Surveys – add authority to your content marketing |  |
- 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:
Creating your surveyPerhaps 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:
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 SurveysGoogle 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:
Disadvantages:
World's OpinionThis 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:
Disadvantages:
Survey MonkeyThis platform is perhaps the most known out there where you can create, "any type of survey – from simple to sophisticated". Advantages:
Disadvantages:
What you can do once you have got your dataSo 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?
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) – Keynote
Maile kicked off today’s #smx expo with a history of Google search:
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…
5 Steps to Building a Mobile Site:5 Steps to Building a Site for Tablet:Vivien Tombs – Associate Head of PPC – Periscopix (@vivtombs)
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. LabelsWhen 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.
Ad CustomisersStandard 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.
Key Takeaways
Daniel Gilbert – MD – Brainlabs (@danielgilbert44)
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. 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
Day 2 – Thursday, May 21, 2015
Bas Van Den Beld – Chief Editor – State Of Digital (@basvandenbeld) – ‘Better Together: Search and Social’
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:
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
Mark Mitchell – Senior Director of Client Services EMEA – Brightedge (@searchmitch) – ‘Better Together: Search and Social’
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:
5 Top Tips:
Key Takeaways
Kelvin Newman – Founder and Managing Director – Rough Agenda (@kelvinnewman) – ‘Building Your Search Marketing Technology Stack’
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.
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?
Two great tools that Kelvin discussed were IFTTT and Zapier. Both tools designed to help save you time, well worth a look. Key Takeaways
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?
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
What not To Do
Complications
Key Takeaways
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| 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 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:
How to get your account readyYour 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 #2. Think before you tweet #3. Optimise your tweets for search #4. Balance branding with calls-to-action #5. Create a healthy mix #6. Keep an eye on brand mentions 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 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 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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