what you bring uniquely to the marketplace.

Now, across the water is Prospect Island. Here dwell the needs wants, hopes, dreams, and desires of your prospective customers.

Eric: And your content needs to be able to bridge those two islands?
Mark: Yes. Most content that fails to produce desired business results tends to be anchored on one or the other island but fails to reach across the gap. The content may be stuck on Brand Island if it is too salesy, or talks too much about your product or service without linking it to what your prospects actually need.
On the other hand, content that is stuck on Prospect Island tries too hard to grasp the hearts and minds of potential customers while failing to make a strong association with the brand and what it sells.
For example, a brand that sells shoes might post a pop culture quiz that goes viral, but few consumers will remember that it had anything to do with a shoe seller.
The key is to always have both islands in mind as you create your content, your business goals and brand identity on the one side and the needs and desires of your prospects on the other. Then find a link between the two. Often that link will be emotional at its core, but it must strongly associate the emotional response with the brand.
A great example of this is the clothing retailer Patagonia. You and I have used them as an example often, and in this case, their environmentally conscious content. That creates a strong connection with the brand’s affluent, socially conscious outdoors enthusiast customers while emphasizing that Patagonia shares their values.

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No matter how much experience you have leading a digital marketing department, you can always improve.
In this episode of our popular Here’s Why digital marketing video series, Mark Traphagen reveals the biggest needs for improvement in enterprise-level digital marketing.

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Resources

• Korn Ferry CMO Pulse Survey 2018
• Why You Need to Adopt a Winning Analytics Philosophy
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Transcript

Eric: Mark, no matter how much experience we have as digital marketers, we can always get better, right?
Mark: So right, Eric.
Eric: What are some areas in which all online marketers could probably use some improvement?

1. Improve analytics

Mark: The management consulting firm Korn Ferry recently surveyed over 200 CMOs and marketing leaders to find out. The number one area these marketing executives said they needed to make progress in was analytics. Thirty-nine percent of them said that while they were investing more in analytics, they still felt their use of analytics was immature.
Eric: As it happens, we have a Here’s Why video on how to develop mature analytics philosophy.
Any insights on why these CMOs are finding it so difficult to get better at analytics?
Mark: The respondents said that their biggest problem is finding qualified analytics professionals. So, if you’re pursuing a marketing career, might be a good idea to get some analytics and data science training.
Eric: That’s a big pain point. What are these marketing leaders most excited about though?

2. Pursuing personalization

Mark: Right now it’s the whole area of personalization.
Eric: Okay, so explain what that means.
Mark: Simply put, marketing personalization is using technology and analytics to try to deliver an experience to each user that feels customized just for them. Now, as with many other areas brought up in the survey, this is something marketers are hotly pursuing but still don’t feel like they do very well.
Eric: If marketers are feeling so challenged, what’s the main problem? Is it a lack of resources?
Mark: Surprisingly no. By a wide margin, the number one challenge they list is a lack of organizational alignment. They feel that the rest of their organization from the top-down doesn’t really understand or fully value what they do. A third of those singled out their CEO in particular as not being supportive or lacking understanding. And hey, I’ve always been thankful that you haven’t been a problem.
Eric: For many years, I was the marketing of our agency, actually. So yeah, I think I get it.
Mark: But if that’s not the case, you marketing leaders need to make it a regular part of your job to help educate your co-executives on your role and how they can support it.
Eric: And perhaps even more important, how your role supports that function.
Mark: That’s a great point.
Eric: What’s another pain point for these enterprise marketers?

3. Tying marketing results to company performance

Mark: A big one is they know they need to do a better job of tying their results to their company’s performance. Slightly less than half of the respondents feel like they do this with any degree of effectiveness.
Eric: Sounds like professional marketing leaders still have a lot of work ahead of them. How else can we help?
Mark: I’ll be bold enough to suggest that these Here’s Why videos are a great start. Over the past three years, we’ve built a library of these free videos approaching 200 episodes.

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Many trends have come and gone in digital marketing over the years, but among those destined to endure, content marketing is near the top of the list.

The primary reason content marketing has become such an indispensable tool is its incredible utility for almost any digital marketing situation.

Effective content powers SEO, social media, branding, audience building and a host of other marketing applications. It is often the most decisive factor in the success of a brand’s marketing strategy.

At the same time, content marketing has become more challenging with each passing year. I’m not surprised that once something is shown to be highly effective a great many companies will adopt it. But that comes with the consequence of exponentially growing amounts of content chasing after the same limited audience.

So what are content marketers to do?

I study and test content marketing trends and assumptions every day. From those observations, here are my primary content marketing priorities in 2019.

1 Balance Quality and Quantity

In the early days of content marketing (then known simply as “blogging”) the conventional wisdom was, “The more content the better.”

That made sense back then due to several possibilities:

• Before automated social posts, when most blogs were accessed via RSS feeds or email subscriptions, content had a very short lifespan, and only the most recent content was seen.
• As Google made its first shifts from being keyword-centric to content-centric (but didn’t yet have its present machine learning capabilities), its focus may have been more on the quantity and recency of content on a site rather than its quality.
• Most brands were playing a catch-up game because of a general lack of real content in the past.

In more recent times, most content marketing experts have emphasized quality over quantity. That shift seems to have been driven largely by Google, as over time the search engine has demonstrated an increasing ability to judge which content pages bring the highest quality response to a given query.

However, there are other factors motivating the push for higher-quality content. For example, brands have come to realize that consumers judge them, in part, on the basis of their content, and that they tend to stay more loyal to brands that are more consistently helpful and relevant in their content.

So has the priority for content marketing shifted entirely from quantity to quality? Mostly, but not entirely.

If your content production resources are truly limited, it’s more important to concentrate on fewer, high-quality content pieces, as opposed to as much content as possible. I want to emphasize the “truly” in the previous sentence because too often “limited resources” is just an excuse for avoiding the work. Resources are always limited; it’s a matter of how you prioritize those resources.

But if you’re truly limited in how much you can put into content marketing, I think investing in a few outstanding content campaigns rather than a lot of “meh” posts will bring you greater rewards. It’s much more likely that at least some of those better pieces will catch fire than it is that any of the churned-out, run-of-the mill posts will even be seen by anyone at all.

That being said, while I think that quality should always be a top priority in content marketing, if you can also keep up a consistent quantity of publishing, do it.

[Tweet “In content marketing, quality is priority 1. But if you can also produce in quantity, even better!”]

Eric Enge often mentions the example of the Cleveland Clinic, a leading health care provider. Beginning in 2013, Cleveland Clinic shifted significant resources into upping their content production abilities. They went from about 600 new posts in 2013 to averaging between 800-1000 since 2015.

I must emphasize that even though they now crank out an average of three new content pages per day, these pages are not junk. Many of them may be brief, but the information is correct, authoritative, and well-written.

Cleveland Clinic also did a great job of promoting their content via social media.

The results speak for themselves. Here is a chart of Cleveland Clinic’s search visibility over the past five years, as shown by SearchMetrics:

Even though it appears they took a hit from the spring 2018 Google updates, you can see that in September, they not only recovered, but surged to record heights. This is a testament to their sustained competitive advantage due to their massive amounts of useful content.

Takeaway: In 2019, high-quality content that is significantly better than your competition is table stakes for content marketing. You must have it. Quantity alone will never beat quality. However, if you can do it, having both is a knock-out punch.

2 Prioritize Content Hubs

Once you’ve made a firm commitment to priority one above, it’s time to level up. The best way to take your content effectiveness to the next level is by creating content hubs.

What is a content hub?

A content hub is a static page (not a blog post) on your site that hosts your most current and/or comprehensive piece of content on one of your core topics, and also links out to all the related posts and resources on your site.

When done correctly (and properly and consistently promoted), a content hub can allow you to take ownership of a topic, not only in search, but also in discussions about the topic, therefore locking that topic to your brand identity.

Why create content hubs?

Let’s start with the negative reasons:

• If a site has been blogging for years, the majority of the content on the site is outdated, no longer relevant, or lacking focus.
• It’s a simple fact that search engines aren’t going to rank your site high for everything you wish they would. It’s better to pick a set of topics that have key strategic importance for your brand and build content hubs around them.
• Blog content grows mold over time. By their very design, blogs keep the most recent content closest to the top of a site’s structure. Therefore, search engines are more likely to pay attention to that recent content, let alone visitors to the site.

Because content hubs are built around static pages, you can keep them close to the top of your site’s navigation chain. This tells search engines these pages are more important. In turn, that allows you to be in control of which topics you want to give the best chance of ranking well for.

Do content hubs work?

We’ve seen them be very powerful for a number of commercial sites we work with. Let me share our own example, since, of course, I’m most familiar with our own content.

You can see our content hubs by going to the Insights tab on the top navigation of this site. Below the “All Research” link, you’ll see links to all of our current hub topics.

If you select “Featured Snippets Resource Study” you’ll see our hub page for that topic.

This static page (again, not a blog post) always contains the most recent version of our ongoing study of how the presentation of featured snippets in Google search has changed over the years.

To the left of the content is a navigation sidebar that links to other featured snippets-related content we have published. This helps alert Google that we are a potential valuable resource on the topic.

One of the secrets of the success of our ongoing, updated study hub pages is that we redirect all traffic from previous editions of the study (which are moved to their own pages) so that all of the search-ranking power they may have gained in the past is directed toward this one highly focused page, rather than spread across many similar pages.

Some of our hub pages have succeeded in totally dominating their topic in Google search, and have held onto that dominance for a long time. For example, our DPA study hub page has been #1 for “digital personal assistants” on Google since shortly after it was created.

The same goes for our mobile vs desktop study hub, which ranks in the first three positions for dozens of high-volume mobile vs desktop keywords, and which continues to earn new links from high-authority sites every week.

3 Build Content Bridges

I’ve written extensively about my concept of content marketing bridges elsewhere, and we’ve also published a Here’s Why video on the topic, so I won’t go into great detail here. But I do want to include it in this list because I believe it is fundamental to content marketing success in 2019 and beyond.

Put simply, the content marketing bridge concept is that to be successful in accomplishing your actual business goals, your content needs to bridge the gulf between what you want to accomplish (brand identity and authority, increased visibility, sales!) and the hopes, dreams, wants, needs, desires, fears, etc. of your prospects.

It’s a delicate balancing acts, and most failed content errs too far to one side or the other.

Content can fail if it is weighted too heavily toward the brand goals side. Such content tends to be too salesy or promotional. It does nothing to grip or interest the reader, to make her feel like the brand understands and empathizes with her concerns and needs.

On the other hand, content can also fail by being too focused on getting the prospect’s attention. This happens when the content goes so far into pure entertainment or shock value that it loses any association with what the brand is about.

Strive to build content that balances both of those, and you’ve created a bridge that can bring prospects across to becoming customers.

Happy and successful content marketing in 2019!

Google seems to be showing interest in the authors of web content once again. Does that mean it’s now an SEO ranking factor?
In this episode of our popular Here’s Why digital marketing video series, Mark Traphagen explores the evidence and gives you the real reasons it matters who authors your content.

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Transcript

Google Agent Rank

Eric: Mark, Google has shown some interest in authors behind web content for some time, haven’t they?
Mark: Yes, but it seems to pop up in spurts. It goes back at least to their agent rank patent which proposed a search ranking factor based on a quality score and attributed to various agents or entities associated with a web page. One of the those would be the author or authors of the content on the page.
Eric: Did Google do anything with that?
Mark: We don’t know for sure, but sometimes companies like Google take out patents just to protect the intellectual property of their ideas. So having a patent doesn’t mean they ever actually have to use it.

Google Authorship

Eric: What was the next time Google showed interest in authors then?
Mark: That was the big one and we call it “Google Authorship.”

Authorship was a program that allowed authors and publishers to cross-reference each other using schema markup, allowing Google to verify the author of a given piece, as well as see all of his or her other content. A few months after announcing that, Google began showing author photos and bylines next to some content that used markup.
Eric: Was authorship a search ranking factor then?
Mark: We never found any evidence that it was, and Google representatives said that while they might use it as such in the future, they weren’t at the time. Still, it was a significant experiment with a lot of investment from Google, seeing as it lasted three years.

Recent Google Interest in Authors

Eric: So that’s interesting, but anything more recent?
Mark: Yes. A couple of interesting things just in the past few months.
The first one came in July of 2018 when Google released an update to their search quality raters guidelines. That’s the training manual for their search quality raters, humans who help evaluate the quality of search results. The new version has significant additions that directed the raters to look into the expertise, authority, and trustworthiness of the authors of web content.
Eric: Does that mean author reputation is now a search ranking factor?
Mark: Again, we can’t really say that. We know that something being mentioned in the guidelines does not mean it is a direct ranking factor. Nevertheless, it certainly indicates that Google thinks the qualifications of an author are an important gauge of content quality.
There was one more small but short-lived piece of evidence. For a couple of weeks in August 2018, we discovered Google was experimenting with displaying an “interesting finds” box in mobile search results for some prolific authors.

The box contained links to more content by or about that author. While I can’t find those anymore, I found it very interesting that Google was experimenting with something like that.

Takeaways

Eric: If we can’t be sure whether any of this directly affects search rankings at this point, what’re your takeaways for our viewers?
Mark: While I agree it would be presumptive to say that Google is actively using author reputation right now in search rankings, I think it’s undeniable that Google continues to show an interest in authors.
So my first takeaway would be if you’re trying to build search authority with expert-level content, an investment in using well-known authors who have a good reputation in the topical area of your content might be a good future-proofing search tactic. Now, by that I mean if Google ever does decide to turn up the knobs on author reputation, you’ll be ready.
Now, that may be particularly important since we’ve had recent evidence that Google is turning a hard eye toward your money or your life (YMYL)-type content. YMYL is anything that affects a user’s personal wellbeing or finances. Now, if you have that kind of content, I would highly recommend using reputable, authoritative authors.
Eric: Yes, and we’ve seen an increased effort by social media sites and Google to crack down on fake news and dangerous pseudo-science. Who authors the content could be an indicator that it’s really important.
Mark: Right you are.
But my other takeaway is that whether or not Google is watching your authors for search rankings, it’s still a good idea to have the best authors you can for your content. Google put that in their rating guidelines for a very good reason. Real people care about it.
Now especially, as you’ve mentioned, in this era of fake news awareness, more people will stop to scrutinize a source of content, including who wrote it.
Eric: Thanks, Mark.

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Transcript

Eric: How can you measure ROI from social media?
Mark: First, let’s define what we mean by ROI. Obviously, it stands for return on investment. But a lot hangs on what you mean by the two nouns in that phrase. Now, what is the investment you’re making? And what return are you expecting?
Since ROI came out of the financial world, it’s typical to assume that both the investment and return are in dollars and cents. But there are other kinds of significant investments and returns you can measure.
Eric: So how do you know what the investment and the expected return are?
Mark: Well, that depends on your business goals for social media, which is always the place you should start.
Are you trying to drive sales? Then the traditional dollars and cents are what you should measure. But there are other legitimate goals such as

• Brand Awareness
• Sentiment
• Brand Mentions
• Audiences
• And others

all of which can be driven by social media as well.
Eric: So let’s start with the traditional monetary measurement of ROI. Can that be driven by social media, and what are you measuring exactly?
Mark: The short answer is yes, it can. But only for some types of businesses. For example, if you’re selling a commodity product and competing mostly on the basis of price and you have a relatively short buying cycle.
Eric: Meaning people see the product or offer and tend to either buy it right then or not?
Mark: Right. So in that case, it’s pretty easy to measure actual sales generated from a social media campaign.
Of course, as with any of these measurements, they’ll only be accurate if you set up correct goals in your analytics, and if you carefully tag the URLs in your social posts so you know which actually drove a sale. At the more advanced level you should also be measuring things like lifetime value of a customer.
For more accurate attribution of the role social media plays in bringing you sales, I recommend this guide by David Kutcher.
Eric: Does revenue-based ROI only work for those short buying cycle situations?
Mark: No. It is possible to do some measurement of the situations where it might take many touches and perhaps through different mediums before someone buys. But the attribution gets murkier. The truth is that no analytics set up is going to track and correctly attribute every sale. So in these cases, it’s more important to look at trends. Is the average sale per campaign going up or down?
Eric: Let’s move onto those other non-revenue based ROI investments then.
Mark: Okay. Sure. With these, it becomes even more critical to have a clear idea of what your goal is. For example, if your goal is brand awareness, what does that look like on social? Deeper reach? More engagement with your post? More shares of your content? You need to determine what matters to you and then measure that.
Eric: All right. So that covers the return side of ROI. But what is the investment for things like brand awareness or audience-building campaigns?
Mark: If you’re using paid social campaigns, the ad spend is an obvious part of that. But for any campaign, paid or organic, you should be keeping track of the time your staff spends creating and promoting the social content. The value of their time becomes the primary investment factor.
And before we go, I want to emphasize again the importance of learning how to tag your campaign links using consistent tags and setting up correct goals in your analytics.

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