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Month: January 2016

How Did GoDaddy Build Their Own Search Engine? A #MarketingNerds Exclusive Interview
In today’s special edition of Marketing Nerds, Executive Editor Kelsey Jones talks with GoDaddy‘s VP of Engineering, Charles Beadnall, and SVP of Domains, Mike McLaughlin, about some really cool stuff surrounding GoDaddy’s search engine, its effect on the company’s bottom line, and how it’s able to help their end users.

Here are a few transcribed excerpts from our discussion, but make sure to listen to the special podcast recording to hear everything:

GoDaddy’s Recommendation Engine

If you’ll rewind a couple of years, search was a much easier challenge in the domains business. There was a handful of what we call top-level domains that we’re all used to, com, biz, net, org—the Internet that we’re used to.

Starting a couple years ago, a couple of things were happening: One was that hundreds of new top-level domains—the extensions to the right of the dot—were about to be introduced into the global domain name system. With that, search was going to get a lot more complicated.

Number two; from a GoDaddy standpoint, we were basically a domestic company serving customers largely in the United States in English, and we were about to go global and start serving customers around the globe in different languages.

Number three; with well over 100 million .coms taken globally—today we sit here with nearly 300 million domain names taken across the planet in all the different top-level domains—getting the exact name you wanted was getting harder and harder. With that, we said, as the world’s largest seller of domain names, we have to make sure that we do a better job on behalf of our customers, who are typically tiny, tiny, little, small businesses just starting out, on being able to get the perfect name so they can get going on their online journey.

Identifying Specific Words and Phrases on GoDaddy’s Search Engine

The one other important point to make here is that this is not a traditional inverted index type of search, a la Google websearch or Bing. There is one category where having an inverted index is useful and that is in what’s called the domain aftermarket. These are domains people have purchased and they are basically back up for sale, whether it be in an auction or for a fixed price. But that’s a very small percentage of the aggregate purchase flow that we have and what the majority of consumers are purchasing. It’s an important part, but a smaller piece.

The majority of domains that are purchased are effectively new inventories. If it’s MissKelseyJones.com or whatever; that is inventory that didn’t exist until you bought it. Effectively, we are coming up with these domain names on the fly. Effectively, we looked at a lot of different ways that we could have solved the problem. We could have created all possibilities, 63-character strings in every possible top-level domain name and then created an inverted index on top of that. There are lots of different ways that we could have done this but we chose to use cheap compute instead, so we’re basically determining all this on the fly.

Now, how we come up with “toilet seats” and “toilets eats” is basically some of the rules that we have put in place and those come from. Effectively, it’s all machine learning. Some of it also comes from things such as dictionaries, but a lot of it, we look at the user behavior and basically are looking for signals that they are giving us as to what’s more valuable.

There are a lot of different examples of things like that. The “toilet seat” is one example. One is that we’re also getting concatenated strings sent to us by users. It could be toiletseats.com and you don’t know if it’s toilet seats or toilets eats so you’ve got to basically tokenize that, split it apart and then come up with alternatives based on that and we call that whole experience “name-spinning” or “suggestion”.

Another example of that is language detection. Another example of that would be identifying numerals and kind of incrementing on those. There are lots of things that we’re doing basically on the fly based on the string that you’ve provided us.

Dealing With Blacklisted Words and Term Replacements

There are terms that are simple dictionary synonyms that would not be appropriate. They’re archaic for the name of a business or the name of a product, which is typically what our users are coming to us for. We’ve spent quite a lot of time—machine learning and other methods—to come up with appropriate term replacement, which is a little bit different than just the pure kind of blacklist.

We have this unique data set, which is we have 15 years of search history from folks coming to GoDaddy and going and finding their domain names. With that it gives us a lot of insight into what people want and don’t want. We’ve spent a lot of time mining that data to understand the patterns of how people go about finding a name. That largely guides us and, from our standpoint, it’s core and it’s something that we’re lucky to have, as the largest retailer, as a proprietary data source.

Which Domains to Suggest and Display

[Machine-learned rules are] effectively creating a rank for a potential suggestion and we’re basing that ranking on a very large number of factors—everything from price to language, to term frequency, to popularity, etc. We’re generating tens of thousands of candidates for each and every search that you may type in. Some of those, many of them, aren’t available so we’re filtering on that but then it’s basically all about what we think will have most relevance for you.

Language and Location-Based Search

We have a pretty good signal in terms of the site that you came in on. It’s certainly not 100% but there are actually about four different factors that go into determining that, including the language that it came in as. That is a little bit problematic on its own because there are lots of, say, French terms in English and English terms in German and what not. That is a signal but it’s a lesser weighted one than some of the stronger location based ones.

How GTLDs Influenced GoDaddy’s Search Data and Algorithm

Our job is to try to put the best set of options, the most relevant set of options, in front of a user so that they can find the name that works best for them and get going on their journey online, which typically starts with a domain name and then follows on with website and email and then from there.

Now, with much-expanded inventory, it allows us to provide more selection and choice and availability to that end user. You’re just starting out, it’s 2016 now, and 120 million .coms are taken. You come to GoDaddy, you type in a term with a .com and odds are your first try is taken. We have to recover. From an e-commerce, search standpoint that’s a null search with a need for recovery and we need to give you a good set of options.

With the new GTLDs, now we can take that term, which might not be available on .com, and provide a really good set of semantically meaningful options in other new GTLDs. The availability and choice set just becomes a lot bigger and that’s great, and it’s good for the end customer.

It also allows customers who have an existing domain and site who might not have the exact .com that they wanted because it wasn’t available several years ago to now get a new GTLD and potentially forward it or use it as an alternative name that might again be considered a shorter or more memorable name than the one they originally came up with. We look at it as an expansion of availability and choice that’s only good for the end user.

We want to do whatever the end customer wants and whatever’s in their best interest so what you’ll typically find on a GoDaddy search result is a mix of our inventory, a mix of .coms—because .com still is far and away the most preferred name, at least in the US and much of the Western world—you’ll see alternatives of the traditional top-level domains of .net and .org, and then you’ll see some options for a new GTLD. So at least we’re exposing the customer to all the different options that they have.

What we then see in the search logs and how people actually interact with this is they might not have understood before that as an alternative to a .com if I’m running a bike store: .bike is available. You might find them migrate and then do a follow-on search for different .bike options. There’s an amount of discovery that happens through the process here and our goal is to facilitate that on behalf of the user.

The Effect of Better Search Engine on GoDaddy’s Bottom Line

Inevitably, better search is good for both our customer and for us. Domains are typically our first introduction to that customer. It’s usually the starting point for small businesses as they get going and we’re lucky to be at the very moment of inception—as they’re just thinking about getting started.

In the modern world, one of the first things you do when you have an idea is you go and bang on a registrar’s search box. Often, that’s GoDaddy’s search box, and you try to name and capture the essence of that idea, so we’re lucky to be very early on in that process and have that customer relationship really early in their life cycle—often before they’ve even incorporated or done any other kind of creative act.

With that, then, being able to get people through that first hurdle—which in our world is measured by a better conversion of that first act—that’s great. Now that allows us to have a customer relationship for that user to get started and then to grow with them as they move beyond a domain to get a website, get email, and then the services that you need as a small business to get started.

Buyer’s Journey and Behavior

There are different types of customers and so what we try to do is target the experience throughout based on what we know about you and what your activity has been. Someone who’s never been with us before comes in and buys a first domain most likely is a small business getting started—and after the domain the next obvious things typically are email and website in the natural progression of a user’s life cycle.

For folks who are buying 200 domains, typically that’s not the first time they’re doing it. They are often doing it either because they’re an investor or because they might be what we call a “web professional”, who is buying names on behalf of a client. Or they might be a marketing agency, which might have a client and need to have a portfolio of domain names.

There’s a bunch of different sub-segments that we serve, and as best we can, what we try to do is understand enough about each user and what their need state is to be able to provide the right set of services.

When is the Right Time to Build a Custom Search Engine?

First, if you can use something off the shelf, do it. It does take relatively experienced folks in an information retrieval niche to build this type of thing in the first place. But there are a lot of very large e-commerce companies that are moving down to Lucene and its progenies, Elasticsearch and Solr and what not.

If you can get away with that and it works and it meets your need, it’s open source, you can customize it, you can basically build all kinds of customizations into it and a number of media outlets have done that. That’s the high level.

In our case, as we kind of articulated up front, we’ve got a very unique and a very different search problem. The things we want to search don’t exist as such, so it’s a novel and different type of search and it’s something that we looked high and low for and it doesn’t exist. Nobody had built something exactly like this previously, at least to our knowledge. There we had a unique technical challenge and a pretty big business import in terms of building something that satisfies our customer needs. I think the marriage of those two caused us to build our own.

What’s Going on in the Domain Name Business

When we look at the business we’re in right now, the domain business is globally doing well.

What’s driving a lot of that is, as inevitably the rest of the world’s population is coming online, the small businesses of the world are effectively following their end customers and increasingly realizing their need for an online presence.

With that we just see this long, secular trend of small businesses coming online: starting with a domain; getting a site; getting a presence; and then having an ever-increasing set of needs as, effectively, being online has, even in the past several years, gone from just needing a domain and a website and an email to now having to be more sophisticated about social marketing and email marketing and finding customers wherever they may live around the web.

It’s a great space to be in, it’s a fun space to be in, and there’s a lot of opportunity in it still. When you look in the US, there are roughly 30 million small businesses. Only approximately half of them today actually have their own website.

Even in a market as mature as the United States where we’re 20-plus years past the advent of the modern worldwide web, still half of the small businesses in America don’t really have that really professional online presence—so a lot of opportunity is there.

Then you look internationally. There are over 200 million small businesses globally, and a very small percentage of them have found their way online yet. But their customers are going there en masse and they will follow. When you look at where we’re going with our business, obviously we’re following that trend and we expect that internationally we will continue to see a lot of growth in the coming years. A lot to be excited about in the domains business, but really what that reflects is a lot of excitement that we have for the global small business market.

To listen to this Marketing Nerds podcast with Charles Beadnall, Mike McLaughlin, and Kelsey Jones:
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Think you have what it takes to be a Marketing Nerd? If so, message Kelsey Jones on Twitter, or email her at kelsey [at] searchenginejournal.com.

Visit our Marketing Nerds archive to listen to other Marketing Nerds podcasts!

Source – SearchEngineJournal.com
January 28, 2016
How to Optimize Your Content for Google’s Rich Answer Box

You may have noticed that when searching for a term or asking a question on Google, you receive not only a list of search results, but also an informational box at the top of the page that displays a quick answer to your question or a description of your search term. This featured snippet is part of Google’s Rich Answer Box, which has been around a while, but is now becoming more prominent for quick answers, event listings, recipes, maps, and more.

The demand for fast, relevant content has rocketed due to an increase in mobile usage – a study by Microsoft found that the human attention span hasdecreased from 12 second to eight seconds in the last 13 years. In order to give users a quick and accurate answer to their search query, Google now provides a short snippet of relevant content that a user can quickly read without having to scroll through a lengthy article.

Here are a couple of examples where you can see that the content Google has chosen to show in its Answer Box is not always the top-ranking content in the search results:

Here, you can see Hubspot’s content has been featured in the Answer Box over Adobe’s, even though Adobe’s content currently ranks in position one.

In this example you can see that the description of “evergreen content” actually comes from Wordstream, which only ranks in fifth place for the term.

So how does Google decide which content to display in its Answer Boxes, and how can we optimize our content to give it the best chance of being featured?

Getting your content featured in Google’s Rich Answer Box is likely to become increasingly important moving forward, so here are six ways you can optimize your content to help it rank in “position zero”:

Identify Queries

The idea of the Answer Box is to save a user time when they are looking for a description, definition, or answer on Google. If your content focuses on easy topics that many other sites will have covered, then you are unlikely to be featured in the Answer Box unless you already hold a high SERP ranking. Try to identify more complex questions your audience is asking that could lead them to your site.

When carrying out keyword research, look for questions that you will be able to answer in great depth. Keyword Planner can be used to find a range of queries relevant to your industry—simply pick out your product category and include keywords such as “how”, “why,” and “where”.

This will provide you with a list of keyword ideas with further details about the average monthly searches and the competition:

Another good way to find queries around a certain keyword or phrase is to look at other suggestions that Google automatically generates when searching for a term. You can look at the drop down that appears when you start typing:

Or in the “Related Searches” box at the bottom of your search results:

Or, for some queries, you may see a “People also ask” box:

If you have access to a tool like BrightEdge, you can actually enter certain keywords and queries, and filter the results so they only show key phrases that don’t currently have a quick answer. This is a great way to target your content around questions that are currently unanswered within Google’s Rich Answer Box.

Directly Answer the Question

Whether you are providing a definition for a certain term or answering a query, you need to be clear cut with your content. As Google’s algorithm focuses on the intent of the user, it’s important you consider the different areas of possible intent when creating your content.

Start by using the query or key phrase in your headline, then explicitly answer the question somewhere in your content. Write your answer as a complete sentence near the top of your page, then use variations of your keyword or answer throughout the rest of your copy.

The example above from Content Marketing Institute highlights how easy it is to include the question in your title and then answer the question directly (as they have in the central quote), and follow up with a second variation of the answer.

Consider User Experience

It’s always important that your readers have a good experience on your site, but both the way your site is structured and how your content is formatted can be beneficial for Google and its users. Be holistic with your digital marketing and make sure you are creating a good mobile and desktop experience that can be seen throughout the entire user journey.

Make sure there are no roadblocks on your site that may cause a user to bounce off your content, and that everything you produce is clear and consistent. Structure your content using subheadings, paragraphs, and visuals, and use bullet-points and tables where relevant.

If you are creating content around a query best answered in list form, then make sure you use either ordered list tags (<ol>) or unordered list tags (<ul>) to highlight to Google what form the content is in.

Use Entities in Your Content

The Hummingbird update initially allowed Google to better understand and use entity data, and the Entity Recognition and Disambiguation Challengeexplained more about how the system works:

The objective of an Entity Recognition and Disambiguation (ERD) system is to recognize mentions of entities in a given text, disambiguate them, and map them to the entities in a given entity collection or knowledge base.

Entities are not the same as keywords; they are what keywords identify, and different keywords could be used to refer to the same entity. Entities can be personal (a name), geographical (a place), or topical (an object). Semantic search allows Google to work out the meaning behind different search queries, so it can provide a range of information and entities in its results. When you’re writing your content, make sure it’s clear which entities your content is describing by clearly using nouns, verbs, and names.

When Google introduced its Knowledge Graph, its first blog title on the topic “Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings” highlighted how SEO has fundamentally shifted its focus from “strings” to “things”—we no longer need to focus on “strings” of similar keywords, but on the “things” (entities) those keywords are identifying. This needs to be thought about every time you produce a piece of content and will help Google identify what your content is really about and whether it could be used in the Rich Answer Box.

AlchemyAPI is a useful, free tool that can detect entities and extract them from your text—if a tool can do this, then it’s likely Google can, too. By either entering a URL or uploading your text, you can analyze your content to find out exactly what topics your keywords and phrases are pointing to:

Include SEO Best Practices/Schema Markup

When creating on-site copy or optimizing content, it’s important to implement all the basic SEO techniques to ensure your content has the best chance of ranking and of being featured in Google’s Rich Answer Box. Use theme relevant cross-linking and make sure you include your key phrase or query in your header, meta data, alt tags, and URL structures.

Schema markup will also allow Google to identify semantic entities within the source code of your site, and therefore extract data from within your content to be used in its Answer Box. Sites with a clear semantic markup may be looked at preferentially when Google is finding information for its results.

There are many different types of markup that will produce Knowledge Graph-driven results, and you can find all the different schema options atSchema.org and Schema-Creator.org.

Key Takeaway

Optimizing content to be featured in Google’s Rich Answer Box is still a relatively new technique and there is still a lot of testing and analysis to be carried out around the various approaches and results. While many queries now have an Answer Box within Google’s search results, there are still a huge number of queries and key phrases that don’t. By understanding exactly what the user is looking for, and by tapping into more complex queries, you can understand which areas currently lack in-depth, relevant content and where your existing content can be further optimized to help fill a gap.

With Google’s Rich Answer Box now considered to be “position zero” on page one of Google’s search results, it’s a great place to have your content featured and will drive traffic to your site, increase brand awareness, and build your audience base. These simple tips should help you on your way to dominating Google’s Rich Answer Box with relevant content that directly answers a user’s query, and may ultimately drive them to your website.

Source – SearchEngineJournal.com

January 28, 2016
Amazon, Alibaba and Rakuten: who is winning the global ecommerce game?
Amazon has been an ecommerce powerhouse in the West, while its two Asian counterparts – Alibaba in China and Rakuten in Japan – have been growing rapidly. Should Amazon fear their entry into the global ecommerce market?

Like most U.S. companies who are leading the way in their own field, Amazon has been considered the number one ecommerce platform by many businesses worldwide.

While the ecommerce behemoth is wooing more and more non-Americans, it has two formidable competitors in Asia: Alibaba in China and Rakuten in Japan.

Alibaba is the biggest ecommerce platform in China, a market that is estimated by eMarketer to surpass the U.S. as the largest retail e-commerce region by 2017.

During Singles’ Day 2015, a Cyber Monday-like shopping festival, Alibaba topped global e-commerce sales records with $14.3 billion in gross merchandise volume.

Currently most of the company’s transactions occur in China but its chief executive (CEO) Jack Ma is hoping to change that with Alibaba’s high-profile initial public offering (IPO) that happened in 2014.

Rakuten, on the other hand, is the Japanese equivalent of Amazon. Its CEO Hiroshi Mikitani made English the company’s official language in 2010. Rakuten has been very aggressive in globalization, with acquisitions totaling around $4 billion to date.

Major deals include:
- $410 million for ebook and audiobook platform OverDrive in 2015
- $1 billion for U.S. shopping site Ebates in 2014
- $900 million for Cyprus-based mobile messaging app Viber in 2014
- $200 million for video site Viki in 2013
- $315 million for Canadian e-book company Kobo in 2011
- $39.1 million for European online retailer Play.com in 2011
- $250 million for Japanese e-commerce site Buy.com in 2010
- $425 million for U.S. performance-based marketing solutions LinkShare in 2005
The global expansion of Alibaba and Rakuten raises a question: can Amazon win the ecommerce game outside of the U.S. and Europe?

An open platform versus a closed system

The three ecommerce giants are built upon different business models. Amazon is a closed system where the company handles everything for merchants, including warehouse management, logistics and customer service.

In comparison, Alibaba and Rakuten are taking an open approach where they provide a shopping platform and payment gateway but business owners need to manage inventory, logistics and customer service by themselves.

“Amazon has an advantage over Alibaba with its closed system that guarantees consistent user experience, high-quality customer service, global scale, mature infrastructure and trusted relationship with existing online shoppers,” explains Bessie Lee, founder and CEO of China-based investment management consultancy withinlink.

But with its IPO in 2014, Alibaba started collaborating with more third-party cross-border logistics companies in various free trade zones in mainland China and Hong Kong, which benefits brands that are looking to enter China, Lee adds.

“Logistic-wise, Alibaba’s setup can save international brands a lot of hassle,” she says.

Rakuten is also an open platform. But compared to Alibaba and Amazon, Rakuten is membership-based and more loyalty-driven by offering consumers direct benefits through cash back and Rakuten Super Points that can be exchanged for offline and online shopping or other experiences.

“Rakuten’s focus for 2016 is to further build an open platform online marketplace, which is about offering access to a rich diversity of [products] curated for the individual consumer, providing an entertaining, personalized experience,” a source familiar with Rakuten, who wants to keep anonymous, tells ClickZ.

Through mergers and acquisitions, Rakuten already operates in many markets including the U.S., Canada, Brazil and many European countries.

“In some ways, Rakuten is more advanced [than Alibaba] in integrating its disparate investments, such as rewarding members when professional sports teams win,” says Mark Tanner, managing director of China Skinny, a marketing strategy and research company.

“And Rakuten’s investment in Viber gives the company a potential for social commerce, which is an advantage that Alibaba doesn’t have,” he adds.

Amazon should be aware, but not afraid

For Alibaba and Rakuten, Western markets are a hard nut to crack. Alibaba’s CEO Jack Ma made no secret of his desire to grow the company’s presence in the U.S..

In 2014, Alibaba teamed up with New York-based social shopping marketplace OpenSky to create a boutique consumer ecommerce site called 11 Main. But Alibaba sold its share in 11 Main just a year after its debut.

While Rakuten is still barely known by consumers in the U.S. and the U.K..

For the time being, Amazon is still the best ecommerce option for many international merchants thanks to its closed ecosystem. Because foreign brands who do not have established distribution, logistics and marketing teams overseas will have to struggle with the lack of resources if they partner with either Alibaba or Rakuten.

A Quora user even described Alibaba’s international marketplace a “horrible structure.”

“Alibaba does not really target startups from overseas in the way Amazon does. Additional costs and different time zones for support make it hard for Alibaba to compete with Amazon,” explains Tanner from China Skinny.

However, international brands should not neglect Alibaba or Rakuten given these two companies’ large user base in their local markets where Amazon does not have the same scale. That’s why Macy’s signed a deal with Alibaba last year as the first U.S. department store to join the e-commerce conglomerate’s online shopping mall for international brands, Tmall Global.

While in Japan, one in four online purchases takes place on Ichiba (Rakuten Marketplace), according to Bloomberg.

Both Alibaba and Rakuten have helped rival Amazon make money, as well. Amazon in China has opened a store on Alibaba’s business-to-consumer (B2C) platform, while consumers who sign up for Rakuten-owned Ebates can browse deals on Amazon and get cash back on their purchases. Ebates gets a small commission.

Final thoughts

Asian ecommerce conglomerates like Alibaba and Amazon are expanding their businesses at a global scale but at the same time they are going through some pains.

“We’ve seen that with eBay and Amazon who have struggled to make any headway as they do not understand the consumer as well as the savvy local companies,” says Tanner.

“While Amazon does not need to fear in its established local markets, Asian giants will certainly give it a run for its money in emerging markets,” he adds.

For the time being, Amazon is winning the global ecommerce game, while Alibaba and Rakuten are leading the way in their country. But as the two Asian companies are optimizing their platforms and their business models are more widely accepted, they could be able to beat Amazon.

“It will take Alibaba a long time to establish what Amazon has achieved today,” says withinlink’s Lee.

“If Alibaba decides to link its ecommerce platform with any other services that it has acquired overseas, Alibaba will blow international shoppers’ minds with the platform’s openness (all information is available to shoppers), variety of products and price advantage. Then Alibaba will be a threat to Amazon,” she adds.

Source – ClickZ.com
January 26, 2016
How do Facebook’s ads drive search traffic?

How do Facebook’s ads drive search traffic?

According to a new study released by Facebook this past December, Cross-Channel Planning: Making Search Work Harder, Facebook’s ads do drive search traffic – sometimes.

This study summarized 23 “conversion lift” studies – which are Facebook’s bid to provide the digital ad business with a more holistic alternative to traditional last-click attribution – from July to September 2015.

Participants in the study came from a variety of consumer sectors – including automotive, financial, and travel – with spend above $10,000 a month that were also willing to share traffic and conversion data with Facebook.

Here are highlights, plus my own take on what the data means.

Only one in four campaigns sees any Facebook-search effect

A mere 25 percent of campaigns studied actually saw any statistically significant increase in search referral traffic.

Across the entire group, search lift in search referral traffic was 1.8 percent with a standard deviation of six percent.

Does this mean that three out of four search marketers are wasting their time buying Facebook clicks? Possibly. Unfortunately, the study doesn’t say much about this high failure rate.

Was the lack of search referral traffic due to the nature of the business, the campaigns, the ads themselves, or some other unknown variable?

Obviously, some brands are more likely to drive search referral traffic than others, so it would have been more helpful if Facebook had revealed additional information about the profile of each business.

Also, if other marketing mix models are any guide to interpreting results, there may be a requirement of a very high investment in social advertising in order to overcome the background noise from other marketing and drive measurable search lift.

My teams see a much tighter correlation between paid media outside search and lift in search volume when the display/social/video budget is significant in relation to search.

Facebook can depress paid search CPCs

Even with the foregoing question unanswered, it’s clear that some brands can use Facebook to achieve some efficiency in paid search. Facebook’s data shows that some marketers can use Facebook to drive down paid search cost per clicks (CPCs).

“When Facebook paid media was introduced into the marketing mix, consumers were more likely to search for branded keywords and in some cases less likely to search for unbranded keywords.

For (one advertiser) 97 percent of the incremental paid search visits were in the form of branded keywords. As a result, we saw that Facebook ads make search ads 1.8 percent more efficient, largely as a result of this change in consumer search behavior.”

My guess is that to a lesser extent the brand created through social (and other forms of paid media) also increases the click-through rate (CTR) and therefore the quality score of generic keywords, resulting in a cost savings.

“For brands in Automotive, Financial Services, and Retail, we found that Facebook paid media caused statistically significant lift in lower-funnel KPIs these advertisers care about, including online and offline sales. Lift in these KPIs varied widely, ranging from flat to 79 percent. For one large retailer, the majority of this sales lift came from increased basket size.”

If the study data is valid, it will likely be celebrated by search marketers, who are always looking for a way to reduce click costs.

Why this matters

Facebook’s study is intended to put the company in a better position to argue that any increased share of budget it receives will be offset by lower CPCs – at least among those industry verticals buying lots of unbranded keywords. Only time will tell if this argument is successful in terms of prying loose more budget for Facebook campaigns.

What is clear – at least in my mind – is the idea that many marketers who’ve not yet experimented with Facebook paid media should be testing the effects of paid social spend and determining for themselves what the effects are on CPC. And more importantly, return on investment and return on advertising spend.

As you likely know from reading my ClickZ columns, I’m a big believer in the power of Facebook Custom Audiences. I have seen it used to great effect and believe it to be the wave of the future, along with similar products now offered by Twitter and Google as well.

It’s also critical for traditional search marketers to begin to regard paid social with more respect than it’s been traditionally accorded and coordinate appropriately. Copy, creative, campaign timing, and messaging should be aligned across Google, Facebook, and any other platforms required for reaching one’s target audience.

For some, measuring the direct effects of Facebook on search marketing KPIs may prove a challenge, but that’s only an argument for making sure that the marketing models are sophisticated enough to take full account of the real relationship between social and search that Facebook’s study points to.

There are also really powerful ways of targeting in Facebook using both custom audiences and other targeting parameters in conjunction using the Audience Overlap feature, which I’ll cover in the future column.

Source – ClickZ.com

January 26, 2016
Super Bowl 50 Advertisers: These Brands Are Ready To Play The Commercial Game

See which brands will be airing ads on the most-watched sports night of the year, along with their campaigns, teaser ads and more.

On February 7, two NFL teams will take the field to battle it out on the most-watched sports night of the year, but marketers know where the real competition is happening: the Super Bowl Ads!

Super Bowl is a whole lot more than football; it is the ultimate advertising arena. This year, a select number of brands are spending upwards of $5 million to reserve their spot during the game — making a play to win the minds and hearts (and laughs) of the biggest ad audience available.

To prepare for game day, Marketing Land is keeping its own scorecard of which brands are competing and what they’re planning for game day.

We’ll continue to update this list as more information is made available from the advertisers and more ads are released.

Also, be sure to check out our 2016 HashtagBowl, where we track pre-game and post-game social media visibility for this year’s Super Bowl TV commercials: Game On: The 2016 Marketing Land #HashtagBowl Is Coming Soon.

(Jump to particular advertisers and all of the latest campaign details using our alphabetical index: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z)

Acura

Brand Category: Automotive
Agency: Mullen Lowe

Avocados From Mexico

Brand Category: Food
Campaign: “Always There”
Buy: 30-second spot
Agency: GSD&M

Bud Light

Teaser Ad: Shown above. Official Ad: Unreleased.

Brand Category: Beverage

Campaign: Bud Light says its new campaign is more than just a Super Bowl ad, it’s a, “…completely new communication of what Bud Light stands for — inclusivity, positivity and fun.” Playing on this year’s election season, the brand’s teaser ad features Amy Schumer and Seth Rogen rallying for the “Bud Light Party.” The campaign’s launch will begin with its Super Bowl ad and continue with national spots and digital creative to be released throughout 2016.

Buy: 30-second spot

Agency: Wieden+Kennedy

Recent Coverage: The “Bud Light Party” Super Bowl 50 Ad Gets Political With Amy Schumer & Seth Rogen

Budweiser

Brand Category: Beverage
Agency: Anomaly

Buick

Brand Category: Automotive
Buy: 30-second spot
Agency: Leo Burnett Detroit

Butterfinger

Teaser Ad: Shown above. Official Ad: To be released February 7.

Brand Category: Food

Campaign: “The brand will use its spot to launch a new brand message, Bolder Than Bold, inspired by the inherent boldness of its crispety, crunchety, unapologetically in-your-face candy bar.”

Buy: 30-second spot

Agency: WPP / Santo

Official Campaign Hashtag: #BolderThanBold

Recent Coverage: Super Bowl 50 Advertisers Take The Field Early: Wix & Butterfinger Announce Campaigns

Coca-Cola

Brand Category: Beverage

Colgate

Teaser Ad: Shown above.

Brand Category: CPG

Campaign: Colgate’s “Save Water” campaign will encourage viewers to turn off the water while they brush their teeth: “Brushing with the faucet running, wastes up to four gallons of water. That’s more than many people around the world have in a week.”

Buy: 30-second spot

Agency: Y&R Peru

Official Campaign Hashtag: #EveryDropCounts

Doritos

Teaser Ads: Shown Above. Official Ad: February 7.

Brand Category: Food

Campaign: This will be the final year for the brand to host its “Crash the Super Bowl” campaign, a contest that invited fans to produce their own Super Bowl ads for the chance to have their spots aired on game day. After receiving nearly 4,500 entries, the brand selected the three finalists posted above. Viewers can vote up until January 31 for the ad they want to see aired during the Super Bowl.

Campaign Hashtag: #CrashTheSuperBowl

Heinz

Brand Category: Food
Campaign: Sharing very few details, Kraft’s Heinze brand announced it would be returning as a Super Bowl advertiser with a campaign that will feature multiple products: “Everyone knows and loves the great taste of Heinz® Ketchup, and we wanted to introduce the world to the rest of the great tasting family in a campaign called #MeettheKetchups.”
Buy: 30-second spot
Official Campaign Hashtag: #MeettheKetchups

Honda

Brand Category: Automotive

Campaign: Honda intends for its upcoming Super Bowl campaign to act as a launching pad for its all-new 2017 Honda Ridgeline pickup truck, with extended promotions across several platforms, screens and internet properties.

Buy: 60-second spot

Agency: RPA

Recent Coverage: More Super Bowl 50 Advertisers: PayPal & Honda Gear Up, While GoDaddy Takes The Bench

Hyundai

Brand Category: Automotive

Kia

Brand Category: Automotive

Campaign: Releasing very few details around the campaign, a Kia representative told AdWeek: “Christopher Walken — and a very colorful sock — will add pizzazz to Kia Motors’ 60-second Super Bowl commercial for the all-new 2016 Optima midsize sedan,” a Kia representative told AdWeek, “The new ad will continue to spotlight the next-generation Optima as the vibrant alternative for those determined not to blend in.”

Buy: 60-second spot

Agency: David & Goliath

LG Electronics

Teaser Ad: Shown above. Official Ad: To be released February 7.

Brand Category: Tech

Campaign: LG’s debut appearance as a Super Bowl advertiser will include Liam Neeson promoting the brand’s OLED TV. Mimicking Neeson’s usual action/thriller films, the 15-second “Man from the Future” teaser ad was released along with the announcement of its #OLEDisHere Twitter sweepstakes where participants can tweet LG’s campaign hashtag for a chance to win an OLED TV.

Agency: Ridley Scott’s RSA Films

Official Campaign Hashtag: #ManFromTheFuture & #OLEDisHere

Recent Coverage: LG Enlists Liam Neeson To Star In Its Debut Super Bowl 50 Ad: #ManFromTheFuture

Michelob Ultra

Brand Category: Beverage
Agency: Wieden+Kennedy

Mini USA (BMW)

Brand Category: Automotive
Buy: 30-second spot
Agency: Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners

Mountain Dew

Brand Category: Beverage
Campaign: In a release announcing four new flavors for its MTN DEW KICKSTART energy drink, the brand said it would be returning to the Super Bowl: “For the first time since 2000, Mountain Dew will return to the Super Bowl with a hilarious TV ad that combines fan-favorite ad elements and is guaranteed to have fans talking.”
Agency: BBDO New York

PayPal

Brand Category: Finance
Buy: 45-second spot
Agency: Crispin Porter & Bogusky
Recent Coverage: More Super Bowl 50 Advertisers: PayPal & Honda Gear Up, While GoDaddy Takes The Bench

Pepsi

Brand Category: Beverage

Pokemon

Brand Category: Gaming
Agency: Omelet
Official Campaign Hashtag: #Pokemon20

QuickBooks

Brand Category: Finance

Campaign: Intuit’s QuickBook’s brand will revisit its “Small Business Big Game” campaign, inviting small businesses to enter a contest where they can win an all-expense paid 30-second Super Bowl spot produced by the brand’s ad agency.

Buy: 30-second spot

Agency: RPA

Shock Top

https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=_WY1078xvvc

Teaser Ad: Shown above.

Brand Category: Beverage

Campaign: Anheuser Busch brand Shock Top will make its debut appearance as a Super Bowl advertiser in a spot featuring actor and comedian T.J. Miller. In a 90-second teaser ad, Miller claims Shock Top’s ad will be, “…the greatest Super Bowl commercial of all time.” Shock top VP Jake Kirsch told AdWeek that the brand chose Miller because of his irreverence and wit. “We tell people to ‘Live Life Unfiltered,’ we’re an unfiltered beer, and T.J. is at the top of the list of people like that,” said Kirsch.

Agency: Wieden+Kennedy

Recent Coverage: Shock Top Says Its Super Bowl 50 Ad Will Be “The Greatest Super Bowl Commercial Of All Time”

Skittles

Brand Category: Food

Campaign: Skittle’s Super Bowl 50 campaign will star Aerosmith front-man Steven Tyler, the first Wrigley ad (Skittle’s parent company) to feature a celebrity.

Buy: 60-second spot

Agency: DDB

Snickers

Brand Category: Food

Squarespace

Brand Category: Tech

SunTrust Bank

Brand Category: Finance

Campaign: Lighting the Way to Financial Well-Being

Buy: 30-second spot

Agency: StrawberryFrog

Recent Coverage: SunTrust Bank Announces Its Debut Appearance As Super Bowl Advertiser

Taco Bell

Brand Category: Food

Campaign: Taco Bell says it will be using its Super Bowl spot to unveil its newest menu item. The campaign was launched in the brand’s usual fun way, issuing a press release with most of the campaign details redacted.

Buy: 30-second spot

Agency: Deutsch LA

Recent Coverage: Taco Bell To Reveal Its Next Big Menu Item At Super Bowl 50… We Think

Toyota

Brand Category: Automotive
Campaign: Toyota’s Super Bowl 50 campaign will feature the brand’s hybrid Prius model.
Buy: 60-second spot
Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi LA

TurboTax

Teaser Ads: Shown above. Official Ad: To be released February 7.

Brand Category: Finance

Campaign: It doesn’t take a genius to do your taxes.

Buy: 30-second spot

Agency: Wieden+Kennedy

Recent Coverage: TurboTax Super Bowl 50 Ad Campaign Proves It Doesn’t Take A Genius To Do Your Taxes

WeatherTech

Brand Category: CPG
Buy: 30-second spot
Agency: Pinnacle Advertising

Wix

Teaser Ads: Shown above. Official Ad: To be released February 4.

Campaign: Developed by DreamWorks Animation, the same studio behind the animated “Kung Fu Panda” film franchise, Wix’s Super Bowl campaign features characters from the “Kung Fu Panda” movies.

Brand Category: Technology

Agency: DreamWorks Animation

Supplementary campaigns/channels: According to Wix, the #StartStunning campaign will include made-for-web content and social media activations. It has also launched www.StartStunning.com, a site dedicated to the campaign. The brand will also be employing YouTube’s new Real-Time ads as part of its Super Bowl Campaign.

Official Campaign Hashtag: #StartStunning

Recent Coverage: Wix Drops Its First Super Bowl 50 Teaser Ad Featuring “Kung Fu Panda” Characters

Source – MarketingLand.com

January 25, 2016
Is Your Paid Search Account Leaking Money? The Importance Of Query Mapping
It’s time to dig below the surface of your PPC account to see if relevant search terms are wasting money. Columnist Amy Bishop shows what to look for and how to use the data to your benefit!

There’s never a bad time to look for efficiencies within your account. Of course, there are the obvious things to look for: keyword bids, dayparting, geography and device performance and so on, but sometimes inefficiencies stem from issues below the surface.

One of the ways I like to dig into an account’s structural and economic health is by taking a look at query mapping.

By that I mean filtering through the search queries to see which ad groups and keywords queries are being paired with and subsequently adding negatives to ensure that queries are matched most appropriately. (I’ve heard query mapping called by other names such as negative keyword sculpting, negative keyword funneling and keyword mapping. I use these terms interchangeably.)

Query mapping isn’t really a new concept, but a lot of advertisers aren’t familiar with it and/or don’t see the value in what might seem like tedious work. The most common anti-query-mapping arguments that I hear are:
1. It’s time consuming.
2. The engines do a good job of matching keywords.
I don’t entirely disagree with either of the arguments above. I don’t find query mapping to be particularly time-intensive, but it does require some time — as does any other optimization. The engines do a generally decent job of matching queries to terms, but they aren’t perfect, as you’ll quickly see if you review your query mapping.

But the bottom line is this: If you don’t partake in query mapping, your account could be wasting money.

Performance Gaps

The art of keyword mapping is great for taking terms that are already performing and pushing them to perform a little bit better.

Take a look at the chart below. This chart includes actual numbers, although the search queries, ad group names and campaign names have been changed for the sake of anonymity.

The search term “pink puppy collar” is matching to keywords in two ad groups: Puppy Collars General and Puppy Collars – Pink. Why does this matter? It matters because if you look at the conversion rate and the CPA, you’ll notice that they vary pretty widely.

Unsurprisingly, the keyword performs much better within the Puppy Collars – Pink ad group. The ad copy in that ad group is very specific to the query, and it delivers users to a highly relevant landing page — whereas the other ad group is more generic, with generic ad copy and landing pages. The generic ad group is meant to grab less-specific queries.

Without any changes in the account, the ad group Puppy Collars General would likely continue to grab the lion’s share of the traffic for the search term “pink puppy collar.”

However, since it performs better in the Pink ad group, I added it as a negative in the General ad group so that it would push the traffic to the Pink ad group. In this case, the keyword “pink puppy collar” already existed in the Puppy Collars – Pink ad group — but if it hadn’t, I would add it.

The Keyword Is Paused, But The Query Remains

Part of growing an account means testing and adding new keywords, but those keywords don’t always work out. The problem is that sometimes when you pause that keyword, the corresponding query will just begin to match to a different keyword instead, which means that you’re still getting that poor traffic — even though you didn’t intend to.

(As noted in the previous example, the data below is real but the ad group name, campaign name, and search terms have been changed for the sake of anonymity.)

In this situation, the term “purple puppy sweater” was coming through the Puppy Sweaters ad group and mapping to the best appropriate keyword; however, it wasn’t performing very well. The keyword had been paused, but the term continued to come through a different keyword. It hadn’t spent much before it was caught and added as an exact match negative, but without having reviewed the search term report, it could’ve continued to spend money at an exorbitant CPA.

Isolating Keyword Performance

Ensuring that poor search queries aren’t continuing to seep into the account is a pretty big benefit in itself, but there are additional benefits to negative keyword mapping.

A major benefit is that you can see a truer snapshot of keyword performance. In the first example that I used above, you might not have expected the keyword “pink puppy collar” to be a very valuable keyword. After all, it had only driven about six conversions. After looking at the search term report, though, you could easily see that keyword has a lot of potential.

The query “pink puppy collar” may also have been dragging down the performance of the modified broad keyword in the general ad group that it was mapping to, even though it was driving conversions; the CPA isn’t necessarily favorable.

To truly isolate keyword performance, it’s important to review query-to-keyword mapping, as opposed to query-to-ad group mapping.

Other Use Cases For Negative Keyword Sculpting

Query mapping is important for all of the reasons above, if not just for the pure and simple fact that it can help you to ensure that you’re putting your best (and most relevant) foot forward with ads and landing pages. But there are a few other situations where negative keyword sculpting is important.

If you build out campaigns or ad groups by match type, negatives should be added to make sure that the appropriate query maps to the best possible keyword. Otherwise, the value of your match type structure is essentially nullified.

Also, if you have dynamic search campaigns, you’d likely want to do some keyword sculpting to ensure that you aren’t robbing Peter to pay Paul. DSAs are great for picking up queries that might be missing in your account, but they’ll also compete with your regular search campaigns if you don’t add negatives to ensure that they don’t.

Last but not least, query mapping can be incredibly valuable within shopping campaigns, but that’s a whole post in itself. Luckily for you, Kirk Williams has already written said post and you can (should)check it out here.

Final Thoughts

It’s usually a good idea to start by reviewing which queries are mapping to multiple ad groups and resolve those issues first. Then you can go through and begin to get more granular by looking at which queries are mapping to which keywords. This is extra valuable if you have different destination URLs for different keywords, but even if not, it’s still valuable to isolate keyword performance.

If you haven’t reviewed your query mapping before, you might be a little surprised to see how many queries you have that are mapping to multiple ad groups, and it may even lead to some small structural changes, such as ad group buildouts. You’ll tend to find that the more frequently you review, the less time-intensive the task will become over time.

Plus, as this becomes top-of-mind, there are a lot of great opportunities to do so at the outset. If you have a generic ad group, it’s good to add the descriptors that make up your more specific ad groups as negative terms to help funnel terms to the most appropriate ad group. Still, as your account grows, you’ll likely continue to find some to be added ad hoc as you review the reports.

As with any other account changes, I always suggest monitoring performance after making optimizations. In situations like the first example above, we’re inclined to believe that the keyword will perform better if forced to map to the most relevant ad group (and with good reason), but we can never be completely sure until we see how it performs after the negative is added.

Keyword mapping can take a bit of time, but the return on time invested can be more than a little valuable.

Source – SearchEngineLand.com
January 25, 2016
4 Content-Marketing Methods to Stay Above Your Competition

Promoting irrelevant content to your customer base is as useless as bringing a knife to a gunfight. The question is no longer whether targeted content is a competition worth entering, but how to bring home the gold.

With 86 percent of buyers “frequently” using mobile phones to access business-related content, it’s no wonder marketers and publishers are leaving their pay-per-click and display tactics in the closet and opting for the gold medal of all advertising methods: content marketing.

Related: 7 Steps to Finally Master Content Promotion in 2016

Here are some of the methods being used by winning companies:

1. Leveraging influencers

Influencer marketing is the force of nature shaking the online marketing world. There are two things to know when utilizing influencer-based marketing: it’s expensive and it works. With that said, choosing the right influencer takes much more than a bit of YouTube browsing. Successful influencer marketing doesn’t end once a video goes live. It is important to follow up with comments and viewer queries across your channels, as well as the influencer’s.

Recommended app: Mention allows brands to identify the best influencers for their brand and, with tools such as the influencer scorer, to know the amount of traction his or her brand will offer. The Mention dashboard also allows for you to connect with users directly.

2. Making it move

Digital storytelling should be as engaging and fluid as your content. Having a compelling user experience is exactly what your brand needs to draw your customer in and retain them. Content should be moving with your customer and enhancing their online customer journey.

Interactive content is also a highly useful way for testing audiences’ online preferences, allowing for brands to elevate the content they curate.

Recommended app: Apester allows brands to engage using personalized experiences such as quizzes and interactive content.

Related: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Online Marketers

3. Creating for your customer

A surprising 61 percent of consumers are more likely to buy from a company that delivers personal content that is specific to their wants and needs, according to Custom Content Council. Being that content has such an impact on conversion and retention, having an awareness of trending topics and industry keywords is a great way of understanding what your customer is searching for online.

It’s crucial to remember that content should be targeted to your customer’s needs, not your own. While self promotion and PR are huge forces in marketing, giving information to your clients with no strings attached is the best way to organically reach your customer base and keep them for good. By knowing your customers’ personas and breaking down their pain points, you can adapt your content to your target customer and create deeper connections.

At the same time, if you are truly creating content for your customer, it should never be a one-way street. Instead, your content should be a catalyst for a dialogue. To make your content genuinely useful, encourage your users to add their own insights. This not only enriches the content itself, but it also empowers them to become loyal users.

Recommended app: Popular sites such as EW.com use Spot.IM’s social sidebar to make such conversations easy and simple.

4. Letting the journey drive content

The competition for outstanding content begins with a keen understanding of the customer journey, so that your brand can improve it. By creating a road map for this epic, you can position your content to tell a consistent story — one that individually addresses each action and motivation of your customer base. Much of the content story can be boiled down to smart planning and a well-devised content calendar.

Recommended app: This one I haven’t tried yet, but searching through many blogs I’ve found DivvyHQ to be highly recommended. With it, you are able to plan and manage your calendar on one dashboard, allowing you to be ready for your customers’ journeys. Remember that the customer journey isn’t necessarily linear, but is constantly in flux.

Source – Entrepreneur.com

January 22, 2016
How Your Business Can Copy the Marketing Strategies of the Fortune 500
We’re so used to seeing the big brands. We see their ad campaigns and outputs so often that we sometimes forget something really obvious: How did these big companies become big?

Related: With Orgying Models and Public Breastfeeding, Are Equinox’s Latest Ads a Desperate Ploy or Pure Genius?

Sure, many of them had visionary leaders. Some even had massive marketing budgets. Some just had a few lucky strokes. But what about their marketing? The world’s most successful brands work hard and spend big to achieve their marketing goals.

And the fact that these companies are so enormous makes it important for them to work harder than ever at that marketing.

Obviously, no small business can copy the exact marketing moves of these brands; however, we can adopt their strategies on a smaller scale. Here are four such strategies that you can start using right away in your small business marketing plan.

1. Coca-Cola has kept its brand identity and product consistent for over 130 years.

Coca-Cola is the world’s most well-known brand. Its product is in every country and on every continent and reaches millions of consumers around the clock. But this reach doesn’t come cheap: Coca-Cola spendsan estimated $4.3 billion on marketing and advertising alone. With a budget like that, you can do almost anything you want to do.

But rather than make radical moves, Coca-Cola has worked hard to stay the same. Its emblematic marketing features and products have changed very little in the company’s long history. Why does this matter?

As North Star Marketing has observed in question form:

The difference between a good brand and a great brand? Consistency.

Coca-Cola’s consistency is communicated in its iconic logo and its soft drink’s familiar taste. The company has paved the way for global domination.

Now, you may not have a single product such as Coca-Cola, but you can still practice rock-solid consistency. Many business owners are too quick to run after the shiny balls in marketing: Every so often they’ll add shiny tricks and ad hoc alterations to their marketing scheme in hopes of renewing their image and increasing their revenue.

But maybe there’s some wisdom in stability and dogged determination.

2. Apple satisfies the cravings of a passionate tribe.

Another of the world’s most famous brands is Apple. What is its marketing strategy? Apple created a movement.

This didn’t happen by accident. Everything about the company’s marketing and advertising produced visions of world-changing experiences. It adorned this vision with unprecedented technology and mind-blowing innovation.

Whether or not Apple’s products live up to the hype doesn’t really matter. What matters is that the company created the hype and turned ordinary citizens into a tribe of frenetic fans. How many times have you heard someone say, “Yeah, I’m a Microsoft fanboy,” or “I buy every new product that Microsoft produces” or “I waited in line for 12 hours to get my hands on a copy of Windows 7″?

Probably never, and it is unlikely that you ever will. But, with Apple?Definitely. Apple founded a tribe.

Can you? The answer is, “Of course!” even if your customer base isn’t as large or your product as expensive. Any brand can create raving fans through a few simple strategic mindsets:
- Create an awesome product.
- Deliver unparalleled customer experiences.
- Rinse and repeat.
Related: 4 Millennial Marketing Tips From Taylor Swift

3. Colgate publishes top-notch information on oral health for its customers’ benefit.

You’ve probably used Colgate toothpaste before. Maybe you even used it this morning!

But Colgate doesn’t merely make toothpaste. It imparts oral-care education to the masses. It has an Oral Care Center that is packed with user-friendly information, and engaging videos that provide all sorts of preventative care how-tos.

Obviously, this type of content makes complete and logical sense for a toothpaste company. But it’s interesting to discover how Colgate’s technique can be applied to small businesses.

The company is doing content marketing here, plain and simple. Instead of merely shoving its products down customers’ throats (or mouths), Colgate is giving information.

Any small business can do the same thing: Identify your target audience members. Understand their needs. Deliver the kind of content that they want. Simple.

4. Starbucks takes social media to a whole new level.

Starbucks has a lot going for it in the marketing arena.

But when it comes to social strategy, Starbucks is an absolute genius.

Some 80 percent of the Fortune 500 companies are active on Twitter and Facebook, but Starbucks takes this activity to a whole new level. Let’s take just one channel that the coffee company dominates and consider a few facts:
- Starbucks makes smart use of gifs and videos in its Twitter feed.
- Nearly every tweet has a custom image.
- Outright marketing is slim and hard to notice.
- Starbucks tweets back to its customers with emojis and full messages.
- Oh, and its response time is insane.
- Starbucks publishes custom infographics just for Twitter.
- Starbucks keeps a pulse on popular trends and tweets about them.
- Starbucks dominates the hashtag world and owns several unique ones.
Clearly, Starbucks has a killer Twitter strategy. And so can you. It’s not hard to dominate Twitter. It might be hard to gain 11.1 million followers, but you don’t need millions of followers. You just need active and outstanding engagement with your followers.

It’s a marketing strategy that works.

Conclusion

Maybe you’re not Apple. Maybe you’re not Coca-Cola. Maybe that’s okay.

Marketing power doesn’t flow from big budgets, 130-year-old brands or even Steve Jobs.

As Roger Martin explained in the Harvard Business Review:

Good marketing and good strategy are both about making choices that build and maintain a particular set of capabilities that enable the company to outperform its competitors.

In other words, successful marketing depends on successful strategizing. By observing the marketing strategies of the world’s most successful businesses, we can learn to implement their marketing moves on a smaller scale.

You can produce the same red-hot marketing sizzle by embracing the strategies of the big boys.

What Fortune 500 marketing strategies do you think would be most effective in your small business?

Source – Entrepreneur.com
January 22, 2016
Keyword Research in 2016
The Internet changes rapidly and the trends people follow change constantly, which means every business needs to be keeping an eye on which keywords continue to work for them and which don’t.

To clarify, you can’t do keyword research once and be done. Keywords need to be continually reviewed and maintained to keep up in 2016.

Where to Start

An obvious answer is to begin with what your customers are looking for, but that isn’t enough. In today’s semantic world you also need zone in on the words and phrases different age groups, demographics, and regions are using.

How people speak and how they search are different, so you have to think outside the box a bit for desktop, mobile, and voice search. Think about the products and/or services you sell, the way they are described and the categories they fit in. How do you think different demographics are searching for these things?

Take this information and use available SEO tools to see if you are on the right path. When you use Google Search Console (formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools), you will be able to see a wide variety of data about your domain, including a set of the search queries that people have used to find your site. Here you can gain some insight into how optimization strategies are working and which keywords you should be targeting more.

Find Related Keywords

There are several tools we use to get a complete picture of the possible keywords we should target for ourselves and our clients. We use multiple tools to help us create the right keyword list for optimization, ads, content and social media. Here are the tools we use the most:
- AuthorityLabs has the Now Provided report which integrates your Google Analytics data, combining rankings, volume, and competition data to highlight important keyword opportunities you may be missing out on. They also offer a competition analysis report that provides keyword rankings for the top competitors you want to keep an eye on.
- The Google Keyword Research Tool is part of Google AdWords and can help identify more than just commercial keywords so that you can reach potential customers while they are in the consideration phase of the buying process. You can also get local keyword data from this tool that will help with the targeting and marketing.
- SEMrush offers organic SEO keyword data for sites and competitors, allowing you to analyze your competitors’ ad copy and keywords, see keywords in multinational and multilingual environments, and get long-tail keyword data.
- Spyfu can be very helpful when it comes to researching the competition. You can enter your own site URL and select the ‘Competitors’ tab and it will show you a list of competitor sites related to yours. Check out their sites and see what keywords they are focusing on and which marketing strategies they are using.
Want to be a Pro at Keyword Research?

For detailed, how-to information on how to do keyword research from start to finish, including how to maintain your data and how to use all the tools we mentioned like a pro, check out KeywordCourse.com. It is a free course emailed straight to your inbox with the step-by-step information you need to ensure your keyword strategies are solid for 2016 and beyond.

Source – SearchEngineJournal.com
January 21, 2016
7 Ways to Find Better Content Ideas
The simplest things are often the most difficult.

How hard should it be to come up with a single content idea? Considering it’s a few words, you’d think it would only take a few seconds.

You and I both know that there’s a lot more that goes into solidifying a good content idea than the first few words that come to mind.

As content marketing becomes more popular and properly utilized, marketers will be producing more and more content. Currently, 91% of B2B marketershave started using content marketing. In addition, 77% of marketers plan to increase their content production over the next year.

A single good idea every now and again is not enough—you needseveral. And if you’re working efficiently (in batches), you should be coming up with at least 50 at a time, but then writing about only the best ones.

When you start a new content marketing campaign, ideas are relatively free flowing. You can write about just about anything in your niche. But once those “easy” ideas are exhausted, most marketers struggle.

They spend hours only to come up with a handful of mediocre content ideas. Not only is it a huge waste of time, but it is also mentally draining and frustrating. Most content creators struggle more with ideation than they do with the actual content creation.

I don’t want you to be one of them.

In this post, you will learn seven highly effective ways to find great content ideas—quickly.

While there can be some abstract thinking behind idea generation (which is the hardest part), you can minimize it by sticking to any combination of these tactics.

Let’s dive in…

1. Take Good Ideas and Make Them Great

This method is by far the fastest way to come up with solid content ideas.

The basic idea here is to monitor your competitors. When they publish a piece of content, you want to see if you could improve upon the idea or make it better.

I’m not telling you to copy the article, but you can certainly create content on a similar topic but do it from your own perspective.

If you get an idea to improve upon a post of mine, then by all means, go ahead and create it. This is innovation, and it’s how most things (including content and education) get better over time.

There is one big limitation to this tactic: you limit yourself on what you write about because you’re relying on competitors to give you ideas. If they ignore topics important to your readers, you could easily end up missing out on some great content ideas.

That’s why I recommend you use at least a few other content idea generation tactics along with this one. With that in mind, here’s the step-by-step breakdown of how to use this method:

Making Monitoring Competitors Easy

If you like to do things the hard way, you can just visit all your competitors on a regular basis and see if they’ve published anything new. But that seems like a big waste of time to me.

A better option is to use an RSS reader such as Feedly. You can check it once in a while and instantly have an easy to browse list of recently published posts by your competitors.

Create an account, and then click the “add content” button in the left sidebar:

You can search by a keyword, use a specific competitor’s URL, or choose from one of the starter kits (organized by category). The goal is to find all of your top competitors as they’re the ones who are likely producing content around solid ideas already.

If you’d like to add one to your RSS feed, just click the green “+” button:

It’s up to you how many you add, but around 5-10 will be sufficient for most.

Once you’ve done that, you can click the “all” label in the left side bar (or a category if you have multiple):

This will bring up all the articles published by those sites that you selected with the newest articles at the top.

After that, you can click a title to expand it so that you can see the text. For now, start by noting down interesting topic ideas. Then, you’ll need to figure out a way to improve upon the idea or look at it from a different angle.

In general, there are 3 common ways for you to add more value to your content…

Make it Longer

If you’ve read many of my posts, you know how I feel about length. In general, longer is better, which is why longer content ranks better in Google.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:

Say you find an article such as “7 Tools to Level Up Your Content Promotion Game.”

How could you make it more valuable? Look at more than seven content promotion tools that your readers could benefit from.

While I haven’t written about that exact topic yet, I’ve created list posts on similar topics, and they often contain a number of items much greater than seven:

If you match the detail provided in the original article about each tool, but double, triple, or quadruple the number of tools reviewed, your article automatically becomes much more valuable.

Make it More In-Depth

Sometimes, you’ll find content that is already pretty lengthy. Maybe it’s a list of 30 tools.

However, those articles typically lack any real depth. They mention the tool name, maybe include a picture, and that’s it. But there’s no overview of important features, pricing information, or guidance on who would benefit from each tool.

By adding more depth on valuable aspects of each tool, you add a ton of value to the content idea.

Here’s an example: Marketing Profs published an article “Five Quick Tips for Thinking Like a Marketing Revolutionary.” And when they say “quick”, they aren’t kidding. Most of the sections have 100-200 words:

This is useful to a very small percentage of marketers. Most would find the content much more valuable if it was more in-depth.

Adding examples, specific action steps, and even some explanatory pictures to each section would dramatically increase the value of this content.

Make it More Practical or Readable

Finally, you’ll come across some content that has a lot of value, but only to certain people.

For example, Seth Godin is one of the best known entrepreneurial and marketing writers. He is known for his extremely short, strategic blog posts:

They are often under a few hundred words. They always contain a good message and something to think about. But only some marketers want to think or have the background knowledge to make the message useful.

If you catered to a different type of marketer, a beginner marketer, you could write on similar topics as Seth does but make them more accessible.

Spell things out, give as many examples as possible, and make the content as actionable as possible for beginners. Your content wouldn’t have as much value to his audience, but it would have much more to yours.

You can also make your content more readable by using pictures and formatting (see example in way #2).

Content Ideas Should Serve as Answers, so Find the Questions

The basic purpose for all content is to solve problems for the audience.

People consume content because they’re trying to make their lives better. What this means is that if you could identify the problems your audience has, you could create content around the solutions to those problems. Your content becomes the answer to their questions.

And you can do this by finding the questions that your audience asks.

There are many ways to find these questions, but I want to point you to two sources in particular.

Source #1: Blog Comments

Probably the best source of content ideas is your readers themselves. If they take the time to express a problem that they are having in a comment or email – listen!

That not only means that it’s a significant problem, but it also means that many other readers in your audience are also having it. Here’s an example of one I quickly pulled up from Joel on a Quick Sprout article:

Firstly, he’s expressing that he likes the header pictures I use on Quick Sprout (credit to my designer). This is something I’ve heard many times (but never too many times!).

The most interesting part of his comment is the next sentence/question:

Have you ever thought about doing an article on how to find just the right art?

Boom! Great content idea right there.

Just from that comment, I could easily come up with a few different angles to explore it from:
- The complete guide to creating featured images that WOW your readers
- 10 sources of mind blowing art that will capture your readers’ attention
There’s one potential problem with this source…what if you don’t get many comments?

It takes time to start getting multiple comments on each post on a regular basis.

Source #2: Forums and Q&A Sites

If you can’t find out what problems your readers are having using comments, the next best thing is to find your target audience on other sites.

You could look at the comments on a competitor’s site for content ideas. More reliably, find a niche forum to browse, which will enable you to come up with hundreds of content ideas quickly.

Start by searching for “(your niche) + forum”:

For over 95% of niches, the top few results will be active forums. From there, just browse through the thread topics.

From the top garden forum result, I spotted 3 threads that were updated recently:

The content ideas are pretty simple to come up with from there. For example:
- “Do you really need to prune Ficus Lyrata?”
- “The complete guide to pruning: Which plants need and don’t need it”
- The definitive guide to fern identification
The tub one would depend on whether you specifically wrote about gardening or covered other “home” topics as well.

Regardless, you can easily find over 100 good content ideas in under an hour from a good forum.

Have Just a Single 20-Minute Talk With Your Target Audience Member

This tactic might scare you…

Most marketers don’t like talking on the phone, let alone to an actual member of their target audience. But it’s the single most effective way to not only come up with great content ideas but to create better content as well.

Where do you find someone who will be willing to talk with you for 15-30 minutes? Here are a few potential ways:
- find a friend who is in your target audience, and ask for a favor
- email your existing email list, and offer free coaching or a product discount in exchange for the talk
- go to a local meeting group (you can find one through Meetup.com) of your target audience. Approach one of the members after, explain your goal/purpose, and offer to buy them lunch if they’ll talk with you
As long as you come off as someone who genuinely is trying to add to your community, you’ll find quite a few people who are willing to help.

This one short interview could make you thousands of dollars in the future.

Once you find someone to talk with, what do you do?

The main thing is to listen. If they’re passionately talking about your topic of interest, don’t stop them. Ideally, record the interview (ask them if that’s okay) so you don’t miss anything. Otherwise, write down every single problem they mention. Afterwards, create content ideas that would solve those problems.

If they’re not sure what to talk about, use questions like these to ignite conversation:
- why do you find (topic) interesting?
- what major problems have you faced when it comes to (topic)?
- what are you currently spending your time on when you have time for (topic)?
Anything that gets them talking about your topic or industry will start to reveal problems and frustrations that they’d like to see solved.

Some interviews will obviously be more fruitful than others, which is why I recommend doing these on a regular basis as frequently as possible.

Answer the Questions That Other Posts Leave Readers With

This method picks up where #2 left off.

In case you didn’t read about that tactic, the idea behind it is that most of the best content ideas are the solutions to the problems that your target audience is having. The tough part is finding those questions.

With this method, we’ll be finding those questions by using your competitors. And there are 3 basic ways you can do this:

Find Strategic Posts

In general, posts can either be tactical or strategic.

Strategic content focuses on overall best practices and goals, while tactical content focuses on specific ways to accomplish specific things. Think of it this way:

You may have a content marketing strategy that encompasses how you’d like to approach content marketing. Inside that strategy, you will have many tactics that you will use to accomplish your strategic goals.

Big problems are typically solved strategically, while small problems can be solved tactically. The point is to identify writers in your niche who write strategic posts.

These will typically be thought leaders. Seth Godin is the perfect example once again (note that some writers may write both kinds of posts):

His posts are very general and meant to provoke thought. They would help you create better business strategies.

I already showed you that you could simply take the same topic and make it more practical. But in addition, you can easily pick out parts of a post that might leave readers with questions.

From that above post, I can quickly find a couple of areas that leave readers wondering:
- How do you make a non-salesy sales pitch?
- How do you come up with your product presentation strategy?
- How do you get your product in front of people in the first place? (the skeptics and customers)
- How do you create something that is above average?
Those are 4 questions (read: problems) that most readers of Seth’s article would be interested in having answered, which means they would make great content ideas.

Just make sure that your competitor’s readers are the same ones you want to attract.

Look at the Comments

Comments are powerful because they come from real readers. There’s no guesswork about what a reader is thinking.

We already looked at how you can get content ideas from your own content, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t look at your competitor’s comments.

For example, here’s a comment on one of Derek Halpern’s blog posts:

If you created content for entrepreneurs, you could turn that comment into a content idea like:

How you can leverage selling information products to sell more physical products.

Read Any Article From the Reader’s Point of View

In the first option, I noted that you could specifically target “strategic” content because it’ll always reveal multiple content ideas. However, you can get ideas from any piece of content, whether it’s your own or a competitor’s.

Here’s how you do it:

Read through a piece of content from the perspective of your reader. What questions do they have while reading? Can you create content that answers these questions?

Below is part of an article published on the Content Marketing Institute site:

I put a box around an important line. Some readers might be able to formulate a hypothesis, but I would bet that many won’t.

For a reader, the question is:

“How do I make a good hypothesis?” or “What does a good hypothesis look like?”

You could attempt to create content to answer this question from a few different angles:
- How to come up with a better test hypothesis to get more meaningful results
- 20 examples of great test hypotheses (that result in more effective content)
- 15 tools that will help you come up with more informed hypotheses
The better you can get into the head of your typical reader, the more of these questions you’ll spot.

Over time, you will improve, and you’ll be able to get 5-10 solid content ideas from a single post you come across.

No Two Niches are Equal, You can Learn a Lot From Others

All niches become their own echo chambers at times. All the big blogs in your niche will, at times, seem very similar to each other. They all cover hot topics, and they market using the same tactics.

It’s hard to be different if all your input is from these sites in your niche. However, this is also easy to solve.

If you analyze how authoritative sites in other niches are doing their content marketing, you can often take ideas from them and adapt them to your own niche. Let’s go through an example…

Say I really love how The Cat Site creates content. I see that they’re getting a ton of traction with their gift guides:

If you look at any of the top marketing blogs right now, none of them have any content related to gifts.

I could create my own content ideas by adapting this type of content for marketers:
- 10 marketing-themed gifts that will make your coworkers jealous
- 10 great gifts to give to clients and customers to show your appreciation
These aren’t amazing content ideas, but they’re interesting. More importantly, they’re unique.

This is one way to stand out from all the other sites in your niche. And this technique pairs very well with the very first method of generating ideas that we looked at.

Doing it on Your Own

It’s very difficult to just pick a random niche and study the effectiveness of the top sites’ content marketing.

Instead, start observing sites in other areas that interest you. Aside from marketing, you have other interests, right?

Whether it’s entrepreneurship, cooking, decorating, sports, etc., you can learn from the top sites in any niche.

And since you’re interested in the subject (and are a reader), you have a better feel for which types of ideas those sites are using that are truly being effective.

Be aware that not every single tactic you see a site in another niche using will adapt well to your audience. So if you produce ideas that just aren’t quite good enough, don’t hesitate to toss them away.

Find Questions That No One Wants to Answer

This tactic won’t reveal a ton of content ideas, but it will reveal ideas of the highest quality.

In every niche, there are difficult questions to answer that many readers have. These often get asked on forums (if there is one for a topic), but are typically ignored or danced around. Because of this, no one really has a good answer to those types of questions. And yet, readers still want them answered.

If you can produce a great answer to any one of those questions, it will get a lot of attention and basically promote itself in the future after you’ve done your initial promotion.

There’s a catch: The reason why no other top bloggers answer these types of questions is because they are hard to answer.

You’ll have to create exceptional content to answer any of these questions. Why?

Because other bloggers have probably tried to answer the question but couldn’t do it. They end up with a mediocre post that, again, dances around the question and provides no concrete answer.

How much does a swimming pool cost? The best example I’ve heard of using this technique comes from Marcus Sheridan, a pool installer.

Years ago, if a homeowner wanted a pool, they’d have to get a quote to have any idea of what it would cost. Typically, this would also come with aggressive sales tactics. And it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that potential customers were not thrilled with this setup. All they wanted to know was how much a pool would cost.

Marcus published the first of many articles to come that helped answer the questions of his existing customers and potential customers. This content in particular focused on breaking down the cost of a swimming pool installation in as much detail as possible, River Pools and Spas:

He gave the numbers that he would use when estimating the cost of a job and explained why things cost as much as they did. Most homeowners looking for an initial estimate found this really helpful, and it wasn’t long before he started to rank for some impressive terms.

It didn’t take long for Marcus to write the post that got him much attention, but it did take him years to gain the expertise to be able to answer the question.

Think about areas where you are an expert. Then start paying attention to questions that your readers want the answers to (on your site, competing sites, social media, etc.), but no one will answer.

These are the questions that will form the basis for extraordinary content ideas.

Use Your Expertise to Predict the Future

The goal for most content creators should be to become a thought leader in their industry.

You can’t do that if you’re always writing about the same topics that everyone else is writing about. Thought leaders not only produce great content on those topics, but they also pave the way for innovation.

As you become one of the more knowledgeable experts in your niche, you will likely be able to guess how certain aspects of your industry are going to change in the future.

You can’t do these types of posts all the time, but they are another source of great content ideas that you can use to make up 5-20% of your posts.

What if you’re not an expert? That’s okay! You can still use this tactic. However, you’ll have to leverage the knowledge of the true experts in your niche.

For example, SEO writer Trond Lyngbø put together a great article on thefuture of SEO. He got in touch with several experts to get their predictions:

This is probably more valuable than any single expert’s predictions since you can compare them with each other.

I left this idea generation tactic for last because it’s the most difficult. You’ll need to either have an expert level of knowledge or be able to get responses from influencers in your niche.

Even then, you need to be able to know the areas of your niche that your readers are interested in knowing the future of.

For marketing, among others, readers are interested in the future of:
- SEO
- Link building
- Email outreach
- Effective types of content
- Content marketing tactics
- Product creation
I could create multiple articles for the future of every single one of those—spread out over time, of course.

Conclusion

Great content ideas give you the potential to produce great content. But coming up with enough content ideas isn’t always easy.

That’s why I’ve given you these seven highly effective tactics. Start with just one or two of them for now and practice. When you get good with them, try out some of the others.

At first, you will probably struggle a bit. I hope the detail I’ve provided is enough to limit that struggle. But over time, you will develop your “idea muscle,” and it will get easier and easier to come up with tons of great content topics. Persistence is key, and it will pay off.

If any of these tactics work well for you, or you have any questions at all, I’d love to hear about it in the comment section below.

Source – SearchEngineJournal.com
January 21, 2016