Content marketing is a relatively new concept and can be complicated. So what really matters to achieve success?
Check out our recent video from Eric Enge and Mark Traphagen, who joined Perficient Digital through our acquisition of digital consultancy Stone Temple, where they outline the top three priorities to get the best ROI from your content. Achieving success in content marketing can be easy if you keep these priorities in mind. Here’s why:

To learn more about Stone Temple, read our blog post.

It takes a lot of effort to capture a potential customer’s attention and make a sale, but retention is just as tricky. Customers want to see information that is relevant to them and their experience with your brand, and when they see content that isn’t applicable, they begin to tune out future content you present. In fact, 78% of US internet users said personally relevant content from brands increases their purchase intent.
Enter the concept of people-based marketing. People-based marketing focuses on delivering a unified customer experience across all channels, regardless of the time, location, or device. It means building your marketing strategy around your customers and their data. This used to mean targeting shoppers with cookies or device IDs, but the explosion of mobile and the proliferation of devices has made this strategy insufficient. Now that potential and current customers are interacting in so many places, brands must aim to gain a 360-degree view of a person, not just an ID.

How Do You Deliver on This Trend?

Gather Your Data
People-based marketing goes further than omnichannel experiences and integrated marketing. It takes any and all data—from online, offline, mobile, and call center—and connects it to individual people, rather than device IDs.
One factor to consider is that many customers have multiple accounts with a single brand, checkout as a guest periodically, or use a variety of purchasing channels. In addition, consumers may access your site on multiple devices before they make their purchase decision. Today’s consumers interact with an average of six touch-points when buying an item. With so many points of contact, it’s important to track that customer behavior across those various devices to better target your campaigns.
Connect Data to Touchpoints
Connecting your customers’ real-time behavioral data at every touchpoint of their journey is imperative to crafting a people-based marketing strategy. To target customers effectively, you should aim to connect every customer data point possible, from order history and browsing activity to device type and cart abandonment. The explosion of internet-connected devices has led customers to expect that brands will respond to them in real-time, and they don’t want to start over every time they interact with a brand on a new device. Automating marketing experiences based on customer data and habits rather than cookies and mass emails will connect and optimize the interactions you have with your customers.
People-Based Marketing in Action
One business that is going above and beyond with this concept is Nordstrom. If a customer has an account with them, Nordstrom associates are able to pull up the customer’s browsing activity, whether it be in the app or online. To that end, they’ve created a seamless in-store experience for their customers by giving their employees the tools they need to provide the best service and more accurate recommendations to shoppers.

Where Should You Start?

Shifting to a people-based marketing strategy will take both technological evolution and change management initiatives. We recommend starting by connecting your data, commerce, and marketing technology platforms so they have a single, comprehensive view of the consumer.
At a practical level, your approach is only as good as your data. Start with building a single source of truth that every tool, team, and endpoint uses and is seamlessly connected. Selecting and intelligently integrating the right set of platforms, analytics tools, personalization platforms, and content management systems with tools for managing identity and privacy is essential to ensuring a seamless integration with the platforms that integrate and deliver your marketing and customer experiences.
After developing a solid plan for your customer data and marketing operational ecosystem, you can begin to focus on an organizational transformation where you’ll ensure your teams are aligned with the shift to people-focused efforts rather than marketing to channels.
Interested in learning more about what trends are impacting commerce in 2019? Download our free guide, Make Meaningful Connections in Commerce: Four Trends for 2019.

As consumers, we know what we expect from a personalized experience. We might see this put into action by our favorite retailers, through online ads and email marketing promotions created around our past behavior or buying decisions. But those same tactics and approaches don’t apply to B2B marketing. There are several differences in the B2C and B2B buyer journeys that make personalization harder to deliver.

The Purchase Decision is More Complex

Unlike the B2C marketing funnel (Figure 1.1), you’re not just talking to and providing an experience to a single individual buying something for themselves. In the B2B marketing funnel (Figure 1.2), the customer journey is fragmented, and there are typically several decision makers in different roles involved in the procurement of an item. Single-decision-maker personalization is hard enough to execute on its own, but add in a handful of decision makers, all with different roles, priorities, and preferences, and that’s a lot of different touchpoints to get right.

Personalization is More than Messaging

While messaging that speaks to each of these roles is important, it might not be enough. Personalization in a B2B journey may also mean implementing new applications and functionality that are tailored for a role. A buyer may want a spreadsheet-type view to input values, but a business owner is more likely to respond to a B2C-like product and checkout experience. The journey and means to purchase must be focused by role and where they are in the decision process.

Ease of Experience in Place of Promotions

Fifty-percent-off flash sales and BOGOs are common in B2C, but in B2B it’s the experience and the information you provide, not promotions, that keep customers coming back. Prices are often fixed based on contractual agreements, so there’s no competing on price, so you have to find other, more compelling ways to influence buying behavior. Aim to provide the right content around products and maximize self-sufficiency so customers can do enough research to compel them to do business. This might entail connections to your back-end systems to provide the information that a decision maker may need along the purchase journey (lead times, specifications, etc.).

The Journey May Not End Online

Unlike B2C, the purchase journey may not end online. And that’s OK. Because of the complexities and various roles involved, the final call to action may very well be a call to the distributor or manufacturer. As long as you’re providing the personalized content and information needed to compel them to make that call, you are executing on your personalization strategy
To learn more about what you can do to implement B2B personalization in your organization, download our free guide, How to Conquer Complex Customer Journeys in B2B Personalization.

Social media can be a valuable asset to your SEO efforts, but not in the way most people think. Google doesn’t rank social media links the same way it does other site links. So while your link may be getting engagement on social, it doesn’t influence how Google ranks linked content.
Check out our recent video from Eric Enge and Mark Traphagen, who recently joined Perficient Digital through our acquisition of digital consultancy Stone Temple, to learn about three social media strategies to boost your SEO. Social media promotion can indirectly improve your SEO efforts and be a valuable marketing tool. Here’s why:

To learn more about Stone Temple, read our recent blog post.

Today, Perficient announced that it has acquired Stone Temple Consulting, Inc., a Boston-based $9 million annual revenue digital marketing agency. Stone Temple has an incredible reputation for delivering excellent search engine optimization and content marketing solutions.

Perficient helps many of our clients with digital marketing, content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) and content services. By acquiring Stone Temple, we are broadening and deepening our ability to help clients achieve this goal, enabling them to succeed, grow and beat their competition.

“Their reputation for delivering excellent search engine optimization and content marketing solutions, customer-centric mentality, and solid client roster ensures a strong cultural fit and compelling opportunities for accelerated growth moving forward,” said Jeffrey Davis, Perficient’s chairman and CEO.

With content, SEO, and customer experience so critical to our clients, we’re thrilled to add more digital marketing talent to the team in order to deliver on the promise.

Award-winning, Results-driven Digital Marketing

Our end-to-end offering is now strengthened with in-depth industry expertise and proprietary tools to produce results that drive success.

• Keyword Research Services
• SEO Services
• Mobile SEO Services
• SEO Training Services
• Local SEO Services
• On-Page SEO Services
• Due-Diligence SEO Audits
• SEO Advisory Services
• SEO Migration Services

Industry Recognition

The Drum Search Awards – 2018 Search Personality of the Year
US Search Awards – 2018 Best Use of Content Marketing Award

Digital Marketing Research Studies

Our digital marketing research studies are renowned for breaking new ground and dispelling common myths. These SEO, social media, and content marketing studies significantly contribute to the knowledge base of the industry.

• Image Recognition Accuracy Study
• Mobile vs. Desktop Usage Study
• Voice Usage Trends
• The Canonical Guide to AMP
• Links as a Ranking Factor
• Page Speed Guide
• YouTube Marketing Resources
• Featured Snippets Guide
• Digital Personal Assistants Study
• Impact of Search Features on CTR

Digital Marketing Excellence Blog

Our digital marketing blog has been updated with frequent tips and thought leadership surrounding content marketing, SEO, and more. Below are many of our most popular articles. Visit our digital marketing blog here.

We are so excited to exhibit at this year’s IRCE, the Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition. It’s next week, June 7-10, at McCormick Place West in Chicago.
Leaders from our new digital agency, Perficient Digital, will be at IRCE to talk about the agency’s six core disciplines:

1. Strategy and planning
2. Digital marketing
3. Experience design
4. Digital experience platforms
5. Content studio
6. Mobile and emerging technology

We’ll show how Perficient Digital incorporates compelling customer experiences across a variety of leading technology platforms including Adobe, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce. Our digital and brand strategists, designers, marketers, data analysts, and developers blend the strategic imagination of an agency with the deep technical acumen of Perficient’s established consultancy. Our team enjoys helping Fortune 500 companies and innovative enterprises to:

• map and follow the customer journey,
• transform data into actionable insights, and
• deliver strategies and solutions that delight even the most demanding customers.

“We are all aware of the deep need to capture customers when and where they want to shop. With our deep expertise in strategy, digital marketing, creative, and user experience, Perficient Digital can help our clients build their business around their customers’ needs and expectations.” – Judy Foster, Perficient Digital managing director.

We’re driving traffic and sales for our eCommerce customers by coupling our commerce expertise with creative design services and delivering strategies around personas, site architecture, digital marketing, and brand evolution.
Visit us at booth #736. Agency experts will offer eCommerce and retail insights, demonstrate successful eCommerce customers’ sites, invite attendees to register for a complimentary digital marketing audit, and talk about Perficient Digital’s unique ability to design, develop, and deploy customer experience solutions that enable the world’s leading enterprises to digitally transform.

At this point, I’ve started to explain the importance of prioritizing optimization efforts in order to see the best results in the shortest amount of time. In the previous posts I’ve told you about where to start testing and what to test.  The final piece of the puzzle is to explain why to start testing.  Why are some people converting on your landing pages or your top traffic pages, and why aren’t others? In order to do this, we need to use specific tools to gather insights into understanding why people are and aren’t doing the actions that you want them to take on these individual pages.

Then why is all about collecting and analyzing qualitative data to help answer why or why not visitors actually convert? From there, you’ll be able to prioritize the top opportunities that align with your overall marketing efforts and goals. Analyzing quantitatively helps you understand exactly who visits your website and understand why they should be buying your products online.  Understanding the why is the key to understanding how to improve your conversions. To do this, we use specific tools to gather qualitative insights.  This data strengthens our hypotheses and provides us with testable ideas on how to improve our overall conversion rates.

To collect qualitative data we use a variety of different tools.  SurveyMonkey provides a platform for sending out very specific surveys to hundreds of respondents.  Surveys can be served to visitors at any stage of their decision-making process.  For example, after a visitor completes an action, such as visiting a specific page, filling out a form or completing a transaction, a pop-up opens with a few simple questions.  These questions are anything from “”What made you opt-in for this email campaign today?” to “What made you finalize your transaction?”.  You can also do the complete opposite and serve visitors surveys if they did not complete the desired action, and ask questions such as “What’s stopping you from converting today?” And “ What is this page missing?”  These respondents provide first-hand insights and feedback about the specific website elements.

For a different perspective, UserTesting provides us with a way to watch people go through a website, competitor’s website, and different Google search queries at their own pace.  We’re then able to start to mold the why, and understand the voice of the customer and the different reasons why the website isn’t providing the ideal user experience for them.  Understanding that intent is the key to making the pages and overall website better equipped for streamlining conversion optimization.

Hotjar, as mentioned in our previous post, also provides many useful qualitative tools and reports for figuring out why people may be leaving a website or not. For example, if people are on a top traffic page, and they move their mouse to the back button, we may want to pop open a HotJar-generated survey that asks, “What is this page missing?” or “How can this page be improved?”

Using qualitative data not only helps us understand the customers better, but it will help us put ourselves in their shoes, so we can use the website like they do.

It’s also important to mention the importance of understanding the why of different device types. Whatever device visitors use to browse a website, be it mobile, tablet or desktop computer, we make sure we’re collecting all data specific to that device.  This helps us understand the different user behaviors per device and build out prioritized testing plans.
You now have a deeper understanding of the wheres, whats, and whys of testing and conversion optimization.  Putting this formula into action will provide you with a data-driven strategy for prioritizing the tests you want to run.  It will also help you achieve better results, increase your optimization plan’s traffic, and potentially see, thanks to the eighty-twenty rule, a greater impact in a shorter amount of time.  The Conversion Optimization team will continue to provide you with industry news, insights, and best practices but for now, I hope these posts have been helpful for you to gain a better understanding of how to prioritize your efforts and put together a successful optimization plan.

View more posts about Conversion Rate Optimization.

For more help on how to increase your site conversions, let us take a look and let you know where you can improve. 

Ready to take the next step and accelerate your growth?

Get a complimentary evaluation of your digital experience strategy…

Contact Us

In our previous post, I explained a little bit about where we look for test ideas. After identifying the where, the next question is what should I test? To discover what to test, our team uses specific tools to gather insights that give us a better understanding of what people are doing on top opportunity pages or top traffic pages.

In order to understand what we combine it with the where.  Our quantitative tools helped us figure out our top traffic pages, or where people are going on your website.  Next, we need to figure out what they’re actually doing on those pages. This is where our qualitative data come in to accompany our quantitative findings. Specifically, we want to know what are they actually doing on those pages. In order to do this, we use tools such as heatmaps, user playbacks, mouse tracking, form completion tracking, and so forth.
One of the main qualitative tools we use to do this is called Hotjar. Hotjar allows us to not only create specific heatmaps, polls, and surveys, but it combines all of these elements together to provide more insights into what people are doing, where they’re going, and why they might be leaving. Not only do we use Hotjar to track what people are doing on those pages, but we also use it to create recordings of visitor sessions, so we can specifically watch, understand and experience their journey on the site.
Some behaviors to look out for are how far people scroll down the page, what specific links they click or don’t click on, and how long visitors spend on specific pages.  Here are a few examples:

1. If we see that visitors aren’t clicking on the call to action, or the links directly related to the conversion goals, then we can start forming hypotheses on what can be done to improve this.
2. If a page has a form on it, we might see recordings where visitors are not completing the form in an order that provides a positive user experience.  This is an indication that the form may be too complex and might need to be modified by removing some fields.

Previously, I talked about where to look for test ideas, which included focusing on the top pages.  Today, with the where information, we now know how to identify what to test.  Using heatmaps, recordings, and other tracking, we’re able to really understand what people are doing on individual pages. This helps contribute to the hypothesis, “If I change this element because it’s not doing what I want it to do, then we will see an increase in conversion by “X” because….”
My next posts will take what we’ve learned about the where and what of testing and incorporate the why.  Why are people converting or not converting?  These three elements are what help build your hypothesis, run tests, and make smarter, data-driven decisions about your website.
View more posts about Conversion Rate Optimization.

For more help on how to increase your site conversions, let us take a look and let you know where you can improve.

Ready to take the next step and accelerate your growth?

Get a complimentary evaluation of your digital experience strategy…

Contact Us

In order to prioritize your conversion optimization plan, we need to prioritize how to begin your A/B testing strategy. In order to do this, we need to figure out where what and why. Understanding the where what and why will help you prioritize the most important areas of opportunity on your website. In this post, I will show you how to find the where to start optimizing your website.
Where? First, start by understanding your top traffic pages, the pages that people are visiting directly from all referral sources. We want to understand where the most opportunities are in order to start optimizing for the most traffic and largest benefit. Start with your best-selling items, test and learn from those tests, and then possibly duplicate those efforts to other areas in other products.
In order to determine where to start testing, we follow Pareto Principle. The Pareto Principle states that for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Almost every website is broken up into the 80-20 rule – you’re making 80% of your revenue off of 20% of your inventory. That’s the case if you have an eCommerce website. If you have a regular blog or lead generation website, while different, this could also be very similar.
The same thing works for your traffic patterns. You’re making 80% of your traffic off of 20% of your pages. Understanding these top pages, that 20%, is your biggest area of opportunity to start optimizing, start improving, and start growing whatever objectives you have. These objectives could be sales, leads or any other priorities in your company. Understanding that 20% is really where the largest opportunity area lies.
To find out where to start testing, we’ll use quantitative tools, such as Google Analytics, to collect the quantitative data. Quantitative data is all about numbers and metrics. It’s the analytics and the goals that are calculated from your marketing efforts. In the case of a normal e-commerce site, they’re probably making 80% of their revenue off of 20% of the inventory. That 20% is their best-selling items. If they are low-priced items, you want to try to find ways to sell more of those and influence people to buy quicker items.
In Google Analytics, there’s a specific report that can help guide your testing strategy: the Landing Page report (Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages). These are the pages that people visit directly first. More than likely, one of the top ten pages is going to be your home page. There may also be five to ten other pages also generating enough traffic that you can really optimize too.

Once you understand your top traffic pages,  you can figure out where the most opportunities are in that handful of pages. What pages have the highest bounce rate? Which pages are driving the most traffic but have the lowest conversion rates? Which pages are driving the most revenue? Which pages are having the most impact for you to start optimizing? These important questions will help you start isolating the experiences and look at the areas that hold the biggest opportunities.  Not only will you have enough traffic to actually change different elements and see an impact, but you’ll also be able to see more results in a shorter period of time. Having enough traffic is very important to actually running A/B tests, and you may not be able to run a test with minimal traffic.  There are some specific ways that you could still optimize on low traffic websites, and we’ll talk to that in later posts.
By understanding the Pareto Principle, and applying it to your website and quantitative data, you now have a better understanding of where to start testing.  If your site has enough traffic to actually start testing and optimizing, this is where you should start. The 80-20 rule represents your top traffic pages, the pages that are driving the most clicks, visits, and potential revenue. That will help you prioritize where to start testing.
In future blog posts, I’ll also talk about what you should be testing on those pages, how you can understand exactly where people are going on those pages and then start testing from there. We’ll also look at the why. Why are people doing things you want them to do or not? Why are they converting? Why are they not converting? Why are they entering their email address or not? That is the missing piece. We’ll be talking about that in later upcoming blog posts.
View more posts about Conversion Rate Optimization.

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By now, you’ve probably heard of or seen some of these digital acronyms: SEM, PPC, SEO, CTA, ROAS…CRO?  
CRO, or Conversion Rate Optimization, is, simply put, the process of turning potential customers into customers, and then turning those customers into repeat customers.  Breaking it down a little more, a conversion occurs when a user completes a desired action that has a direct or indirect impact on a business goal (ex. transaction, completed form, etc.).  Therefore, our team works towards providing visitors with a user-friendly experience so they not only complete the desired goal of the site, but also come back again and again.
Where does CRO fall into the digital equation?  After SEO (Search Engine Optimization), PPC (Pay-Per-Click) and the other acquisition channels drive qualified traffic to a website, Conversion Optimization and the other engagement channels come into play.  We look at qualitative and quantitative data to identify specific pain points that are stopping visitors from completing a transaction, submitting a form, or whatever the goal of the website may be.  From there, we form hypotheses, and then test those hypotheses in order to provide statistically significant solutions for fixing identified problems.
We also work with a variety of tools, including Optimizely and the Adobe Marketing Cloud, in order to uncover conversion inhibitors and run tests.
With the continuing rise of the internet as a source for information and shopping, digital marketers and companies alike have noticed an increase in the number of abandoned online shopping carts or people leaving websites in the middle of a page. The questions here are why are they leaving and what can be done to fix the problems?  With Perficient’s established group of CRO experts and specialists, we are here to answer those questions and work towards increasing our client’s conversion rates.
So, keep an eye out for future CRO posts, which take a deeper dive into the nitty gritty details of what we do, how we do it, and why…why is Conversion Rate Optimization not just important, but imperative for all websites in today’s digital age?

So many channels, countless vendor options

The rapidly growing marketing technology landscape is converging around content, customer data, marketing, and commerce. The marketing technologies landscape diagram from Scott Brinker best illustrates the complexities we face as marketers.  In January 2014, there were 947 vendors listed. By 2015, the number of vendors exploded to nearly 2,000. CMOs and CIOs have their work cut out for them to determine how, when, what, and where to integrate systems in their stack.

How to decide which digital marketing platform is the right fit

Should your business opt for a best-of-breed or a single vendor suite of solutions? According to Forrester, it all depends on your business needs and objectives.
For example, an omni-channel retailer might prefer an integration of two best-of-breed solutions, one for marketing and one for commerce. A life sciences company might opt for a premier content management system because content-reuse is an important consideration. Or large, international organizations may opt for a suite of services built around their current CRM platforms to ensure continuity across brands.
I recently read a great post from Diginomica about what to consider when building a digital marketing platform. Here’s a quick summary:
1. Keep your eye on the customer
It’s important to not lose sight of the customer when considering which platforms work best for your business. Map the customer journey from before time of purchase to purchase and beyond. This helps you understand the content and processes needed to easily move customers along the path rather than being distracted by ‘shiny objects’ – the latest, flashy technologies on the market.
2. Build your platform on data & content
Data and content – they are like the peanut butter and jelly that holds a sandwich together. The technologies you choose to build your platform need to be able to share relevant customer data and content. This provides a more complete view of the customer so you can begin to personalize experiences along the journey.
3. Constructing the marketing stack
The majority of marketing teams have one or more platforms to create and manage their marketing programs, including a digital experience and marketing automation platform. These platforms need to seamlessly integrate to share customer data to create that 360-degree view of the customer.
When building your marketing stack, every technology should have a specific purpose. And best practices suggest your stack should be able to grow (or shrink) as your digital marketing strategy evolves.
Taking the next step
A digital marketing platform that contains a well-integrated set of scalable tools is essential for creating a personalized experience across digital channels. Whether you’re building a marketing stack or looking to improve upon what you have, learn how to harness the power of your digital marketing tools by checking out the on-demand webinar from our Digital Transformation series.

Last Friday, rumors started circulating that Google planned to remove all PPC ads on the right-hand side of search results. These rumors have now been confirmed by Google. Today, final changes to the roll-out will be completed.
Google has removed paid search ads from the right side of the search results page, reportedly due to low click-through rates. Instead, the top bar can now potentially show up to 4 ads instead of 3, and more ads are being displayed at the bottom of the page.
Before and After:
 
The 4th ad in the top space will show for more commercial queries, per Google’s official statement:
“We’ve been testing this layout for a long time, so some people might see it on a very small number of commercial queries. We’ll continue to make tweaks, but this is designed for highly commercial queries where the layout is able to provide more relevant results for people searching and better performance for advertisers.”
The right side will still be used for paid shopping results and any Knowledge Graph advertisement.
How does this impact your paid search strategy?
CPCs are likely to increase as advertisers compete more aggressively for the top 3 positions. Those advertisers who have regularly been bidding for positions in the 4-6 range will either need to increase their bids to achieve a higher position or accept a large decrease in visibility.
How does this impact your SEO strategy?
With more ads at the top of the page, organic results are pushed farther down. In some cases, there may not be any organic listings above the fold. That puts more pressure on achieving higher positions in organic results.