seo

Posted by KelseyLibert

Did it feel like everyone you knew was watching “Making a Murderer” at the same time? It may have just been an illusion, thanks to a few key members of your social network.

Researchers at the University of Southern California recently uncovered that when something appears more popular than it actually is, it can create the right conditions for it to be widely spread. They named this social network phenomenon the majority illusion, which happens due to highly-connected individuals within a social network skewing the group’s perception. These findings explain something we already knew — well-connected individuals can wield extraordinary influence. The majority illusion may also explain why it can take only a handful of the right influencers to make something go viral.

Marketers can leverage the majority illusion to create the tipping point needed to drive action or spread a message far and wide. It starts with identifying influencers who have the potential to create the majority illusion among your target demographic, and then encouraging those influencers to help amplify your message.

How social influencers can create the illusion of popularity

Are you surprised when your non-marketer friends are completely unaware of something that was major news in the marketing world? You may think it’s popular because you kept seeing it discussed by key members of your network, which can give the impression that it’s universally popular.

Image source

Let’s say that in the figure above, each of the colored nodes is a Nickelback fan. The networks are identical, except different people are Nickelback fans in each figure. Since the Nickelback fans in figure A have more connections, it may appear to their network that Nickelback’s music is popular. This is how the majority illusion can create the impression within a group that an idea, behavior, or attribute is common, even if the opposite is true.

How a social network is structured

By illustrating how a social network is organized, we can see how an idea can potentially spread across communities or stay within a select group.

We modeled a network graph of 77 Twitter influencers across eight different verticals: automotive, business, entertainment, finance, health, lifestyle, technology, and travel. Influencers were chosen based on criteria including relevance to a vertical and engagement. In order to create a usable graph, we then narrowed down the influencers’ 19 million followers to about 8,600 second-degree influencers. We chose those users based on a set of criteria that signaled mid-level influence: a following greater than 30,000, a follower to following ratio of at least 1:1, and a “lists per followers” rate of at least 6.5 (the number of times they have been added to a Twitter list per thousand of followers). Side note: Wondering why you can’t find Rand? He’s too popular to meet the parameters we set for a “mid-level” influencer.

The resulting network illustrates the hierarchical relationships of first- and second-level influencers within a social network. Click here to see the full interactive graph.

The nodes represent individuals, while the relationships between individuals are expressed as lines. The larger a node, the more relationships the individual has within the network. It’s important to understand this does not mean the large nodes have the most followers within the network; rather, they have the most connections within a particular network (some being first-degree, second-degree, third-degree connections, etc.).

By examining this graph, you can see that social influence is more like six degrees of Kevin Bacon than a popularity contest. Because of this, marketers should focus on getting their message spread by influencers within a focused niche or strategically-positioned influencers to maximize reach, rather than looking for influencers who merely have a large following.

Finding strategically-positioned influencers

Tools such as BuzzSumo and Followerwonk are a good jumping off point for finding influencers within a vertical. But you want to look at more than the number of followers, because influence depends on far more than popularity.

There are three main factors for determining the most powerful members of a network:

• Betweenness Centrality: An individual’s location between different sections of a network
• Degrees: The number of connections, or edges, an individual has
• Closeness: The average number of degrees between the individual and others in the network

So which of these variables are most important? It depends on your goals.

Do you want people to take an action? Niche influencers may be best to create the majority illusion and give the impression of popularity, thus spurring others to mimic their behavior. An influencer’s closeness may be the most important factor in this case, since it signals they share a lot of connections with other individuals in their network. When you consider all of the common relationships within a niche group, it’s easy to see how these groups are susceptible to the majority illusion effect.

Are the goals for your content expanding brand awareness or increasing viral potential? Influencers with connections to other communities may be most effective for reaching a large audience. Betweenness centrality is the greatest signal of strategic positioning, since it shows the individual’s potential to influence and connect different groups.

Influencing a niche group

If you want to create the majority illusion within a niche-focused group, target influencers with followers similar to them who have a low number of followers.

Notice how some groups are isolated on the edges of the graph. We can assume the “majority illusion” is likely to happen within these groups since they have little to no overlap with the other communities.

The researchers found that the majority illusion occurs most frequently in networks where individuals with a low degree of connections tend to connect with individuals with a high degree of connections. Those with a low number of connections may be easier to influence since they aren’t exposed to a wide range of ideas and opinions — plus they have less noise in their stream, so they are likely to see what the influencer posts.

Getting a handful of niche influencers talking about your brand within the same time period may be the key to creating an impression of popularity. I see this happen all the time on niche blogs, where several blogs do a sponsored post or review of the same product within a short time period. It does have the effect of making it feel like you’ve seen something everywhere, even though only a few people are talking about it.

Influencing a wide audience

If you want your content amplified to the widest possible audience, target influencers who are followed by other influencers and have diverse connections across different communities.

The closer an influencer is to the center of the graph, the more visibility they have across multiple verticals. This gives your content a better chance of escaping the echo chamber likely to occur within the more isolated groups. Individuals strategically positioned within their network, rather than those who are the most popular, may be the most effective at influencing a large number of people.

Two great examples of this within our network model are Ann Handley (@MarketingProfs) and Daniel Pink (@DanielPink). Notice how their connections are spread across different groups.

Example: @MarketingProfs

Example: @DanielPink

You don’t need to build your own social network graph to identify influencers with high betweenness centrality. Look for a mix of these two factors to spot strategically-positioned influencers:

1. Influencers who are followed by other influencers. Consider the ripple effect that can happen when an influencer shares something and then other influencers following them share it.
2. Influencers who are followed by people across multiple verticals. Potential reach is greater among influencers who have a diverse following, since their followers can spread things throughout multiple networks.

Need help finding the right influencers? Check out our guide to identifying effective influencers. Once you pinpoint the influencers who can help you achieve your desired goal, be sure to deploy Rand’s advice on getting influencers to amplify your message.

By visualizing the structure of a social network, you can see that having a lot of followers doesn’t necessarily equate to influence. Influencers within closely-knit groups may be best suited for influencing their followers to take action or adopt an opinion, since this type of group is primed for creating the majority illusion that “everyone’s doing it.” To reach a large audience, marketers should enlist the help of influencers who are strategically positioned between social communities, rather than those with a Kardashian-sized following.

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Posted by Tom-Anthony

SEOs traditionally say that a specific search query can be classified as either navigational, informational, or transactional. The categories were originally published in 2002 in a peer-reviewed paper by Andrei Broder who worked for Altavista (remember them?!) at the time.

The categories that Broder came up with have been invaluable to SEOs for many years, helping many of us explain the different types of search query that we should consider.

However, it’s time to revisit these categories to see if we can improve their usefulness in a world of direct answers, apps, intelligent personal assistants, and other developments.

Recap

For those who haven’t reminded themselves recently, here is a quick recap of the three categories:

• Transactional – Here the user wants to get to a website where there will be more interaction, e.g. buying something, downloading something, signing up or registering etc.
• Informational – This is when the user is looking for a specific bit of information.
• Navigational – The user is looking to reach a particular website. There’s only one likely destination that they’re looking to reach.

Google, in their human rater guidelines, call these three categories:

• Do
• Know
• Go

Google also widened the definition of the categories slightly from their original paper. Interestingly, Andrei Broder, who created the original categories, now works at Google.

Beyond the Web

However, what is important to understand is that Broder’s was proposing “A taxonomy of Web search” — i.e. the categories were designed for web searches. Even though Google widened the definition of these queries in their Do-Know-Go framework, they also still discuss them in terms of web search.

Here’s the thing — so many of the searches we do nowadays are not web searches at all. Various papers have estimated differently, but most estimates (here, here, and here) are that around 50–80% of searches fall into the “informational” category, which is the category that often lends itself to a direct answer:

Furthermore, we are more and more frequently searching, not via a web-powered search bar on a desktop machine, but instead via an Intelligent Personal Assistant app (IPA):

In the most recent revision of their human rater guidelines, Google introduced a new category — Know Simple — for informational queries that can be answered with a short (< 2 sentences) answer that has an uncontroversial answer, i.e. the type of answer that is suited for these direct answer-type responses. You should read this great post on takeaways from the latest quality rater guidelines from Jennifer Slegg to read more about Know Simple and other interesting tidbits from the Google document.

New considerations

Google’s addition of Know Simple indicates that Google understands that the Do-Know-Go categories are no longer broad enough for the modern search landscape. However, I believe that, even with the addition of “Know Simple,” the model could be improved upon.

SEOs have traditionally used the navigational / informational / transactional framework to classify the searcher’s intent. We believe that a large part of this (maybe not all) can be captured by considering how user intents may change and be better served when they’ve been conducted via an Intelligent Personal Assistant app.

The last couple of years has seen an explosion in the functionality and usage of an increasing number of personal assistants:

• Apple Siri – Built into every iPhone. Now also “Proactive” in a fashion similar to Google Now.
• Google Now –Technically, the name refers to a certain set of functionality, but people are increasingly referring to the “assistant” app and its functionality with this name.
• Microsoft Cortana – Originally just in Windows phones, but now available for Android as well. Microsoft has a great research team and are working hard on Cortana.

There are also a couple of newcomers that look very promising, but which are not fully released yet:

• Facebook M – An interesting cross between Artificial Intelligence and human workers who help with certain tasks, Facebook is looking to really take things to the next level with an assistant that can do things for you.
• SoundHound Hound – A preview video the company put out last year got a lot of attention for Hound’s speed of understanding and flexibility with complex chained queries. I’ve tried it myself and it’s pretty awesome.

Upgrading Do-Know-Go

At Distilled, we’ve been thinking about this a bit, and have gone through many iterations trying to work out how a new model should look. We still aren’t sure we’ve cracked it, but wanted to share what we have so far.

We propose adding a second axis or a second row to the model, such that we have something like this:

Notice we’ve moved “Go” to the side, because we don’t think it changes in a very meaningful way (you’re just looking to go to a certain destination, be it app or web or whatever) — but it’s also the least interesting category!

The logic of this model is that previously, the navigational / informational / transactional categorization allowed you to two things:

1. Understand the user’s intent for a query
2. Frame how an appropriate landing page (or set of landing pages) should be formed for this category of queries on your site

None of that has changed when we’re still in the the “web model,” but we now need to extend that model so we can do those same two things above when considering IPAs.

In our model, we can see that “Informational/IPA” is where a huge amount of Know Simple queries exist. Then we have a box for “Transactional/IPA,” which is also very interesting.

What’s fascinating is that, in the case of both “Informational/IPA” and “Transactional/IPA” instances, SEOs don’t yet have a good understanding of how to do any sort of optimization of improvements (which is to be expected as they are still developing). Let’s discuss each.

Informational/IPA

Google puts their Know Simple queries into this cell but, as you’ll see, Informational/IPA also covers slightly more ground.

Know Simple queries are for short, relatively factual searches; a good example is [how old is barack obama], which Google can answer from their own knowledge as it’s something that changes infrequently.

However, there are other searches that fall into the Informational/IPA category, such as our example of [are the trains to London on time]. Google says that “queries where different users may want different types of information” are not considered Know Simple, but such queries clearly fit into our structure there.

These latter queries are the interesting ones, as they’re the types of queries that search engines will be looking to fill by connecting to APIs. These are very related to “data-driven search.” Also worth noting is that if 50–80% of queries are Know queries, we can imagine that this cell could serve a huge number of queries.

An Informational/IPA query via Google, served via the facts in their Knowledge Graph.

An Informational/IPA query via Hound, pulling live and context-based data via an API.

A particularly interesting variant of Informational/IPA queries are those which involve some sort of computation. I don’t mean requests such as [the square root of 1764], as they have no “search” aspect. However, a query such as [100 US dollars in British pounds] requires the IPA to fetch the exchange rate for you, and then do something with that answer before giving you a response.

Currently, the capabilities here are still hit and miss; only Amazon’s Evi IPA successfully answered my query [is barack obama older than his wife], whilst Google, Siri, Hound, and Cortana all sent me to a web search.

As the capabilities of IPAs improve, you could imagine some complex compound queries that could fit into this category.

Transactional/IPA

Transactional/IPA queries, which are the transactional relative to Informational/IPA, are queries where there’s an intent to do something further after getting the query response. The initial response may be served within the IPA where you can do some additional filtering before you move to an app to complete the purchase (though, in the future, that part may be unnecessary), or the initial response may be opening an app right away.

A Transactional/IPA query via Siri; you’re able to go several steps into the funnel before finally the “Buy Tickets” button takes you to an app.

This category feels like it’s going to become absolutely huge in the near future; currently on iOS, full integration with Siri is only available to selected partners, but it seems likely that wider integration is going to become available. With Google Now and other platforms, we’re likely to see similar patterns. Once apps can integrate right into the personal assistant apps and add functionality in terms of being able to do things, then the range of available queries available will explode. Being able to “rank” is going to be very heavily based upon being a flexible and comprehensive service for that niche.

Future and wrap up

It seems inevitable that search is moving away from just being about web search and 10 blue links, and so it seems inevitable that we’ll need to update our models to keep up. The original navigational / informational / transactional categories were designed for the web, and the model proposed above was built to allow us to extend that model into this new world.

The original framework was used by SEOs to help us understand and categorize queries and to help educate and persuade clients. This new framework allows us to do these same things, but expand them to cover searches done via Intelligent Personal Assistants.

I would love to hear from everyone on in the comments on whether you think there are more opportunities to improve this model. Distilled’s R&D team is working on better understanding how to do SEO in a world of Intelligent Personal Assistants, so be sure to watch this space!

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Posted by randfish

B2B companies face different challenges than B2C companies. From which stages you target in the funnel to how you measure your success to the team you end up selling to, content marketing can be a horse of a different color when you’re business-to-business. In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand shares his tips for successful content marketing when you’re a B2B.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re going to chat about B2B marketing, specifically B2B content marketing, and some tips that I’ve got for you that are a little bit different from how we would do B2C or other kinds of content marketing.

I get it. A lot of the examples that you see in the content marketing world are B2C, or they’re at B2B companies that are more like Moz where we have a B2C-like community and a B2C-like audience. So I think that when it comes to B2B, because there are some tricky elements, I wanted to try and walk you through a few of those.

Let’s start with the funnel.

The B2B funnel is very similar to a B2C funnel. In fact, marketing funnels in general work like this. People become aware of a product. They have some consideration for whether it’s something they might actually want to buy. They do some form of comparison against other solutions. They decide to convert or not. Then there’s a retention element. Retention element is less true in a lot of B2C fields, especially eCommerce one-time purchases. It’s generally more true in the B2B world.

Target the right stages of the marketing funnel

I think one problem that we have in B2B marketing is a lot of times we target the wrong part of the funnel. This is actually really common. In B2C, usually things that hit on one of these hit on a lot of them. The same things that create awareness about a product or a brand also help with conversion, also might help with comparison because of brand affinity, and also might help with consideration and retention. It’s less true in B2B, not to say not true at all, but less true. So I think one of the jobs that we have is to look inside our funnel and then identify which part needs help versus which part works fine.

Another thing that is very important here: For the majority of your content, don’t try to target it at more than let’s say two of these stages. I might say, “Hey, I’ve got a piece of content that I think can work really well for awareness and consideration.” Or it’s much further down the funnel. It’s for people who already know us and are already considering us. It’s really about comparison and conversion or about conversion and retention. That’s fine. I think when you get into trouble is when you say, “Hey, you know what, this is going to help throughout the funnel — awareness, consideration, and conversion.” Well, that tends not to be the case. That’s not to say it can never happen.

Actually design your content for parts of the funnel that need it

Try to choose. When you’re creating your content, when you’re designing the strategy for why you’re going to produce a particular piece, decide what it’s going to help with. Point it at the area of the funnel that is in most need of assistance.

Let me give you a quick example here. There’s a company called PivotDesk. They’re a fellow at Foundry company. PivotDesk does something really cool. They help small businesses — in particular a lot of startups and early stage companies — but plenty of regular small businesses, to find office space. They’re very business-to-business. They’re talking to landlords and they’re talking to small businesses.

They have a great funnel, but they decide that they need more awareness, which is good. Good job PivotDesk identifying which part of the funnel is the problem. If you’ve seen that lots of people who are already aware of you and visiting you are converting and getting through this part of the funnel, then you don’t need to focus your content efforts there, or maybe less of them. We could think about potentially saying, “Hey, let’s say that awareness is our problem. Awareness to whom? Is it awareness to small businesses or is it awareness to the landlords?” Again, two different audiences. In this case, awareness to the landlords perhaps is the problem.

I’m making these up. I don’t actually know if PivotDesk has these problems. If that’s the case, maybe what we want is an interactive tool that’s essentially part survey and part comparison, benchmarking metrics, that a landlord can go in and say, “My space is in Seattle. I have this much square footage of AAA space, and the current price is $31 per square foot triple net,” and there’s the average me versus what the rest of the Seattle market looks like. Fascinating, I am undercharging or I am overcharging, or I have less square footage than most folks have, or I’m missing these amenities or whatever it is. That could work potentially very well for this stage of the funnel.

This is the process that I’d urge you to use when you’re doing that B2B content strategy. Target the right section of the funnel. Make sure it’s targeted to the right audience, and then come up with a piece of content that’s going to move the needle in the right place.

When you’re measuring success in B2B, it is pretty different than B2C. A lot of the time unfortunately the metric by which you will be judged upon is number of leads created. B2B tends to be very leads-driven. There are a few folks who are in B2B who are also self-service, like Moz is. But for the vast majority, it’s leads for the sales folks to follow up on.

Because of that, the classic metrics, like how many social shares you got across different networks and how much visibility and raw traffic and engagement and those kinds of things tend to be less important than quantity of leads generated. This is really tough when you get into these areas of the funnel that are not the conversion point. If I’m trying to create raw awareness among my audience, I can really get misjudged if my boss, my team, or my client is only looking at the leads.

What I urge you again to do is to take note of what you’re trying to improve and apply the right metrics to it. Don’t just take the same metrics that are used for obviously B2C and don’t take the same metrics that are judged on conversion for retention or awareness for conversion. This is critically important, or you’re going to focus on the wrong parts of the solution you’re trying to create.

The overwhelming majority of B2B transactions don’t just have a single buyer.

In B2C, it’s really simple. I’m selling blue jeans. I’m selling them to a consumer. That consumer tends to be the only person who’s in on the consideration. Maybe their partner is also thinking about it. For the vast majority it’s just that one person I’m selling to.

That’s not the case in B2B, not at all.

Oftentimes the person who ends up buying, who you interact with, who your salesperson reaches out to and has the conversation, that person is just one link in the chain of individuals involved from a corporate ecosystem in who makes the buying decision. For that reason, a lot of times content marketing that reaches this person does a great job of reaching that buyer but does a terrible job of reaching their manager or the CFO and the HR person who are all involved in these decisions as well might be less successful.

This is why we need an overlapping persona analysis when we do our content. It’s also why, when we’re thinking about the funnel, we can’t think about it without regard for which target is in which stage of the buying process. It could be that your buyer is all the way down here, but you have no resources, no content that’s going to help convince a CFO and an HR person up here that they should even put you in the consideration set, because you have no comparison against what are their other options and why do you help them save money and those kinds of things.

Be careful with this. Target your content to not only your buyer but other folks as well, especially if your sales folks are giving you feedback that that’s where they’re getting stymied.

With B2B, it tends to be the case that you can be much more aggressive with forms of remarketing and retargeting. That means paid content. That means amplification. It means spending dollars to promote the content that you’ve created. The reason that you can do this as opposed to a lot of B2C is because it tends to be the case that your customer lifetime value is way higher. B2B transactions, we’re talking about usually many hundreds, if not many thousands or tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars per converted customer.

Cost of Customer Acquisition (CAC)

What you want to be looking at is not just the lifetime value but also the current cost of customer acquisition, or CAC, as it’s called. There’s a ratio that a lot of folks look at in B2B, which is the CAC to CLTV ratio, essentially how much does it cost us to get a new customer versus how much value does that customer provide. B2C folks look at this too, but B2B folks tend to be obsessed with it.

When I see the ratio is high or the CAC itself is low in comparison, this is, gee, $450 to acquire a customer versus $3,780 CLTV, that’s like a 9 to 1 ratio, something like that. I have a ton of room to boost that. I could probably boost that. I could more than double it, and I’d still be fine with a four-to-one ratio or even a three-to-one ratio. I might consider spending a tremendous amount more money to get a customer. If I can see through my funnel that I’m measuring to see how content performs as it pushes people down this funnel and gets them to conversion, if I can see that for every 1,000 views or 10,000 views I’m getting a customer converting, well then I can go and I can amplify through paid channels, through retargeting and remarketing.

I can pay a lot of money to go push that content to more places and to more people. I can probably do things that I would almost never ordinarily do, like even buy paid search ads against a keyword that is very content-focused, not very conversion-focused, that lives up here in the funnel and I can still have success. This is something that very few B2B marketers are doing but some very successful ones are.

Last thing that I’ll cover here, most B2B content does this… I don’t know. It’s like every B2B marketer reads from the same playbook. Look, I go through this process a lot because I’m interested in a lot of B2B content since Moz is a business that I’m trying to grow.

What happens is that the content exposes very little for free. I might hear about something and go, “Oh yeah, I am interested in the average lifetime value of self-service, software as a service companies.” That sounds super corporate and boring. I’m deeply interested in it. It really affects Moz’s metrics.

I might go look, and then I see I can’t really tell what’s in here, what’s behind the wall. You’re not showing me very much.

There’s supposedly this amazing content, but I don’t see anything there.

Then it asks me for too much in order to get access.

If you fill out all these 10 different form fields about your position at the company, and how much revenue you have, and how many employees you had, and what was your growth rate last year, and which other products in this field have you considered and so on, man, geez, I feel like I just had to sign a lease agreement in order to get a piece of content.

Then, that content is not web accessible.

I have to download it, which is insanely frustrating if I’m on one of these. It sucks. It’s a terrible experience on mobile. It’s even a bad experience on desktop. I don’t want to have to download something and open it back up. That makes it less shareable. It’s very hard for me to amplify that content if I’m interested in it. When I want to share it with other people I have to tell them, “Hey, you’ve got to go to this download link.”

What happens? I’ll tell you what happens. Every single time I download it and then I attach it in an email and I send it to every relevant person at Moz, that B2B company that made it only gets one email address, and I unsubscribe from their list.

Insanity.

Insanity.

If you can, fix this process by making your content web accessible, making it so that you’re providing more of a teaser right on the page here so that more people are likely to go through here. Ask for as little information as you possibly can. You can get more later. You can learn a ton about someone once you have just one piece of information, their correct email address. If you have that, you can learn a tremendous amount about them. You don’t need this. You’ve got tools like FullContact, where you can use the API plugin and email address and they’ll give you all sorts of persona-type data about that person. You can go then research the company and get all the facts. Tons of stuff to do.

Then the last thing that I find that’s oddly frustrating — I don’t know why I’m frustrated about it, but you should be frustrated about it if you’re a B2B marketer — is you don’t reuse the audience for future content amplification. If you know that I downloaded this piece of content, I think it is perfectly okay to follow up with a personal message the next time you produce a piece of content like this and say, “Hey, we redid it and here it is again.” That’s not that hard. Hopefully, you haven’t auto-subscribed me to an email newsletter and I’m getting tons of pieces of content that I care nothing about. What’s far better is if you tell me, “Hey, we redid this piece,” or, “Since you liked this piece, you’ll probably be very interested in this other piece.” That’s going to work really well.

You can also do RLSA with this for more paid amplification. I can take a list of emails of all the people who’ve downloaded this, upload it to Google, upload it to Facebook, and then have this content accessible via these paid formats so that I’m bidding in Google and I’m showing the ads to people on Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn, all that kind of stuff.

All right, everyone, hope you B2B marketers out there are doing some awesome stuff with your content in the near future. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by tommcloughlin

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

Many small businesses see content marketing as something that you can only be successful with if you are a huge company with a big budget. I was in the same boat for a long time, but after much research, many (many) failed attempts, and a lot of perseverance, I’ve finally started to see some predictability in how to get results from content marketing. Nothing illustrates this better than a project we managed for a travel company that was inspired by the finale to the fifth season of the television series Game of Thrones.

To sum up how effective this effort was, let me break down the results:

• 111 linking domains acquired (and counting)
• 19 linking domains on sites with DA of 70+
• 33 linking domains on sites with DA of 50+
• 12 all-time-high days of traffic
• Referral traffic was 245 percent higher than the previous year
• Coverage in The Washington Post, Business Insider, Mashable, Yahoo, Bored Panda and other top-tier publications.

This was done very simply by creating a map showing all the filming locations used throughout the Game of Thrones series and then promoting it in the right place at the right time. You can see below how this impacted referral traffic to the site:

Before I get into the nitty gritty of the exact process we went through to gain these results, I want to highlight the turning point for me when I truly believed I could make a content marketing approach work. My epiphany came courtesy of Ryan Holiday, who helped me realize there were hundreds of hugely powerful media sites out there desperate for content.

Our job, then, is simple: Find something newsworthy and create great content around it.

Here’s the process we’re now using to bridge this gap:

The idea

The very first thing you have to come up with is an idea good enough to gain some traction. Don’t think this needs to be directly connected to your (or your client’s) brand. Even a loose connection is sufficient, as you’ll gain the links and brand mentions when you are referenced as the source of the content. Obviously a closer connection to your offering is better, but if you wait around until you found something sufficiently linked to your product/service in the news, then you might be waiting a long time.

For our example, the company focused on Moroccan holidays since Morocco was used as a filming location in Game of Thrones.

I find the best way to get ideas is by surfing the web, particularly the bigger news and entertainment websites (e.g., Mashable, Buzzfeed, Bored Panda etc). Buzzsumo is also an excellent tool for finding similar kinds of successful content in your niche.

Identify targets

Once you have an idea, the next job is to find the people you will target with your outreach when the content is ready. It’s crucial to do this before you create the content, as this process may highlight particular elements your targets are receptive to, which you can then incorporate to make it more appealing to them. For example, you may find that some publications enjoy featuring maps, while others prefer stats and surveys.

The key is to find specific people who have written about something similar to your topic before. We sifted through hundreds of sites to find the specific journalists and writers who had written pieces around Game of Thrones so we knew they had an interest in it and were more likely to be receptive when it came to the outreach process.

Another way to do this is to find a similar piece of content that has been successful and has gained a lot of coverage, then use a tool like Open Site Explorer to examine which websites and authors have linked to it. We found this Google Maps version of Westeros, for example, which we used to mine potential targets for outreach.

The golden nugget in this kind of scenario is identifying the sites which other sites use as as sources for their information. If you can get your content featured in those places, it is almost a guarantee that you will see it republished on a variety of other powerful sites. For example, Business Insider articles are republished on Yahoo, and we’ve found that a story will often get picked up in a lot of places if you can seed it there originally. Therefore, offering your content as an exclusive to those kinds of sites can be a great approach to follow.

Pre-outreach

One possible addition at this stage, depending on the kind of content you’re producing, would be to send an initial feeler email to one or two of your key targets to gauge their interest in the piece. (Hat tip to Brian Dean of Backlinko for this tip.) This can be a great way of getting on your target’s radar without being pushy.

“Hi John: We’re currently putting together a comprehensive map which features every single Game of Thrones filming location. Obviously, excitement is at fever pitch ahead of the season finale next week. I saw you’d covered GOT earlier this year, so I thought I’d see if it was something you’d be interested in featuring?

If so, let me know, and I’ll send it over when it’s ready to go.”

Be sure to let them know why it’s newsworthy and why it’s relevant to them.

If you receive a reply, that’s great. But the real goal is to create familiarity for when your content is ready for sharing.

Once you have a great idea and have identified the people you are going to target with outreach, it’s now time to produce your content.

You don’t need to have huge budgets to create great-looking graphics and interesting images. Websites like Fiverr and Upwork are fantastic resources for finding freelancers who do great work. It simply takes a bit of initial time to sift through and separate the wheat from the chaff. Once that’s done, give the freelancers a detailed brief and tell them exactly what you want.

There are a wide variety of different types of content you could create in this way, including infographics, maps, charts, graphs, slideshows, interactive graphics, and videos. If your idea is interesting and newsworthy enough, then packaging it up in any one of these formats should give you a great opportunity to gain coverage.

Another useful point to consider, in this stage and the “ideas” one, is that the wider the audience you can cover with your content, the more likely you are to get it featured in lots of places. If your content is relevant to people in the US, UK, and around the world, then any site on the Internet may write about it. Limit it to a study about the UK and US, though, and sites are unlikely to pick it up. Fortunately, pretty much everyone on the globe now loves Game of Thrones.

Given that our idea centered on filming locations in Game of Thrones, it made sense to structure the content in a map format. We added in some nice images of each place and gave it a GOT feel and we were good to go!

Contact your exclusive target

Once your content is ready to go, contact your outreach targets and tell them about the content. Provide a concise summary of what you have and why it’s valuable to them. The key here is to offer it as an exclusive feature for that site before reaching out to anyone else. If the writer sees an opportunity to win those clicks before any other site features it, then they’re more likely to pounce on your offer.

If they aren’t interested and don’t reply, though, move on until you find one or more takers. Remember, you only need one solid placement to be successful.

Promote, promote, promote!

Immediately after getting our content featured, we begin the process of promoting it. The more we help the post perform well, the more likely it is that other people will pick it up.

Do everything you can to get more visibility for that post: Share it on your social networks, hijack hashtags, add it to a relevant sub-reddit on Reddit, ask friends to share it, etc.

Boost the post with ads on Facebook and Twitter to enhance its visibility and give it the best possible chance of getting as much social proof as possible. It may seem counter-intuitive to spend money promoting someone else’s site, but the benefit you’ll get from the additional social proof will be well worth it.

Another benefit of this is that many of these sites promote the most popular content they publish to their homepage feeds. If you can get enough early buzz around your piece, then it will only enhance its visibility further by pushing it onto the homepage.

Once you have your exclusive feature in place, the next action is to publish it on your own site.

When you add it to your site, ensure that you add plenty of additional information to it. Make sure that your enhanced version is better than the original piece of content.

Ride the wave

So, you’ve got your first piece of exclusive content placed, promoted it like crazy so that it has irresistible social signals, and published an enhanced (i.e., new) version of it on your site. Now it’s time for the second wave of outreach. Return to your list of highly relevant targets and start contacting them. The only difference this time is that you are not offering exclusive content. Instead, you are pointing them to the exclusive and highlighting how much people are loving it — and how much success (and clicks) they could have a share of if they published the content on their own site.

“Hi Joan: In collaboration with Lawrence of Morocco, we’ve created a map featuring every real life location used through the series Game of Thrones that I thought you might like. Would you be interested in featuring it on Bored Panda?

Obviously, anticipation and interest is building around the upcoming finale of Season 5, as well as their recent announcements about locations for Season 6, so it’s a bit of a hot topic at the moment. Plus, everyone loves GOT!

The map has already received some really great feedback since being featured on Business Insider (http://uk.businessinsider.com/game-of-thrones-set-…), and has taken off on social media since we published it on the LOM site – http://www.lawrenceofmorocco.com/news/game-of-thro….

I’ve attached the map here for you to take a look. If you publish it, if you could link to lawrenceofmorocco.com as the source, that’d be great. If you need anything else, just let me know.

Hope you like it!”

Keep digging

Now is the time to work down your list and contact those third-tier sites to ask about featuring your content. They might not be the strongest sites on the web individually, but provide great value collectively.

For us, this effort involved us contacting the self-proclaimed “nerd sites” (i.e., sites that cater to fans of comics, video games, and cosplay). Our third effort at outreach successfully targeted these groups. As a result, we gained links on Unreality Mag (DA of 57) and Nerdist (DA of 80), among others.

Once the dust has settled and you’re sitting back all pleased with yourself, remember that there are still things you can do to make the job easier next time.

Follow up with the sites that used your content to thank them for featuring it, comment on how well it did (in case they didn’t realize that themselves), and ask them if they’d be happy to receive more ideas from you in the future.

One other thing you can do is to make a note in your calendar of future dates when your content may be relevant again. For us, we’re ready to go when the next Game of Thrones season approaches. That’s when we’ll start reaching out to a new batch of sites, possibly with an updated map.

Final thoughts

I bought into the idea and benefits of content marketing a long time ago, but struggled to put the recommendations I’d read about into practical action to gain (relatively) consistent and predictable results for a long time.

Hopefully, this post will help you, too, to take the plunge and find success.

Do share your own experiences and difficulties with content marketing in the comments below, along with any questions.

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Posted by EricaMcGillivray

Every morning, I listen to the news. I’ve been doing this since high school and now well over half my life, as I’ve changed from radio antennas to apps. Sadly, with all the recent tragedies — from mass shootings in the US and terrorist attacks to devastating earthquakes and other natural disasters — my lifetime habit has become essential to my work.

As one of Moz’s community managers, it’s my and my team’s responsibility to take care of all of you. Whether you interact here on the blog or tweet at us, we’re here to help you out, share something awesome, or just send you a cat gif. In addition to being online marketers, each and every one of you has cares and concerns outside of our world. And we are a global community.

Over the years, our team has developed and evolved responses to these tragedies, particularly when it comes to social media. Right now, the valiant Megan leads our social efforts. I’m not going to sugarcoat this: it absolutely sucks that we have to have these processes. I can also tell you that I’m not the only one on my team who’s starting to feel desensitized to, in particular, the violent tragedies.

Why this is important

In times of crisis, we turn to social media for news, for eyewitness reports, and for safety check-ins for ourselves or those we care about. When a brand continues to post about the “7 best SEO tips” or the “14 moves to dance like Drake” and everyone else is focused on the current breaking tragedy, your brand looks tone deaf. As if you put your social media on automation and left it like Wall-E, running until the end of time.

Your brand is made of people. Your community is made of people. Acting like a person during tragedies is the most concrete action you can take from those “humanizing your brand” books ubiquitously living on marketers’ shelves.

Recognizing the pain in your community, while still recalling that you’re a brand

My team has evolved a policy that if a tragic event dominates social media, we put our social media on pause. It may be on pause for a whole day or a few hours. We then reassess if it’s okay to start tweeting or Facebooking about online marketing again.

In the past, we’ve added some messages of support for those suffering the most. We’ve even experimented with telling our audience what we were doing to help.

This tweet, which I wrote and take full responsibility for, came off as callous to some — as if Moz was trying too hard to be a responsive brand in order to gain virtual brownie points. It also sparked a debate amongst Moz’s entire staff.

In order to maintain our values of transparency, our team used to send all-staff emails to let them know that we were pausing social media. (We don’t do this anymore because, sadly, these tragedies are too prevalent. Additionally, our entire company has started using Slack — think IRC with a better interface — which means these get discussed in our open team channel.) Our staff debated the impact of tragedy on Moz’s audiences, and we didn’t all agree.

Our team also decided that, when it comes to offering up good thoughts to those directly impacted by these tragedies, it’s also best to not post this type of message on our social channels — unless we hit the moment right. I know, this sounds like it goes directly against Moz’s core value of Empathy. But we never want to sound hollow or like we’re joining the bandwagon too late. For instance, we did not change our Facebook profile icon to reflect the French flag after the recent attack on Paris. We talked about it, but decided it was too late to do it without looking like we were just following a trend or just trying to look like we’re a brand who cares.

Instead, most Mozzers tend to take to their own social media accounts in these moments. We’re all people, right? We may not speak as Moz, but it’s a different way of showing us as human. (We also do this for other happy times, such as marketing chats. For example, Roger Mozbot (@Moz) doesn’t participate in #SEOchat discussions; one Mozzer will, tweeting from our personal handles.)

Train and empower the entire team

We make these calls on a case-by-case basis. Everyone on our team is empowered to make the call and take the actions to pause our social media. EVERYONE.

We used to wait for our Director of Community, Jen, to give her opinion or to confer with our executive team. But this is the reality of the world that we live in: If you’re waiting for your CEO to tell you to stop, you are waiting too long. You are on the front lines of your community, and you are the one who must make that call.

If you pause it for a couple hours because you’re worried, it’s better to not send out messages at all than to be the jerk tweeting about your discount on dog food while everyone else is focused on a school shooting.

Christy is all-around awesome, but her community team focus is primarily our Q&A forum. However, because everyone on our team is trained and empowered on how to deal with crises (or fill in when people are on vacation), when this happened on a holiday, Christy jumped right in and paused our social media.

How do you pause your social media?

Like most brands, Moz uses social media management software to do all the things. We specifically use SproutSocial. Currently, (to my knowledge) no social media management software has a pause button. However, several — like SproutSocial and Buffer — have mentioned they are working on them as their response to the seemingly endless stream of tragedies.

This means we must manually stop each and every post scheduled to go out during the time we’re pausing for. For SproutSocial, we either turn posts into drafts or reschedule them for later days.

We choose a time frame during which we don’t share updates. The length of this time frame may depend on the extent of the tragedy and news cycles, or if it happens during working hours or not. Typically, we go for a couple hours, a half day, or an entire day. Before this timeframe is up, we then reevaluate if we should start posting again.

During this time, we will still respond to customers and others who are messaging us directly in need of help or other assistance. We don’t stop being community managers; we just pause our outgoing social media blasts.

Pause those social media ads, too!

Don’t forget to pause ads as well, or work with your paid manager to do so. Ads are usually more sales-y in subject matter. And who cares about buying SEO software — even if we think it’s pretty cool — when there’s a huge earthquake and people are dying?

There’s no sleep button on life

We’re huge believers in having a community team who’s trained on all things. (If you want to know more about that, watch this presentation from Jen.) Our team, who’s trained on and has access to our social media, currently spans four US time zones because there is no sleep button on life. Even if we may be snoozing, the world turns.

Each one of us holds a responsibility to our community and brand. Sometimes, this means we stay up until the wee hours of the morning because there’s a tool outage. And sometimes this means we stop what we’re doing and jump in, or we reach out and ask for anyone on our team to help.

I was at a conference and on paid time off when the Paris attacks happened. I saw it come through early on my Twitter feed, which meant that I hopped into our Slack channel on my phone and told our team what was happening. It was working hours for us, so it was pretty seamless to alert everyone and get someone else to stop all the social media.

Don’t capitalize on tragedy

This should be common sense, but apparently, it is not. Remain sensitive to the issues at hand.

Do not tweet on a hashtag trend without investigating the trend’s topic, as this boutique did during the Aurora shootings:

And don’t pull an NRA, like you haven’t watched the news (also during the Aurora shooting aftermath):

Don’t act like you care, but actually just want people to give you money, like the GAP during Hurricane Sandy:

And worse, don’t offer a discount and discount code to your community affected by tragedy. People whose houses and communities were destroyed during Hurricane Sandy didn’t give two shits about a sale at American Apparel just for them:

Your community has its own tragedies, too

Community managers also must pay attention to what’s happening in your community. The world itself may be floating along just fine, but your community could be distracted. Recently, our community lost the wonderful Dana Lookadoo.

In Dana’s honor, our team paused social media for the day. Jen also wrote a lovely blog post about how much she impacted us, gave the community a place to grieve, and helped set up a scholarship in her name. We did this because we loved Dana, and it came from our hearts. (Miss you, Dana!)

Sometimes your industry news needs to take a backseat

Don’t let industry news trump tragedies that are bigger than your community. It may be really important to your community and industry, but with few exceptions, it’s probably not as important — or it can wait.

The 2014 Isla Vista massacre took place right when SEOs were seeing impact from the Panda 4.0 (#26) update. I spent a lot of that extended holiday weekend on Moz’s social media. Our community was blowing up about Panda. This was right before we started a policy about stopping social media. But I remember getting so angry when watching my own Twitter feed, seeing every SEO paranoid about Panda and every other person concerned for the human life lost. From my personal account, I unfollowed a lot of SEOs that weekend and got pretty depressed about our community.

Take care of yourself

Which leads into the last bit of community manager advice: In the wake of tragedies, make sure you take care of yourself. There’s nothing shameful with stepping back and saying you need help managing your brand during times of tragedy. There’s nothing bad about asking for a second opinion from someone when you’ve reached your limit. I should’ve reached out to my team during that weekend.

Self-care looks different for everyone, but it just means to be nice to yourself in times of stress and when you’re feeling overwhelmed. It may mean unplugging for an afternoon or taking a walk. Or playing with your cat or treating yourself to your favorite meal. My friend Rachelle Abellar published some great books with self-care tips, advice, and ideas if you need inspiration.

Self-care is essential for every person. It’s okay if you’re burned out and need to take a break, or if you’re so agitated, you just need to lie down for a bit. Take care of yourself. Your community needs you to be a whole person.

And now, I’m going to do some self-care and watch Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

Panic button header image by WackyStuff

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