New Google+ Layout: Hangouts, Photos and Stream Reminiscent of Pinterest

Google announced a major update to their social network this week that changes the way Hangouts, photos and the Google+ stream are viewed by users. The decidedly Pinterest-esque layout was just one of many announcements this week out of Google I/O, the totality of which Jeremiah Owyang and Chris Silva dubbed a “wreck.”

“The end result, we hope, is an app that looks and feels great across a family of devices,” Senior VP Vic Gundotra wrote of the Google+ changes. This is in line with Google’s mantra of late: Technology works best when it gets out of the way, and lets people do what makes them happiest: living, learning and loving.

With the announcements of more interconnection of services, Google Maps as a virtual world, Google All Access music streaming and more, Owyang and Silva remind consumers to expect the tools and products to get better, but to know you’re the product. If brands want to play in Google’s sandbox, they’ll ultimately need to pay, they said in summary.

Visit Web-Strategist.com to see the rest of Owyang and Silva’s commentary on what they called a “patchwork set of announcements from a fragmented company,” live from Google I/O.

Online Marketing News Briefs

It’s no surprise much of this week’s news pertains to Google and their products, given their I/O event and a myriad of changes announced this week. However, Facebook also made headlines through their retail social/mobile partnership with Target, as did insightful reports for online marketers from Google and GlobalWebIndex.

Content Recommendation Engine for Mobile Sites Launched by Google

Google has rolled out a content recommendation engine, which makes content recommendations for users at the bottom of the screen on news sites with the service enabled. Sites need just one snippet of code to add this functionality to their site. See more at TechCrunch.

Over Half of Global Internet Users Signed In to Facebook in Q1 2013

Facebook continues to dominate as the most popular social network on the planet, with just over half the world’s online population logging in on the site in the first quarter of 2013. Google+ came in a distant second, with 26% of global internet users, followed by YouTube, Twitter and Sina Weibo. See further analysis of GlobalWebIndex’s report at eMarketer.com.

Target and Facebook Join Forces in Cartwheel Mobile/Social/Retail Partnership

Cartwheel, a new site from a Target/Facebook partnership, has launched in beta and will begin rolling out their mobile/social program for retailers to a select group of participants shortly. The program allows users to browse exclusive deals and sales, with additional savings for social sharing. Learn more about Cartwheel at MediaPost.

Google+ Launches Auto-Hashtagging

As part of the Google+ design makeover, a new feature enables automatic hashtagging in posts. Google will use data from their social graph and analysis to identify hashtagging opportunities and add them to content. Users can remove hashtags they feel are inappropriate. Read more about this new feature at Fast Company.

Mobile Search an Influencing Factor for 84% of In-Store Shoppers with Smartphones

The majority of consumers shopping in-store are using smartphones to help them make purchasing decisions, according to new research from Google. Of those, the vast majority – 82% – are using mobile search, rather than apps or direct navigation to company websites – to access shopping information. Search Engine Watch has additional insights from Google’s Mobile In-Store Research: How in-store shoppers are using mobile devices report.

New YouTube Trends Map Shows Viral Videos Across the US

People in search of a visual way to see which videos are trending across the United States have a new tool, courtesy of YouTube. The YouTube Trends map displays the most popular videos across the country, with the option to drill down by gender, age, location and type of activity on the video.

This Week in the @TopRank Community

Our community – whether at Online Marketing Blog, on Twitter or elsewhere on the web – is a group of insightful, generous marketers always willing to share their experience with other members!

Check out these great tips, comments and quirky news from the @TopRank community this week:

It is very true that we need to be SHOWN how things work. It always makes me laugh when people tell me “I’m a visual person”, as if having a drawing in front of them is the only way they would see it. What they don’t realise is that EVERYONE is a visual person. On the other hand, if you were truly ‘visual’ you wouldn’t need it shown to you – you could see it in your head anyway. That’s what visual creatives do.”

~ from Suffolk Graphic Designer in response to The Power of Visual Content Marketing and Brand Visuals in Action on how your audience learns through content.

Stay tuned to the @TopRank Twitter channel this week for the latest online marketing, social and content headlines!

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | Online Marketing News: Video Trends Map, Content Recommendation Engine & New Google+ Layout | http://www.toprankblog.com

First, it means content marketing has gained critical mass within the popular marketing mix and any company in a competitive industry would be hard pressed to attract business without it.

Second, it means competition to stand out with your brand’s content is only going to get harder as more companies adopt content marketing best practices and mature in their skills.

As companies evolve from simply recognizing the important role of content and experimenting with it, to achieving content creation competency and quality, the need to optimize content marketing skills becomes increasingly important. But where can B2B marketers find new ideas and expand their opportunities to grow content marketing capabilities?

The good news is that B2B Marketing innovation is alive and well and can be found in many places. One place I like to look is case studies and awards for successful B2B marketing work.

A few weeks ago I presented at DemandGen Report’s B2B Content2Conversion conference along with tier one B2B marketers like Michael Brenner from SAP, Jill Rowley from Oracle / Eloqua, Ann Handley of MarketingProfs, Joe Pulizzi from Content Marketing Institute and many others.

On top of hearing strategy and practical tactics from speakers, there was a Killer Content Marketing Awards presentation that highlighted some incredible creative, execution and most of all, performance of B2B content marketing programs.

Highlights included:

SunGard – Created awareness amongst IT professionals for SunGard Cloud offerings with a zombie themed campaign. The zombie themed effort resulted in exceeding download rates by 300%, a 5.7% email open rate and 20+ leads.

Limelight Networks – Implemented a “For Dummies” themed education campaign drawing attention to success and failures for companies and their digital presence.  The campaign gained exposure through nearly 10,000 social media and news release views and $200k+ worth of sales opportunities.

Logicalis - Using content assets such as emails, microsite and ebook, Logicalis developed a thought leadership effort that supported sales teams by enabling custom messaging based on the prospects interaction with the campaign. With a target audience of about 2,000, nearly $8 million in new pipeline business was closed.

Sales Benchmark Index – Targeting prospects that were newly hired VPs of Sales, this campaign focused on providing a toolkit that identified corporate pains when VPs of Sales fail as well as case studies of successes. The promoted ebook was downloaded by target VPs 5,781 times.

Lattice Engines – Partnered with a research firm to create a study showing the impact big data has on sales. A robust mix of content marketing tactics were used to promote the report including: ebook, blog posts, guest articles, video interviews, Slideshare and an infographic. The report was downloaded 500 times, covered by 15 blogs and industry media sites and 1,500 views of the ebook.

Optum – Created an integrated marketing campaign to support the launch of a new solution, support sales and build thought leadership. The content marketing mix included: advertorials, display ads, email, direct mail and a campaign website. The successful campaign earned a 23.5 lead to conversion rate, 475% increase in website traffic, 2,500+ resource downloads, 28% increase in YoY blog followers and $52 million in contract value of new business with less than $ 1million invested.

ADP – Developed a content marketing campaign to connect and engage with their target audience on a ADP solution using white papers and a diagnostic assessment tool. The campaign generated over $1 million in new sales opportunities with several deals closed within the first 3 months of launch.

Demandbase – This education campaign was designed to help B2B marketers make the right content technology investment by using a white paper, infographic, webinar, Slideshare and a live presentation to spotlight tools that can maximize the power of content. The results of the campaign included 1,700 leads, 125 webinar participants, 5,000 views on Slideshare and $1 million in new business.

Xerox – Created a targeted “Get Optimistic” campaign to connect with 30 top accounts and partnered with Forbes to create a magazine that offered relevant business tips. 70% of targeted companies interacted with the microsite, readership increased 300-400% over previous email campaigns, added 20,000 new contacts, generated 1,000+ scheduled appointments, and get this: yielded $1.3 BILLION in pipeline revenue.  Yes, BILLION.

OpenText – Created a personalized new customer onboarding site offering a variety of assets (white papers, checklists, product pages, ebooks, case studies) and content to welcome new clients and provide upsell, cross-sell opportunities. The campaign also included a two phase nurturing program. 1,700 new contacts were identified along with 31 new opportunities worth $1.8 million.

Crowe Horwath – Using 48 pieces of content in 4 different topic areas, this campaign targeted C-level prospects in financial institutions with $1 billion or more in assets across the buying cycle. Content tactics included: executive briefs, case studies, infographics, checklists, Q and A, and Brainshark video. 778 contacts were engaged with a 70% open rate (vs. 10%), 2 engagement worth $250k in revenue.

One of the interesting things about these B2B content marketing campaigns is a fairly consistent LACK of attention to optimizing content assets (images & infographics, video, PDFs, etc) for search. Many of these campaign assets could continue to attract new prospects or at least attract more than they are if the assets were more visibile for relevant keywords. Just using the titles of the files and documents was difficult to find many of these. Many of these content assets are near invisible when it comes to buyer-centric keywords.

Just remember marketers, when it comes to content, there’s no excuse not to socialize, advertise, publicize AND optimize. This approach represents a lot of what we do at TopRank Marketing.

Here’s the full deck for details on each Killer Content Marketing campaign plus performance data. Enjoy!

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | 11 Examples of Killer B2B Content Marketing Campaigns Including ROI | http://www.toprankblog.com

In creating curriculum and learning materials for students (child to adult) and their teachers, I learned just how important visuals are in meeting the needs of different types of learners. This is too often a missing piece in the marketing mindset; we focus on what we want people to do, the action we want them to take. We think of learning styles in terms of learning disabilities, yet the ways in which every person on the planet takes in information should be a major concern for marketers, whose express purpose is to get people to take in information.

Through your content, you may be inspiring, engaging, entertaining. What you are doing though, at the basic level, is teaching. You want your audience to understand the information you are sharing. You want to influence their decisions. Empowered consumers seek out information to help them make the best decision, often considering multiple sources.

Now pair this customer insight with what we know about how people learn: the majority of people are visual learners, either primarily or in combination with other styles. You’ll see a range of stats on the percentage of learners in each group, though 30% visual, 25% auditory, 15% kinesthetic and 30% mixed learning styles is a commonly accepted figure. These are the three major learning styles and though one person may use a combination of styles to take in information, we all lean towards one primary preference.

Kinesthetic learners best retain information they discover through touching, feeling and experiencing material. You might think there is no real “touch” in digital information, yet this is where interactive games and touchscreens are an important tool.

Auditory learners consume and retain information best by listening, often through repetitive information. Podcasting is a good way to connect with auditory learners.

Visual learners, the largest portion, want you to “Show me so I can understand.” You might accomplish this through charts, infographics, video demonstrations, comics, visual e-books, photos, or even animation… the point is, you are acknowledging this unique learning style and tailoring information for best consumption and comprehension.

We saw a fantastic example of a visual learning style recently at Social Media Marketing World, when an attendee shared her visual notes from Lee Odden’s presentation on blogging for business. Taking in auditory and visual information, this person sketched notes rather than writing them, in order to more easily recall the information she wanted to retain later on. It resonated with the social community because others learn this way, as well.

This understanding of how people learn, consume information and are influenced by it lies at the heart of everything we do as online marketers: user experience, content creation, web design, social media marketing and even search engine optimization. We know visuals are important for engagement and social sharing, but understanding the “why” will help you create and optimize content that is truly in tune with your audience preferences.

Now that we know the “why,” check out these examples of companies getting it right with visual content that inspires, engages and most importantly, presents information in a way prospects can understand and retain.

General Electric – Show Me How It Works

General Electric houses their images on Instagram (above) and Pinterest, though they use these same images in blog posts and across their social channels. Their Instagram images, in particular, focus heavily on showing their B2B audience how their products work in real life. Who wants to see a piece of a machine? Show me how it works! They do, and the result is that prospects can picture GE products in action for their own company.

Kellogg’s Pop Tarts – Show Me a Story

The Pop Tarts Facebook Page showcases their masterful visual storytelling skills. Their brand marketers use comics, cartoon characters, and simple images to present information in a fun and engaging way. Their strategy is to entertain, to keep their audience engaged and their brand top of mind. These quirky images are perfect for social sharing and tell stories through single images, or image series released over a period of hours or days. They even have recurring characters who pop up now and again, breeding familiarity and creating anticipation. It’s a winning visual content formula for a B2C brand in a competitive market, where every touchpoint counts.

Rubbermaid – Show Me Why I Need It

Look in your own closet. Now look at Rubbermaid’s closet organization images on Pinterest. Back to your own messy closet. Now back to Pinterest. Rubbermaid shows consumers precisely why they need their product with attractive, high quality photos shares to the social networks their audience members frequent. My closet looks nothing like this. I need Rubbermaid.

Callaway Golf – Show Me How to Use It

Golf brand Callaway has their YouTube channel organized into different types of videos, including instructional clips for golfers. They create videos in series, such as Office Golf Tips and Bones at Work, to create consistency and build anticipation for coming videos. Celebrities like Phil Mickelson appear in their instructional videos to show golfers how to improve their game… using Callaway clubs, of course. Teaching a golf swing absolutely requires video; you would have a hard time learning from written instructions. Callaway just does theirs better than most and have become a reliable resource and authority for golfers, as a result.

Show Me

As you plan your visual content, think hard on the “why.” It’s not about what you want to tell people. What do they want you to show them, to help them make an informed decision and stay connected with your brand? You absolutely must understand what your audience needs you to show them in order to engage and convert, especially when they are bombarded with imagery on a daily basis. This insight and customer-centric perspective will help drive your visual content strategy and you will never run out of creative stories to tell with compelling content.

What factors do you consider when planning and creating visual content in your organization? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Image at top from Shutterstock.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | The Power of Visual Content Marketing and Brand Visuals in Action | http://www.toprankblog.com

According to a recent NM Incite report, there are over 181 million blogs around the world. The way many companies treat blogs in their content marketing mix is to incorporate blogs into their website as a section or subdomain, or host them on their own domain name as we do.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | Content Marketing Tactics: Business Blogging Pros, Cons, Best Practices & Brands Doing It Right | http://www.toprankblog.com

Good advice is both hard and too easy to come by. Search “social media marketing” on Google and there are over 1 billion results.

All the scrambling often means core skills are overlooked. In fact, one of the easiest things a company can do to improve online marketing performance is to stop sucking at the basics.

When it comes to optimizing for search and social media, well implemented basics are as good for search engines and social networks as they are for your customer’s user experience.

Here are a 8 fundamentals worth applying to your organization’s daily content creation, amplification and optimization process.

1. Be the Best Answer: Start by answering a few questions of your own:

• What does your brand want to be known for?
• Is that thing what your customers really care about?
• Do you deserve to be known for that thing?

Look at leaders and authorities for the topics that matter most to your business and observe the deep and meaningful resources they provide. Tap into what makes others so authoritative and incorporate those characteristics in your own marketing. Start the journey to become the first choice amongst your customers for those topics that matter most.

2. Win Friends & Influence People: People are social and so too, should your online and search marketing. Some social networks are better than others as stand alone communities for brands, but make no mistake, social signals matter for people and search engines. That means creating, engaging and promoting brand content on social networks to inspire shares and links from people with authority on topics you want to be known for.

Use social search and influence scoring tools like Traackr, Kred, Klout, Little Bird and FollowerWonk to triangulate where the influencers are, topics that matter and incorporate that insight into your content, PR, social and optimization.

3. It’s Not About You, Or Me Or Us. And Definitely Not Them:  With content for the web or social, avoid overuse of personal pronouns like “I,” “you,” “she,” “he,” “it,” “we,” “you,” “they” and objective pronouns “me,” “you,” “her,” “him,” “it,” “us,” “you,” and “them”. Instead, use more descriptive keyword phrases where social sharing widgets will copy your message and where Google is looking in page titles, file names, text links between pages, image alt text and in body copy.

Keyword use is also a fundamental that should not be overlooked. But remember, the priority is on optimizing for people and the experience they have with your content. Copy should flow smoothly and not read like it’s unnaturally using keywords. Find out what phrases your competitors are using to attract search traffic by using SEMRush, SpyFu or Keyword Spy.

4. Facts Tell, Stories Sell: Figure out why customers buy and create keyword optimized content that tells stories about how and why your products solve customer problems.

Talk to sales staff and ask them about how they are so successful and about the discussions they have with customers. Those stories are a goldmine of ideas for great content that matters to people who want to buy your products and services.  Content sourcing and ideation can be challenging, but tapping into the Q and A around topics that matter during the sales cycle reveal a never ending source of meaningful ideas.

5. Optimize for Search & Share: While a lot of optimization emphasis is placed on creating web pages and media (images, video, audio) around topics and even specific keywords that customers are actually searching for, it’s also important to make social sharing compelling and easy.

To do that, start mastering the art of title writing to catch people’s attention but also include search phrases. Example, “10 Essential [keyword phrase] Tips & How to Boost [keyword phrase] Performance.

Also be sure to include social sharing widgets in your content and experiment with the best formats and networks for your audience. Most of optimization is simply about making it easy for people to do what you want them to do. Finding and sharing your content is certainly near the top of the list.

6. Links Are Like Electricity: Light up useful content on your website by sharing with topically relevant social networks, through blogging and byline articles in industry publications. Find out where your competitors are getting their links by using tools like Majestic SEO, AHerfs or Open Site Explorer.

Do not underestimate the power of media relations and PR for getting into industry publications that also result in links. Whether through feature articles or guest blog posts, contributing content or insight to respected publications that also include a link to your brand’s social or web assets helps brand credibility, sends traffic and influences search visibility.

7. Tune Up Your Engine for Search Engines: Have your website audited by a SEO professional to ensure keyword targeting in content, technical friendliness to Google and Bing, inbound links and social shares. Pages that load fast for people and search engines is good user experience and good SEO.Web Developers and content management systems can be your worst enemy if left unoptimized for search.

8. Live the ABO: Always be Optimizing: Optimization is a continuous process of creating and promoting keyword optimized content on social networks, through industry media and online communities, then monitoring performance through analytics and making refinements.

Be sure to allocate resources for monitoring social networks (Trackur, SproutSocial, or  Sysomos among many others), tracking and evaluating web analytics and applying conversion rate optimization best practices to ensure your findable and sharable content is influencing action.

The blocking and tackling of online marketing may not be the most glamorous, by why leave so much marketing opportunity on the table with skills and tactics we all claim to be so good at?  Optimized marketing requires a solid foundation and if your organization is having difficulty scaling performance, then maybe it’s time to take a look at the fundamentals.

I think Optimize is a book that covers these fundamentals pretty well, so be sure to check it out.

What are some of the online marketing basics that you see often overlooked?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | Want to Improve Your Online Marketing? Master These Search & Social Media Tactics | http://www.toprankblog.com

Your customers want more personalized messaging and content. In fact, 64% believe it’s more important that companies represent them with relevant offers, compared to 36% who don’t want their activity tracked. Given the tools available to block ads, tactics to stop tracking, opt-in nature of communications and social participation, it’s clear that customers who do choose to interact with brands expect a more personalized experience as a result.

The Mass Marketing vs. Personalization infographic from Monetate shares a number of other interesting recommendations and finds, including:

• 94% of companies agree that online personalization is critical to business performance.
• Two of every three companies believe personalizing their website will improve the customer experience and overall success of their business.
• 64% of companies will – or plan to within the year – deliver a more personalized experience to visitors on mobile devices.

See the infographic for tips on better personalization.

Online Marketing News Briefs

Mobile Increasingly Used for Local Search

More people are using mobile for search, especially for local information, according to a new Local Mobile Search Report based on comScore data from Q4 2012. PC traffic has remained static, researchers said, while mobile continues to grow as a percentage of overall traffic to websites. See more at SearchEngineLand.

Klout Aims to Let Consumer Be More Influential with “Experts”

Klout previewed their new “Experts” feature Wednesday. AllThingsD.com explains how it works: “If you’ve garnered sufficient credibility on a certain topic based on your Klout score — say, gardening or hair styling or whatever — you should be qualified to answer questions on the area. Moreover, you’re likely more credible than some result in a Q&A thread on a site like Yahoo Answers or perhaps a Quora.” Klout shared questions to some of its users, whose answers will show up in Bing search results (Klout’s official search partner) and possibly Google.

Mobile Shoppers Spend More in Store: Google

Seventy-nine percent of smartphone owners are also smartphone shoppers and 84% of them use their devices in-store to help them make buying decisions, according to Google’s Mobile In-Store Research report. On average, smartphone shoppers spend 15 minutes on their device while shopping in-store.

Affluent Consumers are Active in Social Media: LinkedIn

Of the 90% of consumers with investable assets between $100,000 and $1 million active in social media, 44% engage with financial institutions via social. According to LinkedIn, 36% of this group use social for discovery and consideration. See more at SearchEngineWatch.

RipOff Report Expanding: Businesses Can Opt In to Pay $90/Month Fee to Review Complaints

Not that companies should be pleased, but Ed Magedson of RipOff Report has devised another way to help companies on the receiving end of customer complaints (real, imagined or invented) part with their money. His new RipOff Report Verified program will give businesses 14 days to resolve complaints before a critical review is posted. See more at Forbes.

Sesame Street and Young Turks Among First Paid YouTube Channels

The first paid YouTube channels launched yesterday, with 30 YouTube partners making the move to a revenue model alternative to advertising. The initiative will become self-serve for YouTube’s 1 million+ content partners, who will be able to charge a fee starting at 99 cents a month for access, according to AdAge.

This Week in the @TopRank Community

This week, TopRank CEO Lee Odden gave the keynote presentation at #PDXCC13 just a day after sharing An Integrated Approach to Digital Marketing & PR with Public Relations Society of America members and webinar guests. Check out our favorite tweets and interactions from members of the @toprank community:

Stay tuned to the @TopRank Twitter channel and #trnews feed this week for the latest online marketing, social and content headlines!

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | Online Marketing News: RipOff Report Expands, Paid YouTube Channels Launch & Mobile Local on the Rise | http://www.toprankblog.com

However, things can go wrong in social and when they do, the fallout can be massive and instantaneous. I wrote about a few examples of epic social fails recently and sometimes, brands find themselves having to defend their image over the damaging actions of an external resource. Tsk, tsk, people say. They should have handled their social media in-house and this never would have happened. This was certainly the case with Celeb Boutique, who publicly laid the blame for their insensitive #Aurora tweet at the feet of their PR agency.

Not so fast, though. Social media fails originate in-house and from external partners alike. Internal processes and failures can cripple your social strategy as surely as external resources.

Working with an agency, consultant or other resource can help your brand execute a successful social media strategy while still reducing the risk of a slip up. In fact, a solid resource will help you scale your social efforts, tap into new markets, perfect your messaging and take your social strategy places you hadn’t even expected. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Before I jump into tips to ensure your agency or consultant relationship works to your maximum benefit, let’s look at a couple of reasons social may fail when working with an external partner:

• Slow response times. Social fans – especially those on Twitter and Facebook – expect a quick response, especially when they’re voicing a complaint. In fact, 42% expect a brand response in 60 minutes or less. The need for approval of messaging can slow down response times substantially and hamper conversation.
• Inaccurate or uninformed responses to questions/comments. The people creating your social content need to know your business and understand your audience inside and out.
• Inconsistent or infrequent community management. If your content is being broadcast but interactions are not monitored often, you’re missing a huge opportunity to connect and may be doing more to harm relationships than build them.
• Inappropriate messaging. This may range from irrelevant to entirely inappropriate, but if the message is off, your company isn’t being well represented on the social stage.
• Lack of consistency in situation management, brand voice or content. Regardless of who is involved in your social strategy, to your customers, your online presence should be unified and consistent.

Understanding your own social pain points and where things may break down across your social strategy enables you to plan accordingly. The first step is finding an external resource with the skills, experience and knowledge to help you elevate your company’s social presence. With PR agencies, SEOs, social specialists, digital marketers and more, what are you looking for in an agency?

Ask the following questions (at the very minimum) to help discern whether the agency is a good fit for your social needs:

1. How will you collaborate with our internal team (and any other external resources) to make sure our efforts are coordinated across SEO, print, paid search and other marketing/advertising activities?
2. Do you understand our business goals and what tools/processes will you use to help us achieve them?
3. Can you share examples of successful social campaigns you’ve managed for other clients?
4. How will we communicate throughout the relationship and which types of situations will be brought to our attention immediately?
5. Which members of your team will be involved in each facet of our social strategy?

That’s an incredibly basic overview, but you need to make sure the external partner understands what makes your business unique and that they will be able to convey that through social media, in tandem with your other marketing efforts. Once you’ve chosen an agency:

Establish their role… and yours.

How will information flow between the agency and your company? It is critical to understand how this will work for both parties. Weekly meetings and reporting are great, but what happens when a customer needs an answer to a question after hours? How should the agency ask for information they need to complete content and social amplification tasks in a way that best enables you to respond quickly with what they need? Is the agency expected to provide customer service, or should they refer certain types of inquiries in-house?

Brands and agencies work together in different ways; your agreement may have them acting in a consultative role only. Or, they may assist in content creation, amplification and measurement. They may even handle your entire social strategy, start to finish. Establish who is responsible for which area to prevent misunderstandings or lost opportunities.

Tips for Working with a Social Media Marketing Agency:

You’ve hired an agency, you’ve established roles and you have a social content plan in place that aligns with your business goals. Now, make the most of your agency relationship by:

• Setting clear goals and expectations.
• Getting any budget concerns out of the way. Deliverables, timeline, responsibilities and obligations must be clear to prevent issues down the road.
• Being available when they have questions or need information.
• Providing training as to your brand voice, core messaging, and existing resources.
• Keeping your agency in the loop as products or services change, other types of campaigns launch, etc. They can’t answer questions or hold your brand’s end of an intelligent social conversation if they don’t know what’s happening inside the company.
• Being open to change driven by logic and substantiated by research. This may mean increasing/decreasing a social ad budget, focusing more resources on one social network than another, or any other of the myriad of situations that can crop up in the constantly evolving social space.
• Establishing a social protocol that establishes messages your external partner can share and which situations require in-house approval or involvement before proceeding.
• Staying involved throughout the working relationship. Would you give someone your television budget and let them run with it? Social media is incredibly public and you absolutely need to stay involved in how your brand’s presence is managed.

Careful planning and diligent management are key to the success of your social media marketing efforts when partnering with an agency or consultant. Can you think of other tips to help brands work more effectively with external resources? Please share yours in the comments!

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | Tips for Brand Social Media Marketing Success with Agencies & Consultants | http://www.toprankblog.com

The colliding or collaborating (depending on your situation) worlds of digital marketing and PR have left a lot of ambiguity about roles, goals and responsibilities between these 2 very important groups.

In this presentation I outline why PR should care about marketing, 3 big trends to watch for and 3 of the most common questions brand PR and corporate communicators have (I polled my LinkedIn network) about integrating PR and marketing. I finish things off with a plan for how PR and communications can tap into digital marketing expertise and contribute messaging and storytelling for more meaningful and impactful marketing / PR performance.

Update: Portland’s NewsChannel 8 covered the conference and included me in their broadcast. Big thanks to Joe Smith for doing the interview and also to Barbara Kerr for setting it up:

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | Keynote Presentation: Digital Convergence of Public Relations & Marketing | http://www.toprankblog.com

Once you’ve invested in attracting traffic to your site, whether to complete a purchase or take some other action, CRO helps ensure your visitors are engaged and converting at the greatest rate possible.

Some believe CRO happens only on-site, though attracting targeted prospects likely to convert through paid search ads, email marketing and landing pages, for example, is a critical step. Another misconception is that CRO is all about increasing the number of conversions. You like to make money, right? Optimizing for higher revenue conversions and increasing the value of each site visitor is another element of CRO that can’t be overlooked.

Of course, the larger your site and the more diverse your audience, the greater the task of optimizing for conversions becomes. Whether you’re tackling it in-house or using a consultant or agency, marketing software can help you better interpret the data available to you in order to improve your conversion rate and value per customer.

Your conversion rate optimization software solution may actually consist of a few different types of tools:

A/B, Multivariate Testing & Landing Page Optimization Software

Optimizely and Visual Website Optimizer are two examples of split-testing and multivariate testing software with a simple UI and no coding knowledge required. These are typically as easy to add to your site as Google Analytics code. You don’t need to actually create two (or more) versions of a page and run them against one another; your testing software will render a variation of your page in the user’s browser – there’s no IT involvement required. Visual Website Optimizer has a range of additional features including usability testing, revenue tracking and behavioral targeting, as well.

Geo and behavioral targeting can offer deeper insight into your customers’ journey to conversion. Image source.

In general, you need to consider:

• Ease of use. Look for a WYSIWYG interface, custom reporting against goals metrics, and code view if you’re more advanced.
• Conversion goals setting and tracking. Find a solution that allows you to establish and track multiple goals.
• Ability to test multiple pages at a time.
• Segmentation and personalization. You may want to test changes that would affect all site users, or only a select group.
• Integration with your analytics, lead capture, or other software.

Important: test your testing software. It only takes a few minutes and can save you a big headache with a new solution. Run an A/A test before you try any A/B or MVT tests.  Think of this as calibrating the testing software you’re trying, except you can’t actually fix it (but you’ll know to move on if it’s not working for you!). Run your own page against itself. There shouldn’t be wild variations in conversion rates. If there are major differences, your testing software choice may not give you the most reliable insights.

You might find a testing software with landing page optimization functionality, or your needs might dictate you seek out another option. You might need a solution that integrates with Salesforce for lead capture, for example. Unbounce is worth looking into, with its landing page building, publishing, optimizing and testing features. If you’re already using WordPress, Premise is a plugin that offers the same functionality with simple set up and WP integration.

Site Analytics

In order to even begin optimizing your on-site experience for visitors, you need to understand how your presence on multiple channels affects and influences their purchasing behavior. Multi-channel funnels in Google Analytics allow marketers to see how site visitors research, compare, socialize, consider and make buying decisions across platforms.

Marketers get deep insight into assisted conversions, time lags, path length, and top conversion paths over the previous 30 days before conversion. It will take time to set up funnels for every page on your site, but this will allow you to see where, when and why people are leaving.

Social Advertising & Analytics

I wanted to mention this one specifically because social media is still written off too often as fluffy or lacking a definitive ROI. There is absolutely a wealth of information available from your social traffic and the ways you can use it for CRO vary. Take Facebook Check-Ins for a combination real-world and online retailer, for example. An offer of 10% off if you present your Facebook Check-In at the case register gives you the opportunity to know the exact order value for that social to in-store converting customer. Organic social analytics can also help you understand where your social users may be in the funnel, based on their engagement, questions and interactions.

Social advertising options, particularly Facebook, LinkedIn  and Twitter Ads, have improved by leaps and bounds in the past 18 months. The targeting is far more granular and advertisers have a great deal of control over their campaigns on the self-serve platforms. Optimizing your PPC and social ads is critical in ensuring the people you are driving to your site are even going to be prospects for conversion.

In a recent blog post, Bryan Eisenberg reminds marketers to approach social landing page optimization with two important considerations in mind: Who are you and what do you do? Social media traffic is fundamentally different than search traffic, he says; social media landing pages must be thought of differently than search landing pages. However, ad and landing page best practices still apply: ads must be relevant, valuable and have a call to action, with landing pages that adhere to Eisenberg’s 10 point Anatomy of a Landing Page guidelines.

Try Before You Buy and Test, Test, Test

Did you notice we never talked about price? Remember that conversion rate optimization is one discipline in a holistic, balanced online marketing strategy. It’s not the be all that ends all and it’s not going to be your only investment this year. Some tools are free and most are quite reasonable, so if you find yourself quoted a sizable price for CRO software, seriously consider other options. Try out a few different CRO tools and test, test, test before you buy.

Many software providers also provide managed services for an additional fee. However, you may be better served by your agency or in-house team, who aren’t married to one tool and will switch if it would be beneficial for you.

Do you have a favorite solution? Share yours in the comments.

 Top image from Shutterstock.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | Conversion Rate Optimization Software: Choose the Right Tools for Your Business | http://www.toprankblog.com

I suppose if you’re starting from scratch, adding any kind of content has the potential to improve a company’s ability to attract people seeking to buy.  Since content creation is one of the biggest obstacles to companies realizing gains with content marketing, it’s no wonder that advice about how to produce articles, blog posts, infographics, white papers, and visual marketing has become so popular.

Which brings me to the point of this post. When looking for help with content marketing and content creation, there’s a difference between what one gets from a SEO agency and a content marketing agency. That difference is not so much about one being better than the other, but more about sizing up which is most appropriate for your situation.

In fact, it would be nonsensical to limit one’s options to just SEO and content marketing, so keep in mind this post is intentionally narrowly focused.

Many pure SEO agencies have added content marketing to their mix of services in the past year if not completely re-inventing themselves that way. This is the nature of SEO, adapting to the changing nature of the industry to provide current services for improved online marketing performance.

Starting as a Public Relations firm in 2001, TopRank has been in the content creation business (messaging strategy, press releases, case studies, newsletters, white papers, email marketing, etc) for a very long time. As we evolved into more of a digital marketing agency, those PR centric content efforts evolved into blogging, social media content, ebooks, infographics, video and other visual content. But we don’t create a diverse array of content types simply because we can. We create them when it’s the right thing to do for a certain audience to affect a particular outcome.

Therein lies the fundamental difference between today’s SEO focused content and what content marketers offer.

SEO is accountable to metrics like search visibility, organic search traffic and any measurable actions that lead to and result in conversions. The more content that can serve as a “hook in the water” of search results, the more the SEO can show an impact on the investment.

As I’ve been saying lately, SEO anticipates demand through an understanding of keyword popularity and content marketing creates demand driven by producing content based on the customer journey. Optimization is an effort to improve search visibility of existing content and digital assets as well as the creation of new content according to a target list of keywords.

Content Marketing is an approach that emphasizes the thoughtful creation of content for a particular audience designed to influence an action or outcome. Rather than keyword popularity driving content creation, an effort is made to understand the customer buying journey and to architect a content plan that provides the right kind of information and experiences along the buying cycle.

When a marketing strategy calls for demand creation, a content marketing strategy will provide for a holistic approach to content where ever the there’s an opportunity for customers to interact with it. That might mean online to offline as well as an intersection with other tactics like advertising, email marketing, rich media and certainly social media.

SEO is a critical partner to content marketing. Search represents a substantial opportunity for information discovery at a time when customers are actively looking for a solution. SEO plays an essential role for information discovery across the spectrum of customer lifecycle content. SEO assumes the buyer is firm in what they are looking for and that is not always the case.

Many companies are making a transition of sorts, from SEO and a focus on creating “more” content to a content marketing focused strategy that emphasizes targeted content mapped to stages of the buying cycle. Such a shift should consider a number of factors from the resources and culture of the marketing organization to a short vs. long term view towards online marketing.

Many SEO agencies have added content marketing to their mix and can provide resources for optimized content creation.  The most common form is to evangelize creation of more content. As SEOs mature in their use of content, audience targeting, content planning across channels and integration with other types of content that have nothing to do with explicit search behaviors will emerge. For now, that evolution is not as common as the evangelism of “more as better”.

When a company is in need of a strategic approach, a content marketing agency will be able to help define audience segments, map buying cycles and develop a content plan that provides for storytelling that is optimized for discovery, experience and outcomes – across the customer journey from awareness to purchase to advocacy.

When it comes to SEO and content, how do you lead your online marketing efforts? Do SEO and keywords drive your content creation or do you plan content according to stages of tbe customer buying cycle? Do you define content marketing as creating more content or have you created a content strategy?

Image source: Shutterstock

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | What Should Lead Your Online Marketing Strategy: SEO or Content Marketing? | http://www.toprankblog.com

LinkedIn Adds Rich Media Capability to Profiles

LinkedIn users can now add rich media content objects to their profiles, allowing designers, analysts, authors and others to share their best works in a visually interesting format. Users can now use videos, images and presentations to demonstrate their experience. Danielle Restivo, Head of Global Programs, Corporate Communications at LinkedIn, reminds us that brands have had rich media access on their pages for some time. “The ability to share rich media through company pages is already available for admins of the Company Page. So an employee of a company who has admin rights to update the Company Page can do this, but employees without admin rights could not,” she told TopRank.

There are 15 accepted file formats for rich media on Company Pages including images, video and presentation on company pages. Restivo recommends that brands use rich media within status updates and post images and video on their Products or Careers page. Administrators can add rich media content from the “Share an update” box on their brand page by clicking the paper clip icon and adding their file. See LinkedIn’s rich media for company pages resource for a complete list of accepted file types.

Instagram Adds Tagging with Privacy Controls

Brands have a new Instagram feature to get excited about: users can now tag accounts in their image uploads, including business accounts.

In an announcement this week, Instagram explained the new privacy controls that come with this feature: “Only you can add people to your photos, so you have control over the images you share… When someone adds you to a photo, you’ll receive a notification and the photo will appear in your Photos of You. Want to make sure you like the photo first? No problem: you can easily adjust your settings so nothing appears on your profile until you approve it.” Users have until May 16th to experiment with photo tagging before their Photos of You section will be visible to other users.

Automotive, Fashion Retail and Other Brands Missing Out on the Pinterest Opportunity

Fashion retail and automotive are falling down when it comes to Pinterest; according to a recent Digitas/Curalate study, 70% of engagement on brand content is generated by users rather than the brands themselves.  This is especially prevalent in the fashion retail industry, where brands pin just 18% of content. The remaining 82% comes from their community repinning content.

In the automotive industry, 75% of the conversation and engagement is driven by the community, with just 25% of content originating from brands. “It’s unfortunate to see the auto industry stuck in first gear. The industry needs to leverage the heritage of their brands to tell compelling visual stories that create emotional connections with consumers,” says Apu Gupta, CEO of Curalate. He added, “While automotive websites may not discard Flash anytime soon, some straightforward changes make these sites shareable, now.”

“Brands need to go forth and pin,” says Jordan Bitterman, Senior Vice President, Social, Mobile and Content Lead, Digitas. “This study reveals the opportunity for brands to drive the conversation on visual platforms like Pinterest. By leveraging rich consumer insight, brands can take the guess-work out of their visual content strategy, and share the types of images their audience wants to see.”

Google Adds Real-Time Conversion Reporting

With the latest Google Analytics update, marketers can now see how many of their site visitors are converting and against which goals. Clicking on a specific goal will automatically segment that report, allowing marketers to track the performance of new campaigns in email, PPC, or TV, for example. An important caveat from Google: “…with this first launch we’re introducing URL based goals only. So computed goals such as Time on Site or Pages/Visit are not included yet.”

Oxygen and Tumblr Move to Further Integrate Television and Social Media

Beginning May 8th, TV network Oxygen will begin airing the best animated GIFs from Tumblr, in an effort to further integrate the television and social experience for audiences.  ”When it comes to reality TV, it’s really astounding to see just how much people like making animated GIFs for our programming,” senior vice president of digital at Oxygen Media Harleen Kahlon told ClickZ.

Twitter Opens the Door to All US Advertisers

Over a year after launching their self-serve ad platform, Twitter announced this week they’ve ended the invite-only period and opened the door to all advertisers in the United States. “Over the past year we’ve listened carefully to feedback from the thousands of businesses and individuals who’ve had access to the self-serve tool, and made enhancements based on their suggestions, including more targeting and reporting in the UI,” wrote Ravi Narasimhan, Product Manager in Revenue at Twitter. Marketers interested in using Twitter for social advertising can get started immediately at business.twitter.com.

This Week in the @TopRank Community

This week, Online Marketing Blog welcomed the 25,000th member of our Facebook community into the fray!

Community members across all of our networks got access to the full video from Lee Odden’s Future of Content presentation at MIMA this past week. Odden explored the true meaning of content and how content teams are structured (and should be structured) in organizations, then shared upcoming trends marketers need to watch for. See the full presentation:

Next week, join us on the @TopRank Twitter channel May 7th, as Lee Odden presents Optimize 360: An Integrated Approach to Digital Marketing and PR in a PRSA webinar. On May 8th, tune in for live tweets at 12:15pm from Communicator’s Conference, where Odden will share his keynote address, Digital Convergence – The Integration of Marketing & PR.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | Online Marketing News: New LinkedIn & Instagram Features, Brands Missing the Boat on Pinterest | http://www.toprankblog.com

Good content marketers know that integrated, consistent messaging is critical across multiple digital platforms.  It allows us to connect with our customers how – and when – they expect to connect with us.

With so many touch points between first contact and conversion, how are companies able to break through all of the data within analytics? We need to determine not only which channels are most effective, but also how to customize marketing activities to the behavior and preferences of the audience in that channel, at that point in their decision.

For example, a TopRank ecommerce client recently lamented the portion of conversions that could be attributed to direct search or branded search.  According to their interpretation of the data available to them, the majority of their conversions came from direct traffic.  Why then, they asked, are we dedicating resources to social media and SEO when their only purpose seems to be building brand awareness?

It’s a valid question; companies can’t afford to sink budget into underperforming channels or tactics. However, a deep dive into their Google Analytics data showed us that:

• 75% of conversions are assisted (or included multiple digital touch points).
• About 50% of conversions can be attributed directly to organic traffic.
• 80% of conversion paths included organic search as a touch point.

In fact, their second most popular conversion path looked like this:

Arrives via Organic search (usually non-branded) > User leaves the site (probably to shop around) > User Returns via Direct Visit

For this particular client, SEO is absolutely a critical part of their mix! It would have been a grave mistake to discount search optimization altogether. In the mobile & social age, businesses must use Analytics data from multi-channel conversions to shape their marketing mix, as this ecommerce client did. That deeper understanding of your customers and prospects will help you make business decisions that make sense, founded in the most recent, relevant data available.

Let’s explore 3 ways to use multi-channel analytics data to shape your marketing strategy.

#1: Review social as part of assisted conversion strategy

Tracking ROI on social can be tricky; for many businesses, it’s less likely to be considered a referring source and more likely to be used as a means for amplifying content or interacting with customers and prospects directly. However, reviewing social as part of your multi-channel funnel will give you a much better idea of how your social visitors are interacting on the site.

To illustrate this, we’ll use the real-world example of  relatively new fashion brand and TopRank client, who boasted higher-than-average traffic from social networks.  Based on their analytics, we knew social traffic only contributed to 15% of total visits, yet the average social visitor spent 4x as long on the site and visited more pages.

Social as last click represented only a small portion of converting visitors, but social actually contributed to well over 30% of transactions. We knew for this business, social visitors were more apt to buy than the average user. Additional sales-oriented content to their social audience helped their social fans feel more valued and connected to the brand.

The takeaway: Consider conversions beyond a purchase or Contact Us and you may find social visitors are more likely to download a white paper or watch a video than the average user.  This information not only can help you refine your marketing mix, it can also shape your content plan by indicating the action your social visitors are most apt to take.

#2 Customize Multi-Channel Reporting

Organic search, direct and referral sources are automatically detected by multi-channel reporting. Going above and beyond to track emails campaigns, PPC, and branded vs. non-branded keyword traffic requires some additional setup, but is well worth your time.

For example, distinguishing between branded and non-branded keyword traffic is a must for businesses measuring the impact of their SEO efforts.  In our first example, an  ecommerce client believed all conversions were coming from direct and branded search.  However, filtering branded versus non-branded traffic allowed the client to not only see the impact of organic search as a whole, but also how non-branded searches were often the first touch leading to subsequent branded searches or direct visits.

The takeaway: Create a custom channel grouping leveraging unique labels for platforms. In addition to rounding out your marketing mix, customized grouping will  allow you to mine out more data from the detected channels.

#3 Integrate for Advanced Attribution Modeling

The free version of Google Analytics is only going to track multichannel conversions over the course of 30 days. This is great  for businesses with shorter buying cycles, but can prove problematic for products or services with a buying cycle longer than 1 month.

For businesses with longer buying cycles, or those looking to do more advanced attribution modeling, passing an anonymous Visitor ID along to the user to track behavior via integration with a CRM or Marketing Automation platform is key.

The takeaway: Don’t remove Social Media or display ads from your marketing mix just because you don’t see those sources converting is your multi-channel report. Instead, integrate with your CRM or marketing automation software for a complete picture. It’s likely those touch points are still contributing to increased awareness in earlier stages of the buying cycle.

As marketing mixes become more complex, data grows, and we push more toward integrated marketing, it can be challenging to connect performance to specific tactics. It’s now more important than ever, though. Customizing and diving into multi-channel conversion report is a great step toward increasing your brand’s awareness of your greatest performers and potential.  Without this clarity and accurate insight, business decisions are really only best guesses based on faulty logic.

Is your business already using multi-channel reporting or more advanced attribution modeling? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | 3 Ways to Use Multi-Channel Analytics Reporting for Better Marketing & Business Decisions | http://www.toprankblog.com

Quality rules the day when it comes to content creation. We write often here on the importance of content planning and optimization and Lee Odden offered a complete framework for optimizing across SEO, social media and content marketing in his book, Optimize.

Here are just a few examples of brands killing it with great content. Check them out and see what lessons you can take away to improve your own content strategy:

Open University Excels in Multimedia Content Creation

In April 2012, OU became the first European university to reach more than one million subscriptions on their iTunes channel, which has seen approximately 62 million content downloads. They also have the distinction of being the first UK university with a YouTube channel. To date, they’ve had over 12 million views on their main channel, with over 45,000 subscribers.

Open University are succeeding through the creation and distribution of optimized content by addressing the needs of their audience with a variety of content formats. Video is a natural solution for illustrating concepts or demonstrating processes, both important teaching methods.

Their move to podcasting was incredibly savvy, as it allowed them to reach students (both potential and existing) in a format they could take with them and listen to across devices, on the go. Social content optimization has also helped them build a network of 96,000 fans on Facebook and over 59,000 followers on Twitter. 

Corning Complements Video with Repurposed Written & Visual Content

Corning’s A Day Made of Glass video was a hands-down viral success, with over 21 million video views and an incredibly successful sequel.

Corning launched the video at their annual Investor Day in New York, Feb. 4, 2011. By late April it had logged 12 million views on YouTube, BtoB reported. In addition to the video, their team created a page on their corporate website for frequently asked questions about the video, creating complementary written content in the process. They also created a series of images fans could share across social networks and issued press releases around the launches.

A Day Made of Glass was meant as a conversation starter with product design and R&D organizations. That it became a social success among consumers, as well, is a testament to Corning’s creative content marketing skills.

SAP Taps Into Audience Emotions with Love vs Hate Content

SAP are killing their content strategy across their social channels with innovative campaigns like Love Hate Data, which included a microsite, infographics, blogs for both the data haters and the lovers, as well as Twitter accounts @datalovers or @datahaters.

This particular campaign was created to promote SAP’s entry-level business intelligence tool, Crystal Solutions. Web content was designed to elicit an emotional, powerful response from their audience and target market by allowing them to identify with either one of two personas: the data lover or the hater.

A December 2012 case study reveals SAP was able to start over 700 online conversations and generate 580,902 tweet impressions through this creative campaign.

Three Steps to Creative Content Marketing Success

Successful creative content marketing strategies have three distinct considerations, as Lee has often pointed out:

Discovery – Businesses understand how does their audience finds content.

Consumption – Brands optimize for an experience that resonates with their audience.

Action – Companies inspire their audience to take action, effectively converting social fans and prospects to buyers.

The brands featured in this post are successfully transitioning to the role of publisher, with top quality, interesting content that has helped them build communities and influence their audience. What steps have you taken to move to a publisher mentality?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | Creative Content Marketing Strategy from Brands Killing It with Content | http://www.toprankblog.com

Adam Stetzer of HubShout, in his recent investigation into the purported Google penalization of Interflora for employing advertorial content, insists advertorials are NOT content marketing.

“Advertorials are advertisements, regardless of how you try to dress them up”, he says, “while content marketing is educational. Advertorials are biased; content marketing is free of any bias. The two may share a commercial motive, but are completely different and should be treated as separate entities”.

However, Lewis DVorkin, Chief Product Officer at Forbes Media, defines content marketing as “Brands using the tools of digital media and social sharing to behave like original-content publishers.”

His definition of content marketing includes AdVoice, the Forbes service he was speaking of at the time. “First launched 20 months ago, it’s a fully transparent way for marketers to publish and curate content on Forbes.com and in our magazine.”  In fact, Lee Odden was included (unbeknownst to him) in a recent Forbes AdVoice article published by CapitalOne, “Use Content Marketing to Boost Your Business” which looks and reads pretty much the same as regular Forbes content.

It seems, then, that DVorkin’s vision of content marketing is not restricted to the unbiased, but that advertorial content is acceptable where parties ensure transparency for readers. “Content is content,” he says, “and transparency makes it possible for many different credible sources to provide useful information.”

Are Advertorials Evil By Their Very Nature?

Marketers like John Bethune at B2BMemes take exception with DVorkin’s definition. In a post questioning this expansion of content beyond owned into paid, he asks, “When a publication buys content (from staff writers or contributors), that clearly counts as editorial. But when the publication is paid to publish it (by advertisers), is it still editorial?”

It’s a valid question.

Advertorials have been around since the 1940s, when savvy newspaper publishers realized the potential of ad content posing as editorial. Then came infomercials, those wonderful paid programming spots that helped networks fill the dead air and increase their off-time revenue.

Fast forward to the modern web; advertorials might also be known as native advertising, or more commonly, sponsored content. They typically appear in blogs as well as print and online magazines and newspapers. Sponsored content allows brands to reach beyond their own audiences, to inform, engage and convert readers through content that (ideally) reads as editorial despite the underlying advertising message.

This advertorial ran in local newspapers through a service called Universal Media Syndicate. Though clearly marked an advertisement, it has a definite editorial look and feel.

Google itself has pushed the envelope as far as clearly indicating which of their content is organic or paid and has had many conversations with the FTC as a result. So while some have rightly questioned whether Google’s stance on advertorials is a move designed to cut their paid advertising competitors off at the knees, it doesn’t seem so. The penalization of flower brand Interflora for participating in BBC advertorials seems a natural extension of their paid links policy. As Stetzer points out in his evaluation of the situation, penalization for advertorial content can be prevented/remedied by ensuring all links in the content are no-follow and do not pass PageRank.

Still, we have the ethical question: do advertorials have a place in your strategy as one of the content marketing tactics to consider?

Are Advertorials Even Content Marketing At All?

When Lee Odden recently asked his social network of marketers to share their definitions of content, the range of answers was surprising:

• Information designed for consumption, seasoned for enjoyment, and packaged to share.
• Content comes in any form (audio, text, video), and it informs, entertains, enlightens, or teaches people who consume it.
• Content is high quality, useful information that conveys a story presented in a contextually relevant manner with the goal of soliciting an emotion or engagement.
• Relevant, compelling, timely and valued knowledge and/or entertainment.
• Original and opinion-charged copy with a focused message and personalized voice.

In fact, after perusing the 40+ definitions of content, I don’t see anything about paid content falling within the bounds of content marketing territory. Then again, I see nothing definitively excluding it as a viable tactic, either.

When Advertorials Are Okay:

Unfortunately, many online marketing tactics that show promise are milked to death and taken way too far by overzealous marketers. Instead of an outright ban on advertorial content, maybe what we need is a set of common sense, ethical guidelines for its use.

“With today’s savvy consumers, sponsored content, native advertising and advertorial isn’t effective unless it provides valuable and useful information,” TopRank CEO Lee Odden recently told a German business magazine. “With reputable publications, similar, if not the same, editorial standards apply as they do for pure editorial content. The only difference is the means of inclusion: payment or editorial.”

With that in mind, here are some common sense guidelines for advertorial, native advertising or sponsored content:

• Top quality – never forget the “editorial” part of the equation. Your competitors may have former journalists and professional editors at their disposal, as should your brand.
• Avoid overtly promotional language because it’s ineffective and makes you look silly.
• Aim to inform, educate, and/or entertain readers, as with other types of unpaid content.
• Offer transparency and does not attempt to trick readers into believing they are reading unbiased, journalistic content.
• Use no-follow links to avoid passing PageRank and falling outside Google’s guidelines.
• Serves its purpose through careful planning and alignment with your business goals.
• An accurate reflection of your brand voice, company culture and capabilities.

Advertorial content has been a sticky topic lately, although it doesn’t have to be dismissed without consideration. If sponsored content makes sense as a marketing tactic for your company and you can find an opportunity for placement with a reputable publication and measurable ROI, it may be worth considering. Just remember that content, whether it’s published purely based on editorial merits or as part of an advertising program, isn’t effective unless it creates value for the reader.

Are you using advertorial content as part of your marketing strategy? Share your tips or thoughts on the practice in the comments.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | Do Advertorials & Native Advertising Fit In Your Content Marketing Strategy? | http://www.toprankblog.com

Where should companies invest to attract more attention and engage those that would influence or act on buying?

To answer that question, we could consider the promotional advantages of each discipline:

• Inbound Marketing – Inbound drives 54% more leads than outbound (HubSpot)
• Content Marketing - 61% of consumers say they feel better about a company that delivers custom content and they are more likely to buy because of that (Custom Content Council)
• Social Media –  74% of consumers rely on social networks to guide purchase decisions (Salesforce Marketing Cloud)
• Mobile - 41% of smartphone owners have made a purchase from their mobile phones & US m-commerce sales will reach $31 billion by 2015 (Visual.ly infographic)
• Email Marketing - Email generates $39.40 for every dollar spent (DMA).

But of course there are advantages to each. The problem is that they are not universally applicable or true.  So you might ask, what is universally true? What thing can we invest in as businesses for the greatest return on marketing spend? In my opinion, it’s this:

The best investment you can make in marketing is the quality and experience of your “product”.

Whether you sell a tangible thing or a service, your “product” provides an experience and consumers are more empowered to share the stories of those experiences now than ever before.

Consistently delivering a  great experience amongst a community of customers empowered to create, consume, publish, interact and transact any where, any time inspires the most scalable and powerful “sales force” you could ever hope to advocate for your brand.

Just look at services like Uber that have forgone most traditional advertising and marketing and simply created a service that’s so useful that people are compelled to talk about it. They tell stories about their experience.

“Talking about it” in today’s digital world means creating and sharing content on the social web where a single positive moment can be shared and reach hundreds or thousands of people. Add up hundreds or more of those moments on a daily basis and you can see how those stories can spread.

A big part of what contributes to customer experience with products and services outside of the fact that they “deliver on the promise”, is how stories are discovered, where and how they are consumed and the means by which they are shared and acted on.

Yes, that means beyond creating a fantastic product (fantastic is defined by buyers) where there is some opportunity and necessity to optimize the discovery, consumption and actions taken as a result of those stories.   This is the promise most of the marketing channels and tactics I mentioned above make.

The effectiveness of any of those channels depends on the quality of the product experience and the meaningful stories that surround it. That means stories communicated, curated and promoted by the brand as well as the people who experience the product.

While you certainly know intuitively, the value of product or service quality, do you see it as a marketing investment? How does product or service quality and experience factor in to your marketing? What are the key stories about that experience being told through brand and by customers?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | The Best Marketing Investment You’ll Ever Make | http://www.toprankblog.com

Brands understand the importance of content marketing, yet most have not yet addressed their content needs on either a strategic or tactical level, according to Altimeter’s Rebecca Lieb.

Researchers for the company conducted interviews with executives actively engaged in content strategy or marketing; their findings were the basis of a new report, Organizing for Content: Models to Incorporate Content Strategy and Content Marketing in the Enterprise. Lieb and report co-authors guide brand marketers through a variety of organizational models for content, with recommendations to help companies execute an effective content strategy. Read the full report on SlideShare.

Trust Can Make or Break the B2B Buyer Relationship: Study

Buyers are overwhelmed by the amount of content available to them, making the content marketer’s challenge greater than ever, according to a new study from Demand Gen Report. Content plays an increasingly important role in B2B purchase decision making, with 68% of survey respondents indicating they rely more on content than they did last year. Variety is key: five out of nine content formats gained in popularity, while only podcasts and interactive presentations lost traction. Researchers found that three specific content formats stand out in 2013: white papers, E-books and webinars.

Sales messages are a huge turnoff for buyers, 61% of whom said sales-heavy content has been a problem for them in the past year. Survey respondents indicated they would like B2B marketers to focus on making content more readable, adding value, and showing their research to their audience.

Google Launches Interactive Customer Path to Purchase Tool

The customer journey is complex, with engagement happening across platforms, devices and possible over a period of time, says Google. Their new tool on the Think Insights website aims to help marketers “explore and understand the customer journey to improve your marketing programs.”

Users can toggle through different industries and countries including the US, Canada, Brazil, UK and Germany in order to see whether channels tend to play an “assist” or “last interaction” role in the typical path to purchase. The length of the customer journey can impact purchase value; Google’s tool also allows marketers to explore combinations of number of days or steps to purchase, industries and countries, with their resultant effect on average order value. In the example above, Google shows that 66% of total US retail revenue comes from purchases made in more than one step. Their findings are based on Google Analytics data and should offer valuable macro-level insight for marketers.

Bing Research Shows Over 50% of Users Click on the First Results on the SERP

The majority of searchers click on the first link available on a search engine results page, with a dramatic reduction in clicks for each position thereafter, according to Dr. Ronny Kohavi from Bing’s Research & Development team. By the time you reach the 8th link on a results page, less than 1% of users will choose it, as shown below.

Dr. Kohavi explained in the announcement of their findings, “The figure (above) shows the click-through rate dropping from position 3 on, where position 3 could contain an Instant Answer, or the 2^nd web result that was pushed down because there was an Instant Answer above it, etc.”

Expect more changes in the near future. “These are our first steps in dynamically sizing the page,” Kohavi wrote. “ If you’re getting different number of results, you’re probably in one of our ongoing experiments.”

Goodbye, Google Instant Previews

If you noticed that Instant Previews are now absent from Google search results, you’re not alone. Search Engine Land went on a quest to find out what had happened to the feature Google promised on its launch it 2010 would result in greater user satisfaction. After confirming Instant Previews are indeed gone, SEL found an online help thread with a statement from a Googler reading, “Instant previews saw very low usage by our users, and we’ve decided to focus on streamlining the page to benefit more users.”

New Social Platforms Venture Beyond Real-Time Marketing to Predictive?

Two major players and a startup all released new social platforms this month. ClickZ’s Susan Kuchinskas shares details on Social.com, the new offering from Salesforce, and Adobe’s Predictive Publishing for Facebook dashboard plug-in.

It gets really interesting with startup Blab, launched April 9. “We don’t do projections, we do predictions based on the pattern and behavior of the actual conversation,” Tamsen Galloway, vice president of Blab, told Kuchinskas. “We can see where a conversation will be in 24 hours, and how that may change between 48 and 72 hours later.”

Image from ClickZ

Blab uses a “conversation canvas,” as shown above, for each brand interest or goal, ie.: brand mentions, competitor mentions, news around events or topic, etc. Kuchinskas explains, “The platform applies its patented predictive and analytic technologies to data streams from social channels and the web, analyzing some 1.3 terabytes of data at any moment.” This gives brands a unique opportunity to actually get ahead of conversations, with time to craft messaging and content in anticipation of opportunities.

This Week in the @TopRank Community

Members of the @TopRank social community tuned in for TopRank CEO Lee Odden’s content marketing presentation at Content2Conversion this week in New York. Attendees shared livetweets, photos and even a cool takeaways Vine on Twitter throughout the event.

Over in the TopRank Facebook community, 10 fans will each win a copy of Lee Odden’s Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media and Content Marketing as we reach a milestone with 25,000 members in our community. Stop by and check it out; page comments get preference!

Check out the @toprank Twitter channel and stay tuned to #trnews for breaking news across the digital marketing landscape in the weeks ahead!

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | Online Marketing News: Predictive Social Tools, Content Marketing & The Customer Journey | http://www.toprankblog.com

Let’s keep in mind your business objectives, shall we? As these social marketing fails will show, campaigns may take off but go seriously sideways if companies place popularity above purpose.

Some companies can afford more risk and racier campaigns than others, yet risk in business must always be mitigated and justifiable based on the potential rewards. You might disagree with my opinion on the campaigns featured in this post, but I believe the risks should have been evident from the start and far outweighed the potential payoff.

These examples may cause you to shake your head, or enjoy a good belly laugh, but each is a fantastic learning opportunity for social media marketers.

Money Can’t Buy You Love – nor Common Sense

We’ll kick off with KFC’s #IatetheBones. Fried chicken execs are literally throwing everything they’ve got at their viral tagline, which they expect to be the next “Where’s the Beef?” Launched April 14^th, the campaign has invested in it an estimated $50 million budget, Interpublic’s DraftFCB agency and an Academy Award winning director for the ads. Considering this tagline is to take them boldly into their new position as a boneless chicken brand, the budget and scope are not all that surprising.

Why, then, did no one stop to consider the potential negative effects of associating a food brand with sexual innuendo and dead bodies? Worse still, did they consider it and decide it was worth rolling the dice? When you read the user-generated content on #IatetheBones, that a food brand would approve of the association puts KFC squarely in Quizno’s horrendous “2 Girls, 1 Sub” space.

As I’m writing this, one sentiment analysis tool puts the amount of positive buzz around #IatetheBones at just 51%. Compare that to 80% positive sentiment for the @kfc brand itself on Twitter. The hashtag sentiment analysis came from a sample of 50 tweets, so I tried another tool to compare, which analyzed in real-time and came up with 74% negativity around the #IatetheBones hashtag.

Apparently the hashtag did well in test markets and inspired people to go online and share videos and comments. Unfortunately, people are sharing memes of people choking on chicken bones, or Hannibal Lecter:

They’re resurfacing years-old animal rights videos and tagging them with #IatetheBones, making those videos appear in social search again with this new campaign. They’re blindly tweeting on the hashtag with no message at all, trying to make it trend. Is this convincing anyone to go buy boneless or think better of the brand? Probably not when they’re sharing tweets about how much fun they’re having with their chicken and dead girls:

Did no one on the entire team it took to put all of this together realize or even care that “bone” invites all kinds of not-even-subtle phallic and cannibalistic commentary?

“Where’s the Beef?” worked because it’s catchy, cute and relatable. Everyone has a beef at some point. We’re not all going to eat the bones. Ya dig?

Then, I could be completely wrong. Maybe this one really will take off and KFC will have ushered in a new pop culture catchphrase as the result of their clever marketing. I still think it seems far more likely the conversation is going to continue its downward spiral, finally crashing and burning at the precise point that reading the tweets on #IatetheBones would make Tommy Lee blush.

If You Want to Gamble on User-Generated Content, At Least Be Sure Customers Like You

Moving right along, another memorable social campaign fail also came from a fast food giant – THE fast food giant – by way of #McDStories. McDonalds’ campaign kicked off innocently enough, with two tweets sharing stories about their employees, food and suppliers.

The problem with viral marketing is that it takes users generating and sharing content to make it popular. As McDonald’s learned, you just never know what people are going to share. #McDStories tweets told tales of everything from throwing up Happy Meals to animal abuse to things I can’t even type as they make me a bit queasy.

Is that good branding? Is the gamble on a viral tagline worth potentially damaging your brand to the point people are still talking about the episode over a year later? I’m guessing in McDonald’s case, their sales didn’t suffer too terribly, though you have to wonder if their investment was money well spent. McDonald’s later admitted that “#mcdstories did not go as planned.” Fail.

A Reputation Takes Years to Build and One Stupid Social Campaign to Destroy

Next up:

Yes, friends, this actually happened. Some social media rocket scientist thought this was a good thing to post to Belvedere’s Facebook and Twitter pages.  Do I even need to elaborate? No, the portrayal of a rape scene is not a good endorsement for your alcoholic beverage. Spokespeople for the company were sorry. Unfortunately, this was so ill-conceived – and there were so many stops along the way someone should have thrown up a roadblock – that no one really cared how sorry they were.

Other dishonorable mentions for social media campaigns that should never have seemed a good idea, even at the time, go to:

• American Apparel for their completely classless Hurricane Sandy sale.
• Microsoft for asking Windows Phone Twitter followers to share horror stories about Android phones on the hashtag #DroidRage. Followers virtually ripped off Microsoft’s arms and verbally beat them with the stumps, leaving a bloody trail of Windows jabs in their wake.
• Kia for attempting to ride the coattails of the popular Cheezburger brand with a meme campaign that had one user tell the auto brand to “Get off of the internet.”

The moral of the story, marketers, is that you can probably pull off something wildly popular and crazy and risqué if you try hard enough and throw enough money at it… but do you really want to? Part of any campaign worth its salt is a critical evaluation of each element and any potential risks. Are those risks manageable? Is it really worth the risk when you can’t control your social audience?

Plan to Succeed and Never Appear in a Fail Blog

First, consider the purpose of your social marketing strategy. You may be trying to:

• gain insight into your community
• build brand visibility and authority
• influence buyers
• promote products and services
• drive traffic to your website
• increase search visibility

…or some combination thereof. Once you’ve established your goals, you’ll plan to employ specific tactics to help your brand achieve them. A social media marketing checklist like this one Lee Odden created and shared can help you get the right people and processes in place to execute your plan. As you implement, measure, and hopefully improve your social strategy, it’s important to remember your social presence is an extension of your business presence. You can’t get away with any more online than on television or radio; the same people are listening and they see everything you do online in an instant.

Whether all of your planning and social management takes place in-house or with the assistance of an agency, you must protect your brand. Work with professionals who value your reputation as much as you do. Choose agency partners that value performance, brand loyalty and measurable results over cutesy campaigns and “buzz.”

If you’re not sure, stop. Just stop. Calculated risk is one thing. Diving head first into issues you don’t understand (or have no real reason to talk about) simply because they’re popular or trending is an invitation for a social PR disaster – and we’ve seen plenty lately. Share the most memorable social fails you’ve seen in the comments!

Top image courtesy of Shutterstock.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | Brands Gone Wild: Social Media Marketing Fails & Lessons Learned | http://www.toprankblog.com

Many companies new to content marketing miss important steps and without checklists or processes, content marketing contribution to leads and sales can be unimpressive.

Of course, not all content needs to “sell” in terms of inquiries or transactions, but for content designed with lead generation in mind, there should be some accountability or you won’t have anything to count.

While deciding the creative on your next infographic, the viral hook of your next video or which awesome thought leaders will be in your next ebook, step back for a second and consider these basic and often overlooked considerations for aligning content with marketing objectives.

1. What’s the primary brand objective for this content? How will successful discovery and consumption of this information move the reader along in the sales funnel?

2. Who is the audience? What problem does this content help them solve? How does this content help them break free of the status quo?

3. What will be used as the hero? How will readers seem themselves in the content and how will it empathize with their situation and goals?

4. What is the unique selling proposition in the content? What’s different or more valuable than others? How is that story being told?

5. What’s the primary offer?  Secondary offer? What other actions are available to support all interest levels?

6. After the reader takes action (share, subscribe, register, download, inquiry), what happens next? How will you nurture communications for the reader to become a buyer, a customer and a referral to others?

Many companies getting into the content marketing game do not have the presence of mind to focus on producing content that aligns with the buyer journey. The experience of creating content is so new, the focus is often on quantity, vs. meaningful information that contributes to moving prospects along the sales cycle.

This is why you often hear things like, “We started blogging, creating videos and white papers, but we’re not getting any leads.”

Content Marketing means creating content and media around a certain topic for a particular audience that will inspire action. What many companies are doing is simply creating “more” content and calling it content marketing. That’s where the disconnect lies.

Are there other fundamental questions about content marketing planning that should be included in this list? How are you solving the disconnect between content quantity and content accountability?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | 6 Simple Considerations For Boosting the Marketing Performance of Content | http://www.toprankblog.com

Without landing page optimization, your visitors may have this same lost feeling when they arrive on your website. Whether the content was written 10 days or 10 months ago, it’s easy to make assumptions about your website visitors and assume the directions (read: content and calls to action) you are providing make sense.

If anyone has ever given you directions based on landmarks (turn right at the gas station) you can understand this feeling. And ultimately you are unsure and have questions such as: what gas station, what if there is more than 1 and good grief why didn’t you just give me the street name?

As the Membership Director of MnSearch, I had the chance to attend a “Search Snippets” event on the importance of creating better directions for web visitors in search of solutions.

During that presentation we heard from 3 different speakers, each covering a different perspective on optimizing for the customer journey starting with an overview of Conversion Rate Optimization from Aaron Weiche (@AaronWeiche).

4 Steps To Get Started

Step 1  - Know Where You Are
Just like when you are lost, it’s best to pull over and figure out where you are. This is the wrong time to make assumptions, as you may end up further off course.

Before you implement any edits or changes, measure your current results from the page in question. Maybe the situation isn’t as bad as you perceive it to be.

Step 2 – Optimize The Funnel
Existing funnels can be optimized at every step. Start first by identifying which areas of the funnel are least effective.

As you look at optimizing your funnel, follow a structured approach. The approach Aaron recommended to the audience was READY:

• Relevant
• Engaging
• Authoritative
• Directional
• Yield Optimal Results

Step 3 – Know Your Recipe
Any good chef knows that you only change one ingredient at time, otherwise you don’t know what element made the dish more (or less) tasty.

It can be tempting to change multiple elements on a landing page, especially if you are misguided by assumptions about the page (see step 1).

To truly be effective, you have to remain disciplined and only test one page element at a time.

Step 4  - Matrix Your Factors    

Map out the types of factors you may want to adjust and what they accomplish. Start with the following, and make sure you have items in each category:

• Benefits
• Features
• Emotion
• Value

 Step 5 – Test & Maximize
Starting with a clear hypotheses, then you can A/B test for a champion.

To wrap up, Aaron overviewed the need to use Cohort Charts so you can start to see how data is related and what optimizations are having impact and pursue those items that are making a positive impact.

The Past, Present & Future of SEO Landing Pages

Next in the series of presenters was James Svoboda (@Realicity). He took the audience through the past, present and future of SEO landing pages.  What lessons were learned in the past?

Past Lesson #1 - Learn that every page is a landing page, it’s not just about the home page.

Since every page is an entry point to the site, it’s also important to understand that every page will have an entry point (such as search or social) and an exit point (to another page or leaving the site).

Past Lesson #2 - Analyze data to be informed and make recommendations.

Recommendations have been largely based on how visitors are behaving on the site. There was also a rise in the use of tools as more became available to track a variety of data. Think heatmaps, for example.

Past Lesson#3 – Continually seek information.

You’re reading this blog, so you’ve got this one covered.

Present Lessons Learned

Lessons we are learning in the present include identifying main conversion points on your site such as:

• Header
• Side bar (adjacent to content)
• In-content conversions (within the content – suggestion to the reader)
• Footer – (your last resort!)

As you outline the conversion points on the page, be sure to find the fold. Or the point where most visitors will have to scroll to see more information.  Once you understand the elements you have on the page, the next step is to build trust through content and visuals.

Some ways to build trust include associations, BBB logos, customer testimonials etc. The kind you use will depend on the type of business (B2B vs B2C), but don’t shy away from simple statements of credibility. Something like a 25^th, 50^th or 100^th anniversary can instill confidence for the visitor.

The next consideration CROs are currently integrating are social elements. If search is going to be social, then landing pages need social elements both for the visitor and the search engine to recognize the authority of the page.  Finally, current landing page optimization efforts are focused on tracking, testing and analyzing to spot patterns.

Test and analyze SEO results by segmenting analytics data. If you need to get started, here are ways to do so  by analyzing organic traffic:

• keywords
• locations
• devices
• bounces
• steps in visitor flow charts
• conversion type (leads, sales)

Future Lessons

James wrapped up by challenging the user to think of what the future holds for landing pages. One prediction he shared was to think of one url as your ultimate landing page going forward. As social signals influence search, imagine if all of the collective search and social equity was captured among a handful of pages where you invest the most time (vs 100’s of pages with less equity and therefore little to no visibility).

Use Psychology to Boost CRO Results

The final presenter was Josh Braaten (@JLBraaten) of Rasmussen College. He gave the audience a primer on using Psychology to boost CRO results.

Josh started by reminding the audience that when it comes to make decisions emotion beats logic. And the best website visits are emotional experiences, not rational encounters.

As noted in the book Brainfluence by Roger Dooley, campaigns with purely emotional content performed about twice as well (31 vs 16%) as those that were rationale.  Additionally, campaigns that were purely emotional still did better than those that mixed emotional and rationale (31% vs 26%)

In order to achieve higher conversion levels we need to create hypotheses using psychological factors, then develop testing plans.

When considering conversion rate psychology, there are two factors:

1. Can do – factors that influences a visitors’ ability to complete a task
2. Will do – factors that influence a visitor’s willingness to complete a task

To get started, ask yourself what is preventing the visitor from taking action and what will make them want to take action?

What I find most interesting about this topic is the reminder that regardless of the company, product or service; at the end of the day we are still people communicating to people – if even through mechanisms that oftentimes remove the face-to-face interaction.

If we were to think about customer needs first and aligned our copy and calls to action to their need to learn and accomplish a goal, would our landing pages be different? I think the answer is Yes.  :)

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | Are Bad Directions Leaving Web Visitors Stranded? Optimize For Outcomes to Improve Experience & Conversions | http://www.toprankblog.com

With 9 out of 10 B2B marketers using content marketing, competition for attention is more fierce  than ever. The constant battle with Google algorithm and indexing updates and the masking of useful data against which to optimize has caused many ambiguities when it comes to implementing traditional SEO advice.

That doesn’t mean search doesn’t warrant top priority. Search is core to finding answers in daily business life: Google handles 100 billion queries monthly and 16% of those queries have never been seen before. According to a recent DemandGen report, 81% of B2B buyers start their journey to finding solutions through search.

That means there are huge opportunities for continuous optimization of content performance in search to attract, engage and convert. Great SEO strategy also contributes to great user experience, so it should play an essential role in every digital marketing mix.

To get the most out of organic search optimization in a very social and content marketing focused world, I think it’s important to make the distinction that most SEO is based on anticipating demand. Alternatively, content marketing and social media have a very big hand in actually creating awareness and interest for B2B products and services through education and buzz.

The distinction will help companies get far more out of their online marketing strategies. How? By focusing SEO efforts on optimizing for what we know customers are actually looking for and also to get the most out of search discovery driven by paid, earned and owned media content.

Another way of looking at this is that a tactical SEO approach involves identification of popular keywords relevant to existing content and then implementing a mix of SEO copywriting, technical SEO audits, linking and social media promotion to create or improve signals for search engines.

Strategic SEO will consider the customer journey from Awareness to Purchase to Advocacy and the planned content, media, advertising, public relations, offline events and promotions that generate demand. A strategic approach to SEO then helps B2B companies get the most value out of their content and media investments by making them easy to find where ever relevant prospects are looking.

SEO That Optimizes for Demand:

For example, let’s say a marketing software company wants to increase inbound leads through search engines. They’ll do the relevant keyword research based on existing content and maybe competitors to identify which keywords are most in demand according to certain product features and problems solved for specific market segments.

Popular and relevant phrases are then used to create a keyword glossary that is mapped to existing website content for optimization through  copywriting, links and off site promotion (links and social shares). There’s more to SEO than that, but these are the basics most companies implement.

Content That Creates Demand:

Alternatively, let’s say a business services company is investing in a content marketing strategy to develop the kinds of information that will create awareness, interest and consideration in a specific market or channel. That content plan will also provide the kinds of information that directly influence inquiries and support the sales process.

A strategic initiative like this may be supported by advertising, offline events (speaking/sponsoring), social networking, visual media/interactive, media relations and email marketing.  The content and media involved in this example can be discovered in numerous ways outside of search. The focus on education and awareness vs. always on “buy now!” creates awareness early on in the sales cycle and helps position B2B brands gain preference critical to influencing buying decisions.

Best Case Scenario: Optimized  & Socialized Content

Planned content designed to provide useful information across the sales cycle is effective and represents the price of admission for the most fundamental of digital marketing initiatives. B2B buyers pull themselves through 70% of the buying cycle before ever talking to a sales rep, so it’s important to gain early awareness and engagement.

Applying search and social media optimization best practices for content to become known as “the best answer” wherever prospects are looking or engaging online is where a lot of companies fall down. Therefore, doing so is a competitive advantage.

With strategic content marketing, it’s important that B2B marketers make sure SEO is more than just a checklist item.  Include optimization of known demand keywords and topics as part of demand creation efforts through new content and digital assets, social media, advertising and PR. Extend the reach of earned, owned and paid media by including search optimization for those content types as well.

Think of optimization in terms of how the brand wants to be known and also in terms of the customer journey. How does your target audience discover information online? What are their preferences for content consumption? What kinds of information and will motivate them to take action and further themselves along the sales funnel? These are essential questions for more effective content marketing.

Where to Learn More:

I’ll be presenting on this very topic at the B2B Content2Conversion Conference in New York (sold out) this week . This event includes other awesome B2B marketers like Michael Brenner from SAP, Ann Handley from MarketingProfs, Joe Pulizzi from Content Marketing Institute, Ardath Albee from Marketing Interactions and many more.

My presentation is titled: “Content Optimization: How to Integrate Search, Social and Inbound to Drive Demand”.  If you’re registered, I hope to see you there on Tuesday.

Beyond that presentation, helping companies develop integrated content, social and search strategies is something we do every day at TopRank. Give us a call or email and if we’re booked or not a fit, we can certainly point you in the right direction whether it’s other consultants, tools or additional events for education.

Image credit: Shutterstock 

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | Drive More Demand for Your B2B Business with Optimized & Socialized Content Marketing | http://www.toprankblog.com