Surveys – add authority to your content marketing

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• Surveys – add authority to your content marketing
• #SMX London 2015 – SEM Key Takeaways
• How to get your tweets ready for Google’s Twitter integration

Surveys – add authority to your content marketing Posted: 21 May 2015 05:00 AM PDT How can you add more authority to your content marketing campaign? Hard data!  Recently, I have spent some time planning and conducting a survey for one of my clients in an effort to boost their content marketing strategy. In a 2-part post, I want to summarise what I have learnt during this process to give you some tips on how to create your own survey and what you can do with your results. We’ll start with why you should create surveys and how to create them. Why carry out a survey? Surveys can be a relatively easy method of content marketing and depending on which service you use, it can be an inexpensive method. Surveys allow you to inform and educate your current and potential clients about your industry as well as enable you to set your business apart as a source of authoritative information. What can a survey tell you? Often people's opinions on surveys are that the data isn’t trustworthy because what people say they do can differ from, or can conflict with, what they do. Let me put this in simpler terms, if you ask people in a survey what they would do and then observe what they actually do, then you might see several differences. However, rather than measuring future behaviour a survey should instead measure preferences, characteristics or perceptions. For content marketing, effective surveys can look at the following: Audience analysis – preferences and demographics of your users or audience Expectations and perceptions of your brand and its content Impact of your content on offline behaviour when no other method to understand offline behaviour is available Creating your survey Perhaps the most time-consuming phase of the survey process is asking the right questions. It's important to break down what you are trying to gain from the survey – what are your goals? What are you trying to measure? There is little point going through the motion of spending money and resources on creating a survey only to realise there is nothing you can do with your results. Before writing your questions, have a think about the following points: What is your topic? What are your aims? What are you trying to measure? How many questions do you want to ask? Do you have demographic restrictions? What do you plan on doing with the results? Which service will you use to conduct the survey? Do you need a screening questions? (Do you want to eliminate certain respondents at the start so they can't continue with the survey?) Once you have the answers to the above, it should make things a little easier when writing your questions! What platform should you use? There are a number of platforms you can use to create your survey. I'll take you through some examples and their advantages and disadvantages. Google Consumer Surveys Google surveys is the platform I used recently for my client work. This service allows you to choose your target audience, type your questions and receive results within a 24 hour time frame. Advantages: Google surveys includes extra information within your results so that you don't have to use up questions to ask your respondents e.g. age, location, income and parental status (of course not all of your respondents will agree to allow you to use their income). If your survey can be improved they will email you! Before my survey was launched, I got a useful email giving me some recommendations on how to make it better. Customer service is quick and they are very helpful! Disadvantages: I thought the price was a little steep! Some of the types of questions you can use are confusing (open text, screening) – its worth doing your research before choosing your type of question. World's Opinion This is an app platform where you can ask anything to their worldwide community of more than 70,000 members and get answers within a few hours – they claim! Advantages: It's cheap (but perhaps not cheerful!) Easy to build our your questions 500 responses Disadvantages: Long responses – you may be waiting a week or longer. Questionable reliability Survey Monkey This platform is perhaps the most known out there where you can create, "any type of survey – from simple to sophisticated". Advantages: Clear pricing table on the website – you know what you're paying for Good audience database Mobile app Customise your branding on your survey Disadvantages: Data download: Open-ended questions and numeric questions need to be downloaded in separate files Invitation design – you can change the subject in the survey invitation but you cannot add a senders name (if you're sending to specific individuals to fill in). The 'from' field on your receivers end will be "on behalf of surveys@company.com" – not exactly professional? What you can do once you have got your data So now you have gone through the motions of choosing your topic and conducting your survey. What can you do with your results to aid your content marketing efforts? Press releases Infographics Videos Blog content Guides Memes Case studies Interviews As you’ve seen from this list, there are plenty of content options! The more strategic you are, the more powerful your marketing efforts become. It’s worth bearing in mind that you don’t have to try all of these examples, just choose one or two that you think will be the most effective to represent your survey findings to your audience. Don’t be afraid to try new stuff – too many people shy away from doing something new because they are afraid it will fall flat, but you could create something extremely powerful. In my next post, I'll talk you through using press releases and infographics as part of your content marketing as well as give you some tips on outreach! In the meantime, have you used surveys and have they been effective? What platforms would you recommend? The post Surveys – add authority to your content marketing appeared first on White.net.

#SMX London 2015 – SEM Key Takeaways Posted: 20 May 2015 02:36 AM PDT SMX London 2015 – Search Marketing Expo: Our takeaways from the 2-day event. Jason Denny & Holly Martin will be live blogging and tweeting from the #SMX conference in London. To make things easier we have organised the sessions by speaker so that you can click on the internal anchor below. Notes are added live throughout the 2 day event and will be filled out further, so be sure to check back for more in-depth content and examples. Day 1 – Wednesday , May 20, 2015 Maile Ohye – Developer Programs Tech Lead – Google Inc. (@maileohye) – The State Of Search (Keynote) Vivien Tombs – Associate Head of PPC – Periscopix (@vivtombs) – Tools to cut-down our admin time. Daniel Gilbert – MD – Brainlabs (@danielgilbert44) – Automation is not optional, learn to code. Brad Geddes – Founder – Certified Knowledge (@bgTheory) Russell O’Sullivan – Senior Digital Marketing Manager – Legal & General (@russosullivan) – Creating persona’s for increased conversion metrics. Maile Ohye – Developer Programs Tech Lead – Google Inc. (@maileohye) – Keynote “Data comes from down up, not dictated from up down.” – Maile Ohye Maile kicked off today’s #smx expo with a history of Google search: Back in ’98, Google SERP displayed 10 blue links, which were all derived from indexing search strings. Leaping forward to 2006 Google launched the Sitemap protocol. Google believed that site owners should be able to submit details of content on their site as they were best-placed to understand the content presented on each page – such as news updates. In 2007 Google unveiled Universal Search, blending images, news and web content onto one screen for mobile. Search ‘Prince Charles’ on Google and you receive an increased amount of information relating to the Prince. 2011 saw the launch of Schema.org taking unstructured content and allowing the site owner to provide ‘entities’ of data for a particular subject, rather than Google reading it as a bunch of random data strings. Schema defines relationships. Ask Google, ‘OK Google – What are the names of Prince Charles’s sons?’ and what you will receive is a bunch of linked entities to your query. Similarly, asking Google ‘OK Google – When is flight BA3024 due from New York?’ it will provide you with your answer on-screen without the need to load and navigate the British Airways site – perfect for people on-the-go. Alongside your answer you now see ‘actions’, such as ‘Book Flight’ buttons etc. Another example of this is searching for ‘comedy films’, and the results provide more than just a list of films… clicking ‘Anchorman’ from the results provides the user with a plethora of data and actions that can be taken… Mobile Friendly algorithm update April 21st – Is your site optimised for mobile? Top 100 Multichannel Retailers' Mobile Sites: 16 Load in Less Than 1 Second – MarketingCharts.com “We used to dial; now we speed dial. We used to read; now we speed read. We used to walk; now we speed walk. And of course, we used to date, and now we speed date. And even things that are by their very nature slow – we try and speed them up, too.” – Carl Honore 5 Steps to Building a Mobile Site: 5 Steps to Building a Site for Tablet: Vivien Tombs – Associate Head of PPC – Periscopix (@vivtombs) “Nothing is a secret.” – Vivien Tombs on Google Adwords Today’s talk from Vivien took us through a couple of tools with AdWords that she likes and could help cut down the admin time that we spend within our Google AdWords accounts. Labels When reviewing accounts, few account managers appear to make good use of labels. These are a godsend when it comes to helping with account management. Manage large scale changeovers in accounts, such as sales and promotions – sale for weekend, allows for scheduling creatives by labels. Use labels to make notes of problem areas or particular success areas, labels allow you to come back at a later date to review easily rather than trawl though the whole account to locate those areas. Consider labeling based on CPA areas, or based on internal teams for easy reporting for last minute meetings etc. Label based on bid strategy, or analysis based on match types. Assign labels to team members – accountability. Keep them short and snappy. Labels cannot be automatically created by set parameters. Not currently supported in Adwords. Labels are now available in the latest version of AdWords Editor making it easier to label in bulk. Ad Customisers Standard text ads that are customisable elements that can be dynamically updated based on custom elements. Ad customisers are parameters that go within curly brackets {like this}. The parameter gets replaced by dynamic text when your ad is triggered by a user’s search. You can include ad customisers within any text ad on the search or display network, anywhere except for the URL fields. The benefit of Ad customisers are that unlink standard ads, when the customiser updates it does not erase/overwrite your historic ad data, instead it keeps history allowing you to later analyse for other upcoming events etc. Ad customisers can be used to create a sense of urgency for sales and keep users up-to-date based on latest product availability, in comes ‘Coundown Ads’. Countdown ads  for retailers has proven to deliver up-to and over 50% increase in CTR when ads counted down within last hour of a sale. Customisers fill in your ad text using ad customiser data that you upload, the COUNTDOWN function or both. The COUNTDOWN function: Customisers with a COUNTDOWN function include arguments, or directions, for that function within parentheses (like this). The customiser {=COUNTDOWN(Discounts.CountdownDate,’en’)}, for example, includes a COUNTDOWN function with 2 arguments. The first argument (Discounts.CountdownDate) tells the customiser what date and time to count down to, which is specified in a file named “Discounts”. The second argument (“en”) tells the customiser to display that time in a particular language (English). Key Takeaways Label Everything, always have a standard ad set-up in case customised ads are not running. Be careful of your character limits! Be creative! Remember, customisers are a short-term pain, but long-term gain.   Daniel Gilbert – MD – Brainlabs (@danielgilbert44) “1,000+ changes in AdWords interface last year alone – Automation is not optional, but necessary.” – Daniel Gilbert AdWords scripts are a game changer. Managine accounts manually takes time… and on larger account, a significant amount of time. Daniel lead us through some AdWords scripts which help alleviate some of the time required to manage your account, with the bi-product being increasing account performance. The main script discussed was Ad Scheduling. Optimising your keyword and ad group bids in order to maximise performance can be a tricky affair and very time consuming. Setting up a schedule to manage your bids is a great way to make sure that you're not spending too much at the wrong times and more importantly that valuable traffic is getting to you at the right times. AdWords built-in tool for modifying bids based on the time of day — ad scheduling — but the limitation of this tool is that it only allows you up to six bidding windows per day, and as we know, our traffic trends can vary significantly from one hour to the next. So we need greater ability to optimise bids for more than six windows throughout the day currently available within AdWords. For large-scale accounts that demand a more granular approach, with bids that need to be changed every hour, the above limitations just won't do. As an example, conversion rates for Domino's vary dramatically during different hourly slots on different days; the company doesn’t want to bid at the same levels at 7:00 p.m., 9:00 p.m., and 11:00 p.m. on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Here’s Daniel’s step-by-step guide on how to implement the AdWords Script That Lets You Optimize Bids Every Hour Of The Day. Daniel then went on to discuss the benefits of the Google Anomoly Detector Script. The Account Anomaly Detector alerts the advertiser whenever an AdWords account is suddenly behaving too differently from what’s historically observed. When an issue is encountered, the script will send the user an alerting email. Only a single email for an alert is sent per day. The script by default is comparing stats observed so far today with historical stats for the same day of week. For instance, stats for a Tuesday, 13:00 are compared with stats for 26 previous Tuesdays. Adjust the number of weeks to look back depending on the age and stability of your account. Schedule the script to run hourly in order to get the most out of alerting. If the alert is too noisy, scheduling it Daily around mid-day might also make sense. Suppose the script runs at 7pm on a Tuesday. Since AdWords statistics may be up to 3 hours delayed, the script will only consider stats up to 4pm. The script will then fetch stats for 26 preceding Tuesdays, average them, and compare with today’s stats. No subsequent alerts of the same type will be triggered for the day. If you’d like to reset the alert, delete the Alerting cell value. Here’s a link on how to set up the AdWords Acount Anomoly Detector script.  Key Takeaways PPC Managers, learn to code! Tool-sets are available online to help you get over your ‘codephobia’. Automation not optional but a essential. Scripting is easy to learn, don’t dive in at the deep end. A little customisation of already available scripts can provide powerhouse tools for optimising your account.   Day 2 – Thursday, May 21, 2015 Bas Van Den Beld – Chief Editor – State Of Digital (@basvandenbeld) – ‘Better Together: Search and Social’ Mark Mitchell – Senior Director of Client Services EMEA – Brightedge (@searchmitch) – ‘Better Together: Search and Social’ Kelvin Newman – Founder and Managing Director – Rough Agenda (@kelvinnewman) – ‘Building Your Search Marketing Technology Stack’ Alistair Dent – Head of Product Strategy – iProspect (@alistairdent) – ‘What You Should Be Doing In Search & Mobile’ Bas Van Den Beld – Chief Editor – State Of Digital (@basvandenbeld) – ‘Better Together: Search and Social’  “And to think our attention span is less than that of a goldfish.” – Bas Van Den Beld If you watch this video:   Can you now tell yourself what the name of this talk is that was given in the intro? Bas kicked of day 2’s agenda with an in-depth talk about how we are always looking to try and create fan bases… when actually we are the only fan. We are the fan of our own ideas. We as a race crave for information, be it at home, at work, on the tube, at the pub… we are always digesting data. But how do we get our ideas, our content over to users to digest… knowing that they have the memory span as a goldfish? It needs to be engaging and shareable. But why in general does our content not get the attention we feel it should? Because we are not looking at ‘why’ people are buying, only when. This ad from Reebok is a fantastic example of engaging and shareable content… it addresses the ‘why’ and it was first published in-line with the ‘when’…     Great huh? We need to understand and be ‘where’ the customer is in the buying cycle, not where we think that they should be or want them to be. Don’t try to get too fancy, aim to get the right attention at the right time for the right people. Answer their needs. If you want success in marketing you have to understand what they want and what they need, talk in the consumers language. Be passionate and engaging with topics that interest your target audience and gain their attention. There are 4 types of audiences: Seekers - Researchers, looking for information that answers their needs. Amplifiers - This is the audience that can share your content which answer their needs. Joiners - These are the ‘I like it, I’ll subscribe’ consumers. Activing looking for more content from you. Buyers - These are the consumers that actively purchased(d) your products. We focus mainly on the buyers when it comes to marketing, which yes can and dos work, but we need to understand that actually it is the other 3 audiences that create they buyers audience. We need to tap into these audiences as they all work hand-in-hand. truly research your audiences, what they ‘do’, what they ‘say’ and what they ‘read’. You may be asking yourself.. OK well that all a good read but how do I know ‘what’ my consumers are asking and ‘what’ can I answer? Well, we all have keywords in our accounts, and we know which works well for buyers. So, two examples on how to identify questions from our keywords are below: Quora - This is a great place to find such questions. In-short, sign-up, and start searching for your keywords. What Quora then does is locate and present questions to you (that have/have not been answered within the Quora community). It is these questions that you can then create your answers… answering your consumers needs. With some great content that is engaging and shareable, you’re tapping into the Seekers and Amplifiers audience lists mentioned above. Google - We all use Google and you know when you start typing into the search bar you get this: Well, amend this with some insight from Quora and you can do this… …finding questions that are commonly asked with Google that you have the opportunity to create engaging and shareable content to reach the Seekers and Amplifiers. Key Takeaways Create something people will recognise, engage with and share. Remember, not every piece of content needs to sell.   Mark Mitchell – Senior Director of Client Services EMEA – Brightedge (@searchmitch) – ‘Better Together: Search and Social’ “Start small, prove the concept, then drive larger scale” – Mark Mitchell Mark guided us through his take on shareable content and the value of creating engaging content. A real head-turner was the run-through of this site below: Click the image to open the interactive version (via Penny Stocks Lab). 5 Top Tips: Integrate your teams around your content. Focus all your teams, internal and external, on content campaigns. Bring all of your assets together to create and share a great piece of content. Social signs can help you drive up content rank. Can your content be shared? Benchmark against your competitors and ask yourself, ‘OK, so what does success look like?’ Understand your social media assets overall ability. Create content that drives social engagement. Use your social assets to dominate your brand space. If a user searches for your brand, can they locate your social assets too? Searching ‘John Lewis’ on Google provides a great example of brand space ownership: Key Takeaways Create engaging and shareable content. Start small, create a piece of content and prove the concept. Then drive larger-scale content campaigns. Own your brand space.   Kelvin Newman – Founder and Managing Director – Rough Agenda (@kelvinnewman) – ‘Building Your Search Marketing Technology Stack’  “By 2017 the CMO will spend more on technology than the CIO” – Gartner Kelvin’s talk today was around tools, platforms and suites, outlining the pros and cons to all. Before jumping in and buying what you think is best for you, establish your criteria, what does the solution need to solve? Then evaluate against the above pros and cons. “Somany of our marketing decisions are derived from data, purchases are often not.” – Kelvin Newman I guess reviewing the quote above, it demonstrates the need to ensure all users are involved during the purchase decision.Who will be using the tool? The CMO or marketing manager? Silver bullets do not exist. They can all help but the best tool is actually the one that gets used the most, not the most ‘fancy’. Time saved is often more important than % account performance increase. The benefits and savings of changing a solution are often lost by the cost of changing. More campaigns fail from poor execution rather than poor strategy. Two great tools that Kelvin discussed were IFTTT and Zapier. Both tools designed to help save you time, well worth a look. Key Takeaways More campaigns fail from poor execution rather than poor strategy. There is no ‘best tool’, only the best tool for you and your needs. Invest in yourself, automate some tasks to save you time.   Alistair Dent – Head of Product Strategy – iProspect (@alistairdent) – ‘What You Should Be Doing In Search & Mobile’ Alistair’s talk later in the afternoon was all around mobile, and what we should be doing, oh, and what we shouldn’t be. What’s Different About Mobile? Bid Modifiers Mobile Preferred Ads It gives you a signal to talk to the user differently as they are not at their desktop. CTAs should be tailored to the ‘on-the-go’ user in effect. What To Look Out For Web vs. App – They perform differently, but work together. Look at the conversion relationship. Ad formats – Mobile formats need to be carefully designed for screen size. Campaign structure – Think carefully about structure, separate keywords to allow for modifiers. Enhanced CPC (ECPC) can help edge you above your competitors on the SERP. Cross-device conversions – Be careful here, Google ‘thinks’ about cross-device conversions, but cannot formerly back these up with data. Ad positions – Look to bid to position. Big gap in CTR between positions 1-2 and 3+. What not To Do Do not apply negative bid modifiers from the start. Obtain data and experience, then make an informed decision. Do not assume mobile will not perform. Do no fear greatness, instead of applying a +5% bid modifier for mobile, why not try at +25% or +50%? With data you can always decided to increase or decrease rather than take little steps. Don’t rush – Use data to make sound judgements. Do not accommodate knee-jerk reactions. Complications Bids affect modifiers. Here is a great article around how multiple modifiers can work. Modifiers over-lap, keep track of them or spend could leap out of control quickly. The lifetime value of a consumer is important to mobile bids. Key Takeaways Mobile is often the upper funnel in a process. Track everything and watch closely. Sometimes it just doesn’t work, don’t force it. The post #SMX London 2015 – SEM Key Takeaways appeared first on White.net.

How to get your tweets ready for Google’s Twitter integration Posted: 19 May 2015 12:00 AM PDT Are you using Twitter to promote your business? The value of a tweet is about to increase as Google and Twitter are combining forces, making search and social tight like never before. Coming to light in May, Twitter's content will show in Google's search results which will help businesses using this social network expand their reach beyond the original service. Why did Google choose Twitter? As Twitter is one of the largest and most established text based social networks, it makes a safe bet for Google to team up with it. In the past (2009) Google and Twitter had a deal known as the 'firehose', which expired in 2011 with the launch of Google Plus. For Google, discovering new content and making real-time rankings was a much harder and slower task, as in order to index Twitter's public profiles and tweets, Google had to crawl them all. Now by getting access to Twitter's API, Google will be able to access more real-time data without the necessity to crawl Twitter to get it. This renewed partnership means that 9,000 tweets per second will become available to Google. For now it's unknown how and when your accounts will start showing in Google search results. What we know is that Twitter may become a crucial channel for your SEO strategy. Considering that Google commands 75% of the web search market and remains the number one most visited website globally, it brings a whole new level to the integration. This also means that for less effort of using Twitter, brands will be able to abstain traffic and strengthen visibility through indexed tweets. Here’s the effect that Twitter might have: Engagement – With Twitter's firehose back in place, Google will be able to see what is being shared and who is being discussed. Authority – Content created, shared and spoken about from authoritative Twitter accounts, which are not short of high engagement and social recognition, will become more credible to Google. Authenticity – Google will favour authentic human behavioural data not the automated spam which is easier to detect on Twitter. Real-time – Google's instant access to Twitter's real-data means that trending topics which often arise on social media, can impact the algorithm. How to get your account ready Your social media can benefit from a much higher discoverability too, but before you get excited about the upcoming benefits it's important to know how to get your tweets ready for Google's Twitter integration. #1. Break into search results with great presence If you don't already have a Twitter strategy, it's time to develop one as only relevant profiles with high engagement and sentiment might be amplified on Google's search results. #2. Think before you tweet Who has the chance to see your tweets? Basically anyone who is searching on Google for any topic. As your tweets will enter Google's public search, it means that they will be visible and accessible to everyone, not just users who are your followers on Twitter. #3. Optimise your tweets for search Before you get very excited it is worth pointing out that not all tweets will be shown in search results.Tweets which are not correctly optimized or do not contain specific content, won't be displayed. To prevent this from happening, make sure to add high-value (search volume) key phrases to your tweets. #4. Balance branding with calls-to-action As Twitter is expected to see a huge increase in organic search, it's important to use this channel to encourage visitors to take specific actions. Simple tweeting is not effective enough, to grab users attention you need to attract them with: a) branded content, b) calls-to-action like e.g. 'Please RT', 'Please share'; c) clear information about what you do and what do you offer #5. Create a healthy mix While trying to apply all of the mentioned above tips together it's important to take into count the golden ratio between promotional and curated tweets, to avoid overwhelming your audience with salesy-focused updates. The ration which we apply is: #6. Keep an eye on brand mentions Now and then every company experiences a negative comment on social media. But the way how you handle situations like this and how you respond will play a significant role as searches will be able to come across both negative and positive comments. More than ever, time and replies will matter as your comments back will be visible to others as well become a reassurance of how you deal with tricky situations and unhappy clients. If positive feedback and client testimonials are not part of your social media strategy, you may need to consider adding them soon, as Twitter's research has shown that "60% of respondents say they've made a purchase from an SMB based on something they saw on Twitter". #7. Leverage the long-term impact  Your tweets help you leave a long lasting image of your brand as messages which you posted even few months ago could show up in search. This is why it's so important to think before you tweet and craft messages which can benefit not just your audience but also search engine. Having tweets showing up in SERPs will impact your paid and organic traffic. This also means being able to get extra recognition from tweets that get retweeted by influencers and individuals with high social authority.   #8. Don’t forget about frequency There are hundred of businesses out there having inactive presence on Twitter. The new partnership is an opportunity for them to get grips with at least one channel which could truly benefit their business. By staying engaged, learning how to use it, they will be able to not just improve their social presence but also achieve tangible results. What are your thoughts about Google and Twitter integration? We will be keeping an eye on its progress to provide you with more information in the future. If you got inspired with this read, there is more to come! The post How to get your tweets ready for Google's Twitter integration appeared first on White.net.

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