vineri, 14 august 2015

Why No One Pays Attention to Your Marketing - Whiteboard Friday - Moz Blog

Why No One Pays Attention to Your Marketing - Whiteboard Friday

Ever mass-deleted a bunch of impersonal emails from your inbox? Brand fatigue is a real threat to your marketing strategy. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand discusses why brands become "background noise" and how you can avoid it.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard. Click on it to open a high resolution image in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat a little bit about why no one is paying attention to your brand, to your marketing. It's the perilous pitfall of brand fatigue.

Brand fatigue sucks

So you have all had this happen to you. I promise you have. It's happened in your email. It's happened in your social streams. It's happened through advertising in the real world, online and offline.

I'll give you an illustration. So I sign up for this newsletter. I decide, "Hey, I want to get some houseplants. My house has no greenery in it." So I sign up for Green Dude Houseplants' newsletter. What do I get? Well, I get a, "Welcome to Our Newsletter." Oh, okay.

And then maybe the next day I get, "Meet Our New Hires." Meet our new hires? I'm sure that your new hires are very important to you and your team, but I just got introduced to your brand. I'm not sure I care that much. To me, you're all new hires. You might as well be, right? I don't know you or the team yet.

"Best Summer Ever Event," okay, maybe, maybe an event. "Edible Backyard Gardens, you know, I don't have a backyard. I was signing up for a houseplant newsletter because it was in my house. "See Us at the Garden Show," I don't want to go to the garden show. I was going to buy from you. That's why I'm online.

Okay, thanks.

How to cause brand fatigue

It's not just the value of the messaging. It's the frequency that it happens at. You've seen this. I'm on an email list that I signed up for, I think it's called FounderDating. It's here in Seattle. I think it's in San Francisco. I thought it was a really cool idea when I signed up for it. Then I have just been inundated with messages from them. I think some of them are actually worthy of my participation, like I should have gone to the forum. I should have replied. I should have checked out what this particular person wanted. But I get so much email from them that I've just begun to hit Delete as soon as I get it.

We've actually had this problem at Moz too. If you're a Moz subscriber, you probably get a new email every time a new crawl is completed, and a campaign is set up, and you have new rankings data. Some of that's really important, right? Like if you're paying attention to this particular site's rankings and you want to see every time you get an update, well yeah, you need that email. But it's actually kind of tough to opt in to which ones you want and with what frequency and control it all from one place.

We have found that our email open rates, engagement rates have actually drifted way, way down over time because, probably, we've inundated you with so much email. This is a big mistake that Moz has made in our email marketing, but a lot of brands make it in tons of places. So I want to help you avoid that.

1) Too many messages on a medium

Brand fatigue happens when there are too many messages, just too many raw messages on a medium. You start to see the same brand, the same name, the same person again and again. Their logo, their colors, the association you have, it just becomes background noise. Your brain goes into this mode where it just filters it out because it can't handle the volume of stuff that's coming through. It needs a filtration mechanism. So it starts to identify and associate your brand or your logo or your name or a person's name with "filter." Filter that out. That goes in the background.

2) Value provided is too low or infrequent to deserve attention

It also happens when the value provided is too low or too infrequent to deserve attention. So this might be what I'm talking about with FounderDating. One out of every maybe five or six messages, I'm like, "Oh yeah, that was interesting. I should pay attention to that." But when it becomes too infrequent, that same filtration happens.

Too few of the high value messages means you're not going to pay attention, you're not going to engage with that brand, with that company anymore. All of us marketers will see that in the engagement rates. No matter the medium, we can look at our numbers and see that those are going down on a percentile basis, and that gets really frustrating.

3) The messaging can't be effectively tuned or controlled by the user

So this is the problem that Moz is having where we don't have that one email control center where you say how often you want exactly which messages updating you of which notifications about which campaigns, and newsletter and da, da, da. So your message frequency is either all the time high or very high and so you're, "I don't like any of those options."

Very frustrating.

How NOT to cause brand fatigue

Now, I do have some solutions and suggestions. But it's platform by platform.

Email

Start very conservative with your email marketing and highly personal. In fact, I would actually recommend personally sending all the messages out to your first few hundred users if you possibly can, because you will get a great rapport that you develop individually with person by person. That will give you a sense for what your audiences like and what kind of messaging they prefer, and they'll know they can reply directly to you.

You'll create that highly-engaged experience through email that will mean that, as you scale, you have the experience from the past to tell you how often you can and can't email people, what they care about and don't, what they filter and don't, what they're looking for from you, etc. You can then watch your open, unsubscribe and engagement rates through your email program. No matter what program you might be using, you can almost always see these.

Then you can watch for, "Oh, we had a spike." That spike is a good thing. That means that people were highly engaged on this email. Let's figure out what resonated there. Let's go talk to folks. Let's reach out to the people who engaged with it and just say, "Hey, why did you love this? What did you love about it? What can we do to give you more value like this?"

Or you watch for dips. Then you can say, "Oh man, the last three email newsletters that we've sent out, we've seen successive declines in engagement and open rates, and we've seen a rise in unsubscribe rates. We're doing something wrong. What's going on? What's the root cause? Is it who we're acquiring? Is it new people that signed up, or is it old-timers who are getting frustrated with the new stuff we're sending out? Does this fit with our strategy? What can we fix?"

Be careful. The thing that sucks about brand fatigue is a lot of platforms, email included, have systems, algorithmic systems set up to penalize you for this. With email, if you get high unsubscribes and low engagement, that will actually kill your long-term chances for email marketing success, because Gmail and Yahoo Mail and Microsoft's various mail programs and whatever installed mail your targets might have, whatever they're using, you will no longer be able to break through those email filters.

The email filter that Gmail has says, "Hey, a lot of people click Unsubscribe and Report Spam. Let's put this in the Promotions tab." Or, "Hey, a lot of people are clicking Report Spam. You know what? Let's just block this sender entirely." Or, "Gosh, this person has in the past not engaged very much with these messages. We're going to not make them high priority anymore." Gmail has that automatic high priority system. So you're getting algorithmically turned into noise even if you might have had something that your customers really cared about.

Blog or other content platform

This is a really interesting one. I would strongly urge you to read Trevor Klein from Moz's blog post about the experiment that we and HubSpot did around how much content to produce and whether lowering content or increasing content had positive effects. There are some fascinating results from that study.

But the valuable thing to me in that is if you don't test, you'll never know. You'll never know the limits of what your audience wants, what will frustrate them, what will delight them. I recommend you don't create content unless you can have a great answer for the question, "Who will help amplify this and why?" I don't mean, like, "Oh, well I think people who really like houseplants will help amplify this." That's not a great answer.

A great answer is, "Oh, you know, I know this guy named Jerry. Jerry runs a Twitter account that's all about gardening. Jerry loves our houseplants. He's a big fan of this. He's particularly interested in flowering cacti. I know if we publish this post, Jerry will help amplify it." That's a great answer. You have 10 Jerrys, great. Hit Publish. Go for it. You don't? Why are you making it?

Watch your browse rate, your conversion rate, and conversion rate.... I don't mean necessarily all the way to whatever you're selling, your ecommerce store products or your subscription or whatever that is. Conversion rate could be conversion rate to an email newsletter or to following you on a social platform or whatever.

You can watch time on site and amplification per post to essentially get a sense for like, "Hey, as we're producing content, are we seeing the metrics that would indicate that our content marketing is being successful?" If the answer to that is no, well we need to retool it. It turns out there's actually no prize for hitting Publish.

You might think that your job as a content producer or a content marketer is to make content every day or content every week. That's not your job. Your job is to have success with the metrics that are going to predict and correlate to the strategies you need as a business to acquire customers, to grow your marketing channels, to grow your brand's impact, to help people, whatever it is that your mission is.

I highly recommend finding your audiences' sweet spot for both focus and frequency. If you do those things, you're going to do a great job with avoiding brand fatigue around your content.

Twitter, Facebook, and other social media

Last one is social. I'll talk specifically about Twitter and Facebook, because most things can be classified in there, even things like Instagram and LinkedIn and the fading, sadly, Google+ and those sorts of things.

Twitter, generally speaking, more forgiving as a platform. Facebook has more of those algorithmic elements to punish you for low engagement.

So, for example, I've had this happen on my personal Facebook page where I've published a few things that people just didn't really find interesting. This is on my Rand Fishkin Facebook page, different from the Moz one. It turns out that that meant that it was much harder for me next time, even with content that people were very engaged around, to reach them.

Facebook essentially had pushed in. They were like, "You know what? That's three or four posts in a row from Rand Fishkin that people did not like, didn't engage with. The next one we're going to set the bar much higher for him to have to climb back up before we decide, 'Hey, we'll show that to more and more people.'"

Lately I've been having more success getting a higher percentage of my audience into the impression count of people who are actually seeing my posts on Facebook by getting better engagement there. But that's a very challenging platform.

Users of both, however, are pretty sensitive, nearly equally sensitive. It's not like Facebook users are more sensitive. It's just that Facebook's platform is more sensitive because Facebook doesn't show you all the content you could possibly see.

Twitter is just a super simplistic newsfeed algorithm. It's just, who posted last. So Twitter has that real time kind of thing. So I would still say for both of these, aim to only share stuff that gets high engagement, especially as your brand.

Personal account, do whatever you want, test whatever you want. But as your brand's account, you want that high engagement over and over again because that will predict more people paying attention to you when you do post, going back and looking through your old social posts, subscribing to you, following you, all that sort of thing, considering you a leader.

You can watch both Twitter Analytics and your Facebook page's stats to see if you're having a dip or a spike, where you're having success, where you're not.

I actually love using Twitter and a little bit LinkedIn or Google+ to see what gets very high engagement and then I know, "Okay, I should re-share that on Twitter because my audience on Twitter is very temporal." Two hours from now it's going to be less than 1% overlap between who sees a Twitter post now and who sees a Twitter post 2 hours from now, and that's a great test bed for Facebook as well.

So if I see something doing extremely well on Twitter or on Google+ or on LinkedIn, I go, "Aha, that's the kind of thing I should post on Facebook. That will increase my engagement there. Now I can go post and get more engagement next time and build up my authority in Facebook's newsfeed algorithm.

So with all of this stuff, hopefully, as you're producing content, sharing content, building an email subscription, building a blog platform, you're going to have a little less brand fatigue and a little more engagement from your users.

I look forward to chatting with you all in the comments. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Blogging 101 – Should it be a blog post?

Blogging 101 – Should it be a blog post?
How to run a blog schedule
Instagram ads: How this new commercial opportunity can inspire marketing efforts

Blogging 101 – Should it be a blog post?

Posted: 13 Aug 2015 01:00 AM PDT

After conducting a fair number of content audits in my time, I feel that the time has come to speak out about company blogs at their very best and worst. Over the next few months I'll be taking you through some blogging basics, starting today with the question: "should it be a blog post?"

Introduction to blogging for business

There are so many resources online about why your business should be publishing content on a blog, like this one from Hubspot. Generally the advice is that blogging helps you to do one (but hopefully more than one) of the following:

Increase traffic numbers
Convert traffic
Improve authority

Yay! I love all of these things and I'm sure you do too. Why wouldn't you want more traffic and conversions? Unfortunately it's very much a case of "easier said than done". The concept of a having a blog is simple, but actually carrying out the work can be quite difficult. Where do you even begin when it comes to creating a blog?

A question that clients often ask me is "what should we write about?" something which should never be an easy question to answer; a blog needs a content strategy just as much as any other area of a company website. Not only that but a blog also needs governance in terms of who will be responsible for writing, editing and keeping it up to date. Running a blog isn't something to be taken lightly as there is plenty of investment time needed.

It's when these considerations aren't taken into account that issues start to occur with company blogs. So let's work together to try and improve things for you, starting with which kind of content you want to publish.

Writing text based content

The company news update

We all love to shout about the awesome things we're doing as businesses, but think about how relevant this is going to be for your audience. Some sites do an excellent job of sharing their news, but others fail due to the lack of relevancy and depth.

Put it this way, do you spend your time reading mundane posts online that make little difference to your life? It's doubtful. But you might read a post about a company news update if you find out your favourite shop will soon be opening in your town, or if you hear about a new product launch.

Where they really belong: you might want to consider that this type of post might be better placed in a press release or media centre area on your website.

Charity work update

It's wonderful to do charity work as a business, and of course you'll want to share the positive stories with your customers and wider audience. The only thing with this is that you can end up having a lot of posts saying much of the same.

I recently audited a company blog and found a lot of charity work posts amongst their really insightful industry news. The main issue was that the content on the pages was really thin, often under 100 words in length, and the URLs were also virtually identical if a charity event took place annually.

Where they really belong: social media platforms are perfect for this type of content as you can share your news and updates in a more informal setting, and also engage with people who have helped your charitable work.

Adding media based content

Images of team activities

Company team building days, nights out and Christmas parties – all of these are events where it's likely that many photos will be taken. Despite the protests of some team members, it's also likely that these photos will end up on the internet in some way or form.

sportsday

The question is where should they go? It's true that pictures of the team away from their desks brings a sense of personality to the business, but it's important to remember tone in the grand scheme of things.

Where they really belong: with Flickr and Instagram around, there are plenty of great social networks specifically designed for sharing images online.

Videos

The same goes for videos. Usually any corporate videos would work their way onto a resource or “about us” page on the main website and not the blog.

This might be different if the blog post is a little more informal and the video is catered to this – perhaps it could demonstrate users interacting with the product, or perhaps one of your team has presented at a seminar or conference and you want to show people that you are a source of authority.

However if you’re going ultra-casual and you’re thinking about posting a video of someone spinning around on their office chair or something else less relevant to your audience, try a tailored social media platform instead.

Where they really belong: Vine, Instagram, and YouTube all have potential here depending on the length of your videos. YouTube can be a good starter home for your content that you could embed into a blog post if it ends up being something of great interest to your audience.

Hopefully you now have a better idea of what type of content to avoid on your company blog. Of course that’s not to say you shouldn’t include anything that gives you personality, just think about where the best home is for the type of content you have at hand.

By doing this you might just find that you start building communities in other areas of the web, and you will also help to keep your website free of bloat. After all, who wants to find a load of old image URLs causing a mass of 404 response code errors in Google Search Console? Not me!

The post Blogging 101 – Should it be a blog post? appeared first on White.net.

How to run a blog schedule

Posted: 10 Aug 2015 05:00 PM PDT

I go on the internet quite a lot. I go on the internet everyday in fact. Whilst on the internet I use my skills of observation to look at what is out there. In an un-scientific study, I've concluded that 98% of the internet can be broken down into two broad categories: naughty websites and blogs. Sometimes the two categories merge, but let's ignore that for now.

What this means is that if you want to launch (or revive) a blog (or a naughty website for that matter), you are going to need a plan. As the cliche goes, failing to plan is planning to fail. If the internet generated dust you'd probably find plenty of it hanging around on blogs.

So, today I want you to decide to keep your blog dust free. Get your marigolds on, pull your socks up and get ready to sort your blog out.

Take simple steps

Blogs can be written by a single person or a team of people; either way, you are going to need a schedule to keep things on track. The first thing I normally do is decide on a publishing schedule, so I suggest you do that too. Weekly, monthly, daily, whatever, I don't really mind, it's up to you. Decide now…

OK, so you've made a decision, now you need to set some goals. Goals for publishing work best when they involve taking simple, easy to achieve steps. Think of it like this; if your only goal is to publish a blog post by a chosen date, you are left with a rather large end goal to aim for. If, instead you break the large goal down into smaller tasks with their own deadlines, you are more likely to hit the desired end goal (publishing the post). I recommend you break your schedule down into the following three milestones:

1. Submit an idea

You can't publish a blog post until you have written it, and you can't start writing it until you've come up with an idea. I suggest you start here. Coming up with an idea is the most important part of the process and by separating it into its own deadline you are guiding your writers to focus on the idea instead of moving into the writing stage too quickly.

Once a writer has submitted an idea there is a high chance that they have committed to the process early on, therefore reducing the chances of them giving up on writing the post.

2. Submit a draft version of your post

Another common issue I've seen when working on publishing schedules is that writers are often very keen to work on the final version of their post. Slow down there skippy. Don't run before you can walk. Accept the fact that you are going to make mistakes. That's fine, we all need to go through various iterations of things we are working on.

Make sure your team of writers know that the work they submit to the editor for proof-reading/feedback should be considered a draft, and nothing more. It'll mean that changes will be seen as a positive, they will improve the post. It's also easier to relax into writing something when you know that it is a draft. If your writer is relaxed about the process they are less likely to miss the deadline.

3. Publish post

The post has been written (in draft form), the editor has read it and suggested some improvements, the writer has responded by submitting something even better. Guess what comes next? Publish the post.

Bonus – Don't schedule too far into the future

I use a schedule like the one I've described above to keep this blog (white.net/blog/) moving. The three key deadlines are split by a week each:

Week one – submit idea
Week two – submit draft
Week three – submit final version/publish

I schedule every writer's next deadline, which covers about five weeks. I don't go further than that. Things have a habit of changing, and if that change means that the schedule needs to move for multiple people that can cause problems. Before you know it writers are getting lost, things are going wrong, deadlines are being missed, there's smoke coming out of the building and a picket line has formed outside the car park. Don't let that happen.

Make it visible

The next challenge when developing a publishing schedule is to ensure that everyone involved in the process is able to see what is coming next. I've seen a number of publishing schedules which, although highly organised, completely fail to keep the entire team updated on who is writing what, and when.

If you haven't got visibility, your process is hard to see and therefore hard to understand. If something is harder to understand than it needs to be, there's a high chance the people it affects will lose energy in trying to keep up with it. There are a couple of ways to remedy this:

Kanban

Kanban is a system that can be used to improve visibility. It was developed by Toyota in Japan and is a key part in helping the car manufacturer to deliver vehicles 'just in time' (JIT). The idea behind kanban is that your system relies on cards, each one a representation of a writer's idea moving through the three stages of the publishing process. Below is an example of a kanban board where each card on the board represents a blog post moving through the stages to publication.

Some people like to have a physical board in place to achieve this, but an online system can work just as well. Trello is built on this principle, other project management tools borrow from these ideas. Use whatever system you like, just make sure it is always visible to the team.

Updates

In addition to maintaining an easily visible schedule, I've found that keeping the team updated regularly helps to stop the rot. Every Monday morning the team receives an email clarifying the schedule, and during a weekly huddle the key deadlines are covered. The update is just about short enough to avoid anyone crying, clocking in at around 30-seconds to be exact.

It's not what you know, it's who knows what

Have you ever seen a publishing schedule run itself? Of course you haven't. Although it can be a labour intensive task, you're going to have to face facts; without an editorial team your blog is going to gather so much dust, even Kim and Aggie would have trouble cleaning it up.

There are two key roles you'll need to recruit for. They are:

Editor-in-chief

This person essentially maintains editorial standards on the blog. They should decide what topics should be covered, who the audience is and who the writers are. The other key role this person will play is maintaining the schedule. Sometimes that means stepping in when a deadline has been missed.

Sub-editor(s)

The role of the sub-editor is to check the accuracy and style of each blog post. Their role is key during the 'draft' phase of the process. They are essentially the annoying people who send your blog post back with lots of 'improvements' marked on it.

Conclusion

There you have it. A simple, practical process for keeping your blog schedule up to date and healthy. You can see how well it works by coming back to this blog (white.net/blog/) again and again and observing how impressively regular we all are!

Why has Instagram made a leap into ads?

Instagram's ads are nothing new, they have been put to the test since 2013 by a very limited number of major brands such as Disney, Cadbury, Waitrose and The Gap. This extra time allowed the network to perfect its execution to please both brands and Instagram's users whilst turning itself into a shopping and marketing destination.

As a repose to the growing demand to use Instagram more effectively, and to allow consumers asking ‘How do I buy this’ to take action, the app decided to take next step into the world of advertising.

To keep the balance right, Instagram introduced a strict policy in order to manage the volume and frequency of its ads aimed at helping marketers create customised commercial content without disrupting the user experience too much.

Why and how brands can use Instagram’s ads

Instagram, which last year took overtook Twitter in number of monthly active users, has according to Forrester's analysis the highest engagement rate of 4.21%, delivering '58 times more engagement per follower than Facebook, and 120 times more engagement per follower than Twitter'.

You can just imagine how brands, who are struggling to generate engagement on Facebook and Twitter, can make content promotion more successful by merging Instagram's activities with its new paid advertising availability with:

● TARGETING: Amongst the first brands to sign up to Instagram's new advertising API is online retailer Net-a-Porter. The brand is using this advertising feature to target ads in real time to a very specific audience across Europe within 24 hours of their events. Marketers will be able to target consumers based on age, gender, demographic and most importantly, their interests.
● ACTION FORMATS: Adverts will be supported with buttons like 'Learn more', 'Sign-up', 'Install now' or 'Show now' allowing users to discover relevant and beneficial content outside of the app.

● INTERACTIVE FORMATS: Brands will be able to drive direct sales, app installs and engagement not just with photo ads but also with adverts including a carousel of several images or interactive video ad formats.

● DATA MANAGEMENT: The spend and ad management tools will help marketers to monitor and evaluate their advertising efficiency.

The commercial benefits of using Instagram ads can be very powerful especially for companies aiming to drive further brand awareness and engagement.

Those who create branded content and are not short of visual collateral can use paid promotion to help their messages stand out while making them more playful resources. Anyone who is looking to reach a young demographic or Millennials could certainly give these ads serious thought too.

Before you start investing in Instagram's ads

As ads will appear in user’s streams, it's important to make them feel as if they are part of a regular posting activity. More than ever before, keeping the balance right between organic and promoted updates will play a crucial role in helping brands avoid over spamming the audience with offer-based advertising.

To take the full advantage of this new marketing opportunity you need to consider a few elements and focus on making your adverts:
A) Relevant: Take full advantage of the targeting options available to deliver the right message to the correct audience.
B) Aesthetically pleasing: Instagram is all about beautiful imagery combined with storytelling. This is why Instagram aims to turn its advertising offering into a premium magazine-like solution. Keep this in mind when selecting content and imagery for your future ads.
C) Engagement enhancing: Respect Instagram’s user ecosystem where your brand is part of a broader conversation.

While the advertising news has been welcomed by us marketers, Instagram's creative community has been left slightly worried about the future of their feed. It's our responsibility to apply advertising solutions in the best possible way to 'fit' the vibe of Instagram's creative essence and reassure the audience that branded advertising is just a way of helping consumers and brands connect together through paid content which makes the discovery process a much faster and easier experience.

What are your thoughts about Instagram ads? Is your business planning to use this advertising format? Let me know in the comments below how are you planing to use it and what are you hoping to achieve.

The post Instagram ads: How this new commercial opportunity can inspire marketing efforts appeared first on White.net.

Seth's Blog : Grit and hard work

Grit and hard work

The story we tell ourselves and the stories we tell our children matter far more than we imagine.

There's a huge difference between, "You got an A because you're smart," and "You got an A because you studied hard."

"I succeeded in getting what I wanted because I'm pretty," and "I succeeded in getting what I wanted because I worked hard to be in sync with the people I'm working with (charisma)."

(And don't forget the way we process luck, good and bad, as well as bias and persistence.)

Smart and pretty and lucky are relatively fixed states, mostly out of our control, and they let us off the hook, no longer responsible for our successes and certainly out of control of our failures. (And, as an aside, pretty sends us down the rabbit hole of surface enhancements and even surgery).

On the other hand, hard work and persistence are ideas we can expand and invest in productively. (HT to John Medina).

• Email to a friend •

vineri, 14 august 2015