Google search results and adwords

Google has announced it is removing its right side-bar ads. So the search engine results page (SERP) can look like - 4 ads on the top, 10 results (plus an image results view), and 3 text ads at the bottom.

This means that ad words just got much more competitive. It's not clear whether SEO will be directly impacted.

Here is a search on Absence Management - the four ads at the top mean extra scrolling; Google has added the "Image" view as a result; and there are three text ads at the bottom.

Here is a good article the further elaborates: http://www.wordtracker.com/blog/google-confirms-a-four-ad-format-ending-sidebar-placements

Content strategist - front and back end

In a recent article on the Content Marketing Institute site it posits that you need two types of content strategists - one for the front-end and one for the back-end. I contend that one person should be able to do it all, and if you don't have one person then you have a high risk of missing content or their components and getting bogged down with processes and approvals. The more people you have managing the content the more rigourous your governance and processes need to be.
Here is my take on what a Master Content Strategist does, in comparison with the article's division of front-end/back-end person:

Front-end content strategist	Back-end content strategist	Master Content Strategist – My perspective
·   Who’s our target audience? ·   Why (for real) are we creating content for those people? ·   What content do they need most? ·   How well do we meet those needs today? ·   How can we meet those needs better tomorrow – while also serving the goals of the business? ·   How can we better coordinate the efforts of all our content creators?	·   How can we organize content so that our authors can easily store and retrieve it, and prepare it for automated selection and delivery in the relevant channels? ·   How do we structure the content so that modules are consistent and can be easily assembled (mixed and matched) on-demand to meet customer needs? ·   How do we make sure that we aren’t creating, recreating, and recreating content over and over for each channel? ·   How do we scale our processes so we can do more with the same resources? ·   How do we take advantage of the wealth of content we have and surface it for our customers in a way that is fresh and valuable? ·   How do we future-proof our content to take advantage of the next big thing?	·   Develops strategy and objectives based on business objectives ·   Defines audience per objective (if necessary) ·   Defines content per sales cycle stage ·   Continually assesses and evaluates content and its use ·   Develops processes and workflows to support content development ·   Develops taxonomies and structures for scalability and accessibility ·   Understands all channels and appropriate use of content ·   Repurposes content for various sources ·   Establishes evergreen content as well as dynamic content ·   Manages an editorial calendar ·   Understands writing for the web – inclusive of SEO, tagging and social ·   Is an editor and a writer
Tasks
·   Define customer personas. ·   Define customer journeys. ·   Analyze and map customer needs to the business strategy. ·   Determine what topics to address when, including content marketing offerings, to support the customer at multiple points in the customer journey. ·   Choose the best content types (text, visuals, video). ·   Develop SEO guidelines to ensure that people searching online can find the content. ·   Develop style guidelines (on how to write for the audience).	·   Identify how content varies based on customer needs and where each need arises in the customer journey. ·   Identify how content can be modularized so that it can be automatically reused (mixed and matched) to meet customer needs. ·   Develop format-free structured content models so that content can be written in a consistent way and automatically published to any channel (mobile, web, print). ·   Define the structure of the CMS repository so that it supports authoring and content retrieval. ·   Develop metadata to tag all content modules for dynamic content retrieval. ·   Develop business rules to identify how content should be assembled automatically upon customer request. ·   Define structured-writing guidelines (on how to write for each content model).	·Develops personas ·Maps customer journeys ·Maps the sales cycle, the customer journey and content, including content type and format per customer need and preference ·Develops styleguide for tone and brand per channel and incorporates robust SEO strategy ·Defines structure within technology solutions including CMS so where it is modular it can be incorporated in various ways, with tagging utilized to showcase content in various modular.

Blogging - why it’s still important for business

Search for blogs in Google and you’ll get over 3 billion results.

Blogging Stats

·        40% of companies have blogs for marketing

o   They get 55% more site visitors

o   And 67% more leads

§  20 or more posts a month can drive significant traffic and therefore leads

·        71% of people said blogs affect their purchasing decision 

Source: Hubspot’s An introduction to Business Blogging.

• 57% of bloggers report having more than one blog. (source)

Content

Blogs are a source of thought leadership and shouldn’t be “ego streams” (That’s my phrase for it). You should give your opinion along with some value content.

If you’re starting a business blog, start with one blog and integrate your efforts. Use tags so readers can get to the topics they’re interested in.

Writing ideas

·        Content can be about trends, answering questions, asking questions, interviews (i.e. interview a subject matter expert or interesting person), join Groups (LinkedIn, Facebook) to see what people are talking about

·        Audit your current content (on your website, digital properties, presentations and even proposals) and find some that can be repurposed

·        Invite guest bloggers (industry experts, key influencers, sme)

·        Don’t just curate content, add value with your opinion; get permission to re-use articles (if you see a relevant article write what you find interesting about it or even controversial and then link to it)

·        Be current, provide reaction/perspective on current events

·        Set Google Alerts for topics you want to follow and write your take on what others are talking about

Style

·        Be interesting, clear and take a position

·        Be consistent with your tone and overall style of writing

·        Provide your perspective and opinion

·        Support your information with facts, statistics and references to add credibility

·        Use metaphors and story telling to get across key ideas

·        Make it relatable for your audience; make it personal

·        Spell check and grammar check – mistakes reflect on you and decrease your credibility

·        Include your byline and reference any relevant credentials – and do the same for any guest bloggers

·        Document your style guidelines and provide to any guest bloggers

Frequency

·        Frequency correlates to number of leads (the more quality content the better)

·        Set realistic goals

·        Be consistent when you post and the number of times

·        Develop an editorial calendar

·        Have a backlog of content that includes evergreen content (then you can take a vacation and schedule this content)

·        It can take a blog 3 to 5 years to gain significant traction and that’s only if you work at promoting it (be patient), you’ll be gaining in SEO if you write your content with high relevancy

Best practices

·        Develop themes and make sure to incorporate keywords

·        Optimize with key words

·        Incorporate CTA – contextual and banners to lead gen information

·        Use images and video

·        Format your posts so they utilize headings and subheadings as well as bullet so people can scan

·        Utilize search engine optimization by putting keywords into titles, headings and content

·        Write titles that engage the user – ask a question or present a provocative opinion

·        Write what you know

·        Have your content deliver high relevancy and be authoritative; address problems readers are interested or that they are facing; identify gaps – ask questions

·        Credibility – references and links to high authority sites; provide links for further information

·        Engage your audience

·        Refresh content, give your readers reason to return

·        Respond to comments in a timely manner (e.g. within 24 hours, or two days)

·        Promote your blog and your articles

o   Have a sign up form or RSS

o   Enable social sharing and write tweetable content

o   Incorporate your blog into your signature, link from your website, reference it on any slide presentations and social posts

o   Submit your blog to directories

o   Write guest posts on other people’s blogs and reference your blog as your appropriate

o   Invite experts to write on your blog and hopefully they will then reference your blog on their’s

o   Share promos of your blog in social media

Measure your success

Success isn’t only about numbers; it’s also about the quality of your readership and the relationships you’re building. Metrics you can track:

·        Number of followers/visitors (quantity)

o   Who is following you (quality; e.g. is an influencer with a large following following you?)

o   Who is linking to you and driving traffic to your blog

·        Visits by blog post (Page views)

o   What articles/topics are popular (is this an area you can write more about to engage this audience?)

·        Subscribers – total number and month by month growth

·        Number of comments

o   Quality of comments – there is high value in a positive response, encourage people to link to your blog

 

Infographs - why?

When infographs first appeared a few years ago everyone loved them and wanted to have them. But a closer look at what was being published was really just promotional/sales material and nothing of real value. I love statistics and I love visuals so putting them together makes sense - if done properly.

With any collateral you create you need to have clear objectives with an audience in mind. Why are you creating this? what do you want to achieve? what are you measuring to determine it is successful? If you don't know, don't do it.

Infographs are impossible to print. They are hard to reference (you can't even tweet the content as its part of the image). They aren't accessibility compliant. They can't be viewed in mobile. They aren't meaty enough to warrant a lead generation form. So you better be clear why you're doing one and what you hope to achieve.

The best case scenario that I know of was an infograph that was printed as a poster and generated conversation at a trade show - people came up and said "I didn't know that". And the same infograph was used in social media. We also separated out the statistics and sent them out as tweets.

Here is an article on infographics that provides some more advice from MarketingProfs http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2016/29375/four-ways-to-stop-your-infographic-from-being-a-total-flop?adref=nlt021916

Marketing and Communications - they aren't the same thing

People often reference marketing and communications as if it is one thing, even calling it MARCOM.

Marketing focuses on supporting sales with awareness and lead generation while protecting and upholding the brand. A good marketing team has deep understanding of the customer and works towards developing customer experiences to drive sales.

Communications focuses on the employees, making sure they are kept informed and ideally engaged so that they will be productive and keep the company profitable.

Of course both marketing and communications teams should share some of the same skills and competencies:

• they should be strategic and detail oriented
• they should have strong writing and design skills or understanding
• they need to be able to get a message across clearly

Grouping marketing and communications often results in communications being the poor cousin that does not get the attention or resources it needs.

Communications is the first budget cut as value is hard to prove even when the consequences in not having and implementing a communications strategy can be severe and include increase is staff turn over and decrease in employee engagement leading to lower productivity.

Marketing needs to be focused externally with the client/customer and prospect alway in mind. Lack of a marketing strategy can result in a waste of resources as collateral is developed with no objectives achieved.

Retail marketing - getting creative

Retail is trying to warm up the winter with some hot ideas. Check out

Nike pop up store All-Star weekend latest round in running battle of the shoe brands
Michael Jordan pop up store Drake, Michael Jordan fans line up in frigid weather for $ ...
Campbell's soup pop up store Campbell's opens a pop-up restaurant in Toronto - blogto.com

And check out this video on Upworthy about 2nd Look - a truly innovative way to spotlight a society issue in a moving and motivating way: https://www.facebook.com/#!/Upworthy/videos/1189150597792463/?fref=nf

Google's Webmaster Guidelines: Breakdown of All Changes Made

It's time to get reading! Google has changed their webmaster guidelines. 

Here is one take on what the changes are: 

Google's Webmaster Guidelines: Breakdown of All Changes Made