Archives for

seo

RankBrain Unleashed

Disclaimer: Much of what you’re about to read is based on personal opinion. A thorough reflection about RankBrain, to be sure, but still personal — it doesn’t claim to be correct, and certainly not “definitive,” but has the aim to make you ponder the evolution of Google.

Introduction

Whenever Google announces something as important as a new algorithm, I always try to hold off on writing about it immediately, to let the dust settle, digest the news and the posts that talk about it, investigate, and then, finally, draw conclusions.

I did so in the case of Hummingbird. I do it now for RankBrain.

In the case of RankBrain, this is even more correct, because — let’s be honest — we know next to nothing about how RankBrain works. The only things that Google has said publicly are in the video Bloomberg published and the few things unnamed Googlers told Danny Sullivan for his article, FAQ: All About The New Google RankBrain Algorithm.

Dissecting the sources

As I said before, the only direct source we have is the video interview published on Bloomberg.

So, let’s dissect what Jack Clark, reporter of the Bloomberg said in that video and what Greg Corrado — senior research scientist at Google and one of the founding members and co-technical lead of Google’s large-scale deep neural networks project —came others said to Clark.

RankBrain is already worldwide.

I wanted to say this first: If you’re wondering whether or not RankBrain is already affecting the SERPs in your country, now you know — it is.

RankBrain is Artificial Intelligence.

Does this mean that RankBrain is our first evidence of Google as the Star Trek computer? No, it does not.

It’s true that many Googlers — like Peter Norvig, Corinna Cortes, Mehryar Mohri , Yoram Singer, Thomas Dean, Jeff Dean and many others — have been investigating and working on machine/deep learning and AI for a number of years (since 2001, as you can see when scrolling down this page). It’s equally true that much of the Google work on language, speech, translation, and visual processing relies on machine learning and AI. However, we should consider the topic of ANI (Artificial Narrow Intelligence), which Tim Urban of Wait But Why describes as: “Machine intelligence that equals or exceeds human intelligence or efficiency at a specific thing.”

Considering how Google is still buggy, we could have some fun and call it HANI (Hopefully Artificial Narrow Intelligence).

All jokes aside, Google clearly intends for its search engine to be an ANI in the (near) future.

RankBrain is a learning system.

With the term “learning system,” Greg Corrado surely means “machine learning system.”

Machine learning is not new to Google. We SEOs discovered how Google uses machine learning when Panda rolled out in 2011.

Panda, in fact, is a machine learning-based algorithm able to learn through iterations what a “quality website” is — or isn’t.

In order to train itself, it needs a dataset and yes/no factors. The result is an algorithm that is eventually able to achieve its objective.

Iterations, then, are meant to provide the machine with a constant learning process, in order to refine and optimize the algorithm.

Hundreds of people are working on it, and on building computers that can think by themselves.

Uhhhh… (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

RankBrain is a machine learning system, but — from what Greg Corrado said in the video — we can infer that in the future, it will probably be a deep learning one.

We do not know when this transition will happen (if ever), but assuming it does, then RankBrain won’t need any input — it will only need a dataset, over which it will apply its learning process in order to generate and then refine its algorithm.

Rand Fishkin visualized in a very simple but correct way what a deep learning process is:

Remember — and I repeat this so there’s no misunderstanding — RankBrain is not (yet) a deep learning system, because it still needs inputs in order to work. So… how does it work?

It interprets languages and interprets queries.

Paraphrasing the Bloomberg interview, Greg Corrado gave this information about how RankBrain works:

It works when people make ambiguous searches or use colloquial terms, trying to solve a classic breakdown computers have because they don’t understand those queries or never saw them before.

We can consider RankBrain to be the first 100% post-Hummingbird algorithm developed by Google.

Even if we had some new algorithms rolling out after the Hummingbird release (e.g. Quality Update), those were based on pre-Hummingbird algos and/or were serving a very different phase of search (the Filter/Clustering and Ranking ones, specifically).

Credit: Enrico Altavilla

RankBrain seems to be a needed “patch” to the general Hummingbird update. In fact, we should remember that Hummingbird itself was meant to help Google understand “verbose queries.”

However, as Danny Sullivan wrote in the above mentioned FAQ article at Search Engine Land, RankBrain is not a sort of Hummingbird v.2, but rather a new algorithm that “optimizes” the Hummingbird work.

If you look at the image above while reading Greg Corrado’s words, we can say with a high degree of correctness that RankBrain acts in between the “Understanding” and the “Retrieving” phases of the overall search process.

Evidently, the too-ambiguous queries and the ones based on colloquialisms were too hard for Hummingbird to understand — so much so, in fact, that Google needed to create RankBrain.

RankBrain, like Hummingbird, generalizes and rewrites those kinds of queries, trying to match the intent behind them.

In order to understand a never-before-seen or unclear query, RankBrain uses vectors, which are — to quote the Bloomberg article — “vast amounts of written language embedded into mathematical entities,” and it tries to see if those vectors may have a meaning in relation to the query it’s trying to answer.

Vectors, though, don’t seem to be a completely new feature in the general Hummingbird algorithm. We have evidence of a very similar thing in 2013 via Matt Cutts himself, as you can see from the Twitter conversation below:

At that time, Google was still a ways from being perfect.

Upon discovering web documents that may answer the query, RankBrain retrieves them and lets them proceed, following the steps of the search phase until those documents are presented in a visible SERP.

It is within this context that we must accept the definition of RankBrain as a “ranking factor,” because in regards to the specific set of queries treated by RankBrain, this is substantially the truth.

In other words, the more RankBrain considers a web document to be a potentially correct answer to an unknown or not understandable query, the higher that document will rank in the corresponding SERP — while still taking into account the other applicable ranking factors.

Of course, it will be the choice of the searcher that ultimately informs Google as to what the answer to that unclear or unknown query is.

As a final note, necessary in order to head off the claims I saw when Hummingbird rolled out: No, your site did not lose visibility because of a mysterious RankBrain penalty.

Dismantling the RankBrain gears

Kristine Schachinger, a wonderful SEO geek whom I hold in deep esteem, relates RankBrain to Knowledge Graph and Entity Search in this article on Search Engine Land. However — while I’m in agreement that RankBrain is a patch of Hummingbird and that Hummingbird is not yet the “semantic search” Google announced — our opinions do differ on a few points.

I do not consider Hummingbird and Knowledge Graph to be the same thing. They surely share the same mission (moving from strings to things), and Hummingbird uses some of the technology behind Knowledge Graph, but still — they are two separate things.

This is, IMHO, a common misunderstanding SEOs have. So much so, in fact, that I even tend to not consider the Featured Snippets (aka the answers boxes) part of Knowledge Graph itself, as is commonly believed.

Therefore, if Hummingbird is not the same as Knowledge Graph, then we should think of entities not only as named entities (people, concepts like “love,” planets, landmarks, brands), but also as search entities, which are quite different altogether.

Search entities, as described by Bill Slawski, are as follows:

A query a searcher submits
Documents responsive to the query
The search session during which the searcher submits the query
The time at which the query is submitted
Advertisements presented in response to the query
Anchor text in a link in a document
The domain associated with a document

The relationships between these search entities can create a “probability score,” which may determine if a web document is shown in a determined SERP or not.

We cannot exclude the fact that RankBrain utilizes search entities in order to find the most probable and correct answers to a never-before-seen query, then uses the probability score as a qualitative metric in order to offer reasonable, substantive SERPs to the querying user.

The biggest advancement with RankBrain, though, is in how it deals with the quantity of content it analyzes in order to create the vectors. It seems bigger than the classic “link anchor text and surrounding text” that we always considered when discussing, for instance, how the Link Graph works.

There is a patent filed by Google that cites one of the AI experts cited by Greg Corrado — Thomas Strohmann — as an author.

In that patent, very well explained (again) by Bill Slawski in this post on Gofishdigital.com, is described a process through which Google can discover potential meanings for non-understandable queries.

In the patent, huge importance is attributed to context and “concepts,” and the fact that RankBrain uses vectors (again, “vast amounts of written language embedded into mathematical entities”). This is likely because those vectors are needed to secure a higher probability of understanding context and detecting already-known concepts, thus resulting in a higher probability of positively matching those unknown concepts it’s trying to understand in the query.

Speculating about RankBrain

As the section title says, now I enter in the most speculative part of this post.

What I wrote before, though it may also be considered speculation, has the distinct possibility of being true. What I am going to write now may or may not be true, so please, take it with a grain of salt.

DeepMind and Google Search

In 2014, Google acquired a company specialized in learning systems called DeepMind. I cannot help but consider that some of its technology and the evolutions of its technologies are used by Google for improving its search algorithm — hence the machine learning process of RankBrain.

In this article published last June on technologyreview.com, it’s explained in detail how not having a correctly-formatted database is the biggest obstacle for a correct machine and deep learning process. Without it, the neural computing (which is behind machine and deep learning) cannot work.

In the case of language, then, having “vast amounts of written language” is not enough if there’s no context, especially if not using n-grams within the search so the machine can understand it.

However, Karl Moritz Hermann and some of his DeepMind colleagues described in this paper how they were able to discover the kind of annotations they were looking for in classic “news highlights,” which are independent from the main news body.

Allow me to quote the Technology Review article in explaining their experiment:

Hermann and co anonymize the dataset by replacing the actors in sentences with a generic description. An example of some original text from the Daily Mail is this: “The BBC producer allegedly struck by Jeremy Clarkson will not press charges against the “Top Gear” host, his lawyer said Friday. Clarkson, who hosted one of the most-watched television shows in the world, was dropped by the BBC Wednesday after an internal investigation by the British broadcaster found he had subjected producer Oisin Tymon “to an unprovoked physical and verbal attack.”

An anonymized version of this text would be the following:

The ent381 producer allegedly struck by ent212 will not press charges against the “ent153” host, his lawyer said friday. ent212, who hosted one of the most – watched television shows in the world, was dropped by the ent381 wednesday after an internal investigation by the ent180 broadcaster found he had subjected producer ent193 “to an unprovoked physical and verbal attack.”

In this way it is possible to convert the following Cloze-type query to identify X from “Producer X will not press charges against Jeremy Clarkson, his lawyer says” to “Producer X will not press charges against ent212, his lawyer says.”

And the required answer changes from “Oisin Tymon” to “ent212.”

In that way, the anonymized actor is only possible to identify with some kind of understanding of the grammatical links and causal relationships between the entities in the story.

Using the Daily Mail, Hermann was able to provide a large, useful dataset to the DeepMind deep learning machine, and thus train it. After the training, the computer was able to correctly answer up to 60% of the questions asked.

Not a great percentage, we might be thinking. Besides, not all documents on the web are presented with the kind of highlights the Daily Mail or CNN sites have.

However, let me speculate: What are the search index and the Knowledge Graph if not a giant, annotated database? Would it be possible for Google to train its neural machine learning computing systems using the same technology DeepMind used with the Daily Mail-based database?

And what if Google were experimenting and using the Quantum Computer it shares with NASA and USRA for these kinds of machine learning tasks?

Or… What if Google were using all the computers in all of its data centers as one unique neural computing system?

I know, science fiction, but…

Ray Kurzweil’s vision

Ray Kurzweil is usually known for the “futurist” facets of his credentials. It’s easy for us to forget that he’s been working at Google since 2012, personally hired by Larry Page “to bring natural language understanding to Google.” Natural language understanding is essential both for RankBrain and for Hummingbird to work properly.

In an interview with The Guardian last year, Ray Kurzweil said:

When you write an article you’re not creating an interesting collection of words. You have something to say and Google is devoted to intelligently organising and processing the world’s information. The message in your article is information, and the computers are not picking up on that. So we would like to actually have the computers read. We want them to read everything on the web and every page of every book, then be able to engage an intelligent dialogue with the user to be able to answer their questions.

The DeepMind technology I cited above seems to be going in that direction, even though it’s still a non-mature technology.

The biggest problem, though, is not really being able to read billion of documents, because Google is already doing it (go read the EULA of Gmail, for instance). The biggest problem is understanding the implicit meaning within the words, so that Google may properly answer users’ questions, or even anticipate the answers before the questions are asked.

We know that Google is hard at work to achieve this, because the same Kurzweil told us that in the same interview:

“We are going to actually encode that, really try to teach it to understand the meaning of what these documents are saying.”

The vectors used by RankBrain may be our first glimpse of the technology Google will end up using for understanding all context, which is fundamental for giving a meaning to language.

How can we optimize for RankBrain?

I’m sure you’re asking this question.

My answer? This is a useless question, because RankBrain targets non-understandable queries and those using colloquialisms. Therefore, just as it’s not very useful to create specific pages for every single long-tail keyword, it’s even less useful to try targeting the queries RankBrain targets.

What we should do is insist on optimizing our content using semantic SEO practices, in order to help Google understand the context of our content and the meaning behind the concepts and entities we are writing about.

What we should do is consider the factors of personalized search as priorities, because search entities are strictly related to personalization. Branding, under this perspective, surely is a strategy that may have positive correlation to RankBrain and Hummingbird as they interpret and classify web documents and their content.

RankBrain, then, may not mean that much for our daily SEO activities, but it is offering us a glimpse of the future to come.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Continue reading →

We’re Pleased to Announce Moz Content – A New Product for Content Marketers

Posted by JayLeary

Stating the obvious here, but content is a massively important part of any inbound marketing campaign. The problem that most of us run into — and I know this well from years of SEO consulting with publishers — is that even “good” content can fade from view without a share, link, or conversion. Engaging an audience isn’t as simple as clicking “publish.”

So, how do we avoid making phantom content a habit?

For Moz, timely data has been a big part of the answer. Over the years, we’ve built internal tools like 1Metric to guide our work. It’s a simple strategy, but the more analysis we perform, the better we understand our audience. The better we understand our audience, the easier it is to produce engaging content.

When we blog and talk about those tools, folks in the community remind us that having something similar for their own use would be really helpful.

Well, we took that feedback to heart and, about a year ago, set out to create a product that helps marketers and content creators optimize their content efforts. Now, after lots of hard work, we’re ready to roll back the curtain on our latest offering: Moz Content.

Enough talk – let’s check it out!

Here’s a quick overview of we came up with…

The Content Audit

At the heart of Moz Content is the Content Audit. With an Audit, you can crawl and analyze any site, including a competitor’s. The Audit inventories a site’s pages and uncovers wins based on social and link activity… In other words, the basic analysis you’re probably already cobbling together in Excel.

More importantly, Moz Content helps you find meaning in that mess of data with automatic tagging and filtering based on topics, authors, and even content types (think lists, videos, news articles, and more). With an Audit, you can answer important questions about a site’s strategy, like:

How do Guides on the Moz Blog stack up against Lists?

vs.

Average links and shares are almost double for Guides. Let’s keep it up!

The filtering lets you segment content to easily surface insights about your current strategy. Are “social media” or “link building” articles generating more links? How do Whiteboard Fridays compare with other videos? Audits let you shortcut the analysis and answer pressing questions about your audience’s interests.

That point-in-time analysis is helpful when you’re researching or course-correcting, but we also know that ongoing performance reporting is critical to a content marketer’s workflow. That’s where Tracked Audits come in.

With a Tracked Audit, Moz Content will automatically re-crawl a site every week and trend your performance metrics. Then, with the handy Audit Selector, you can compare the Audits we’ve archived in order to measure your progress.

By comparing two Audits, you can easily surface gains or losses and learn if your latest efforts are resonating.

Content Search

When we built Moz Content, we knew that we’d need to help sites at both ends of the content creation spectrum. Tracked Audits are great if a site has an active audience, but if you’re just getting started, the focus is usually on research. That’s where Content Search comes in.

Content Search lets you explore popular articles from across the web with simple topic searches. Interested in SEO and content? A quick search for (no surprises here) “SEO AND content” surfaces competitor articles that have garnered lots of attention.

(You can also search for content on domains with the “site:” operator.)

Moz Content monitors hundreds of thousands of English-language sites in order to surface new content about the niches you play in. Use the tool to analyze competitors or research topics that are important to your audience.

For social media marketers, Content Search also helps with curation. After you find something interesting, you can share it directly with your followers:

It’s worth mentioning that our index is still growing and you may see some gaps in the reporting. If that’s the case, feel free to reach out with topics you’d like covered in the future.

And a final note: you’ll probably notice we’re not reporting Twitter shares. Twitter, as of a few days ago, shut down the endpoint that many of us were using to measure Tweet counts. We didn’t want this wrinkle to hold up the launch, but we’re on the case and working on alternatives.

Time to test drive

There are other details we could cover, but I’m guessing you’d rather just dive in and see for yourself. With Moz Content, we’re providing free, limited access to the Audit and Content Search. Just head over to https://moz.com/content and take it for a spin. (Tip: Log in to your Community account first for elevated page limits, more searches, and a saved Audit.)

Try it out!

If you need more data and higher limits, you can always subscribe to Moz Content on a monthly or annual plan. The Strategists tier goes for $59/month and we’ll be adding higher limit tiers with Google Analytics integration soon.

This is just the beginning for Moz Content — we’ll need your help as we improve and expand upon the functionality. Don’t hesitate to let us know what you’d like to see, and feel free to send any feedback our way with a comment below, a note to our Help Team, or outreach on social.

Continue reading →

5 Steps to Content Marketing Success

Posted by Paddy_Moogan

Content marketing is hard.

The problem is that the process looks easy. You brainstorm some ideas, choose one that you like, design and build it, do some outreach and you get traffic, links and social shares. Job done.

It’s a bit like link building, where someone may say, “Just build great content and the links will come.”

Unfortunately, it’s very rarely that straightforward.

Yes, sometimes you can get lucky and something will fly with little effort. But anyone that says that content marketing is easy has probably never done it over and over again. This is one of the reasons that I really liked this post last week by Simon Penson, because he admitted that he’d failed many times before getting it right. Simon pointed out that the plan he shared just increases the possibility of success — it doesn’t guarantee it.

In this post, I’m going to share our process for putting together a content marketing campaign. It doesn’t guarantee success either, but I’m positive that it puts us in a much better position than if we didn’t have a process at all. We’re always trying to improve this process, and it’s never going to be 100% perfect. With each campaign we do, there’s usually something we add or take away which also reflects the ever-changing nature of our industry. It’s also hard to manufacture and force that “ah-ha” moment, when you get a great insight into something and which then generates a great idea. Although this slide deck by Mark Johnstone helps make sense of how we get those moments in an excellent way.

One thing to point out before we get into the meat of this post is that it’s not just about “big” content. Our role as digital marketers (many of us with an SEO background) goes much wider than content that is purely designed to generate links and social shares.

A content strategy needs to include more than just one type of content, and for most clients at Aira, we do multiple types of content based on their objectives. But that’s a post for another day, because today I’m going to talk about our process in the context of content that is designed to generate links and social shares, driving traffic as a result.

There are five broad steps in the process:

Research and idea generation
Idea validation
Production
Promotion
Conversion

Step 1 – Research and idea generation

It’s easy to dive straight into brainstorming and idea generation, and sometimes, that can work. However, I’d always recommend a period of research into an industry prior to this so that you can get a feel for what’s been done before, what has worked, and what hasn’t. This can mean that you go into a brainstorming section far better equipped to generate ideas that may work.

One thing to point out at this stage is that you shouldn’t put yourself under pressure to come up with a completely new idea. It’s great if you can, but the reality is that it’s unlikely that something has never, ever been done before in some form or another. So you shouldn’t put this pressure on yourself. The following quote is an apt one:

“An idea is nothing more or less than a new combination of old elements.”

This is from the book A Technique for Producing Ideas, published in 1939 by James Webb Young. It’s a short — but excellent — read, and I’d highly recommend it.

I think you’d agree that over 75 years later, this quote is even more true now!

Therefore, a big part of the thinking behind our process is looking for inspiration in what others have done and asking ourselves if we can do it a little bit better or a bit differently. I’m certainly not saying you shouldn’t try to come up with brand new ideas, but don’t let an idea fall by the wayside just because it has been done before.

I’m going to frame the rest of this step by saying something: The most successful* content that you find will come down to at least one of three things:

The story – If something has a strong story or hook behind it, it’s more likely to grab attention and be picked up by mainstream news websites and publishers.
The data – Often tied into the story but not always explicitly, if you have unique data or data that has been sliced/interpreted differently, it can be of more interest to someone.
The production – Sometimes a piece of content may just look visually stunning, and that is enough to generate links and shares.

There is one more which I want to point out, but it’s been deliberately left out of the list above. The one other thing that can make a piece of content successful is an existing audience to market that audience to. A prime example in our industry here is Moz, who has a very large, existing audience. This means that this very blog post is more likely to get links and shares than it would if I published it on my own blog, which has a very small audience.

This is important to remember because, when looking at your competitors and the success of their content, the numbers may be skewed a bit because of the audience they have. I’ll show you how to offset this below.

* Successful, in the context of this post, means generating links and social shares that drive quality traffic. Success can mean many things to different businesses, so I just wanted to remind you of this.

Find your content competitors

The first key step is to research your content competitors, and it’s very important to recognize the difference between your product/service competitors and your content competitors. Let’s look at an example.

Let’s say you’re a travel website. You may be trying to rank for keywords such as “flights to New York” or “holiday apartments in Italy” because you provide those things. You’ll have competitors who are trying to rank for the same kind of keywords and of course, you should take a look at what they’re up to. However, there is a whole other section of websites who don’t compete for these type of keywords, but whom you can learn a lot from when it comes to content. In this example, those websites are travel bloggers and publishers who have travel sections. They produce the exact kind of content that generates links, social shares and traffic — exactly what we’re trying to do with our own websites.

Examples in the travel world could be Nomadic Matt and Jayne Gorman, who both produce great content that generates links and social shares. If I run a travel website and I wanted to learn what content can work well in my industry, I’d definitely take a closer look at these kind of people for inspiration. They may even be people who I could partner with on content ideas, but that’s a bit outside the scope of this post.

It’s pretty simple to find our content competitors. The quickest way is to think of a few non-commercial keywords. Examples related to travel may be “guide to New York City” or “planning a trip to Italy,” which are likely to show search results that include publishers/blogs as opposed to direct competitors. You can also use the keyword search function in Buzzsumo to do these kind of searches:

The results will show you content that contains this keyword, ordered by social shares

If you’re not familiar with Buzzsumo and would like to learn the basics, take a look at this post that I wrote on Moz a few months ago, which talks about this and shows how we use the API for one of our internal tools at Aira.

Finding stories and topics

Once you’ve found a handful of content competitors (we try and find at least 4–5), it’s time to start taking a closer look at what they’re doing. Buzzsumo allows us to do this quickly and easily; all we need to do is run a domain search and use an advanced search operator to search multiple domains at once:

You just need to put OR in between the domains that you want to do research on. The resulting search looks like this:

As you can see, Nomadic Matt is dominating the results, which is likely to be because of a combination of writing great content and having a larger audience than the other websites we searched for. This is a good example of where we may actually want to temporarily remove him from the list, so that we see a more diverse set of results. However, you can also just download a CSV from Buzzsumo and filter his domain out if you wish.

The important step here is to scan the list of results to try and find patterns and trends. In the screenshot below, I can immediately see a pattern:

Some of the best-performing posts are lists. We can see this quickly by noticing the numbers at the start of the title. Going a bit further down, I notice another pattern:

Lots of these posts are “How to”-style posts, which are clearly popular with his audience due to them featuring high on the list of results.

It doesn’t take long to start noticing these patterns. Make a note of them and we’ll come back to how we’re going to use them later.

Another way to find patterns is to analyze the titles in bulk. We can do this by doing an export from Buzzsumo so that we get a list of titles:

You can then copy and paste these titles into a word cloud generator tool, such as Wordle , and get something like this:

You’ll need to remove common words, such as the website names and domains, but the result above is basically a summary of the words that get the most shares — which is really handy to know in bulk. Again, make a note of these kind of themes.

I know what you may be thinking at this point: What about links? Buzzsumo can give you backlink data, but you have to click on each individual result to get it. This is fine for a small number of articles, but we’re trying to do bulk analysis. So instead, we’re going to export the results to a CSV and then upload those results into URL Profiler, which can fetch link metrics for us in bulk.

These are the settings you want:

You can select your choice of Mozscape, Majestic, or Ahrefs data, or all three — it’s up to you. The point is that we need to know how many links our content competitors are generating to their individual content pieces. The results will then look something like this when you export the results to Excel:

Once you’ve got this, you can do some pivot table magic to make the data easier to consume. Here are the settings that you need:

Then you’ll end up with a graph that looks something like this (you can, of course, make it prettier!):

As we can see, A Luxury Travel Blog is leading the way in terms of generating links to their content, so they’re worthy of a closer look. The beauty of this process is that Buzzsumo does a pretty good job of excluding the homepage from their results, so the results are showing links just to the content they produce. From here, we can do a deeper dive into their links using Mozscape, Majestic, or Ahrefs — whichever you prefer.

Before moving on, I want to mention a few other tools that we use in this step of the process. Epic Beat is very similar to Buzzsumo in that you can enter a domain or keyword to find what content is being shared the most. Combining the results from Epic Beat and Buzzsumo can give you lots of information on what is working for competitors in your industry:

Another cool tool — which is more for qualitative analysis rather than quantitive — is Brandtale , which curates digital content/advertising campaigns on large publishers. Sticking with our travel example, I can browse their travel section to find brands who are running campaigns:

I can drill into any of these and see what these brands are doing and if I can learn anything. Trust me, running content campaigns like this on large publishers, such as National Geographic or the New York Times, is expensive. A lot of work will have gone into them, which means they’re worth looking at.

Finding data sources

Our next step is to try and find data sources that could lead to us creating a piece of content or a story that can be pitched to publications. I’d highly recommend Statista for this, which is a growing resource of statistics and facts. Sticking with our travel example, here is a snapshot of the kind of data it has available with a simple search:

If Statista doesn’t have what you need, a few simple searches on Google will often yield good results. Just remember to do a bit of due diligence on where the data comes from and make sure that it’s as sound as possible.

Failing that, can you get your own data? There are many organizations and services out there who will gather data on your behalf. Yes, you have to pay for them, but if you think the data can help you generate links and shares for your website, then it could be worth the investment. Here are a few options:

Some of these can be expensive to use, so I recommend using something like Google Consumer Surveys to poll a small sample of people. Then, if the data is looking promising, run the full survey.

Finding visual content

The final piece of this research is finding visual content which has done well and seeing if we can do better. Like finding data, don’t overthink this, and start with a few simple searches. Google Images is always a good place to start with keywords such as this:

You can get more specific based on the website you’re working with, but what we’re looking to do here is scan the results quickly and see if anything stands out to us:

If we find any that look particularly good or interesting, we take a closer look and ask ourselves the question, “Can we do it better?” While some visuals may look okay and performed well, there are often ways to improve on something, such as:

Making the core story or headline more obvious
Making it interactive to make the key messages easier to consume
Making the design cleaner so that key messages are communicated better

There are any number of ways a good designer can make an existing idea much better, and as we discussed earlier, making something beautiful can sometimes be enough to make it successful.

Once we’ve found something we think we can do better, the next question is how successful was it? One way to do this is to use this Google Chrome extension to automatically do a Google Image reverse search to see how many other websites have used that visual. If the answer is a fair few, then you know that a better version is likely to be of interest to a number of websites.

Putting all of this research together

That was a lot to go through! But trust me, it’s worth it. The next step is to take all of this information and put it into a brainstorm session brief for your team. When it comes to brainstorming, many people will say “all ideas are good ideas” — but this simply isn’t true.

A brief is very important here, because your team needs to walk into that session with the right information and context. If they don’t, then the majority of ideas that are generated may not actually be usable — which isn’t a very good use of time.

To make this easier, I’ve put together a Google Doc template which you’re welcome to download and make a copy of. You can find it here.

Step 2 – Idea validation

The more I work on content marketing campaigns, the more I value this step in the process. You can think that you have a great idea, but how do you know for sure? The fact is that you can never predict this 100%, but you can increase the possibility by using a framework to validate an idea.

The key thing here is not the frameworks that I talk about the below, but to make sure you use some kind of framework so that you can consistently and fairly assess the quality of your ideas.

One of the frameworks I’d recommend, which some of you may have heard of, is from Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. I’m not going to go into too much detail here simply because lots has already been written on the topic, including this post from Distilled and this more recent post by Hannah Smith, which references the framework. There is also this summary of the book, which talks about the key takeaways and what the principles of Made to Stick are.

In summary, the book outlines six principles which, through their research, the authors feel make an idea stick in our minds.

Simplicity – An idea needs to be easy for us to comprehend quickly. A good way to test this is to write the headline and see if you can communicate the idea within the restrains of a headline( i.e. you only have a short sentence).
Unexpectedness – While the idea doesn’t have to be 100% brand new, there needs to be something new or unexpected about it.
Concreteness – This can often be mixed up with simplicity, but is subtly different. Concreteness is all about the idea not allowing room for ambiguity or misinterpretation of what you’re trying to say.
Credibility – The basis of the idea needs to be credible. This can be via credible data, a credible (expert) author or a credible company behind the idea.
Emotion – If an idea provokes an emotional response, we’re much more likely to remember it.
Story – We touched upon this earlier and goes back to when we were children. We were told stories and all of us can remember certain ones. We’re used to the structure of a story and how it peaks our interest.

The key here isn’t the framework itself, although that is very important. The key is the ability for you and your team to give each other valuable, constructive feedback on an idea. It’s often easy to just say “I don’t like that idea” or “That idea won’t work,” which, even if you’re right, isn’t the most useful feedback to receive. With a good framework, someone can reference it in their feedback. So if you’re using the framework above, you can say “I don’t think the idea is simple” or “It’s not concrete enough” — this is far more useful feedback to hear and it may mean that an idea simply needs tweaking rather than dumping completely.

As mentioned earlier, this isn’t the only framework you can use. Another one goes back to what we talked about earlier:

Do we have a story or an interesting hook?
Do we have unique, interesting data?
Can we make the idea look beautiful?

Answering yes to at least one of these questions can increase the chances of your idea being a success.

Step 3 – Production

I’m not a designer or a developer, so I’m not going to tell you how to design or develop a piece of content. But there are some things that we’ve learned (sometimes the hard way) when it comes to producing a piece of content.

Function over form

The first thing I want to share here which is important is to remember function over form. Never, ever say “I want an infographic” or “I want a video” or “I want an interactive piece of content.” You should focus on getting the right idea first, then ask what the best way to present that idea is. If it turns out that an infographic is the best way to present your idea, then great. But don’t start with the form; start with the idea and see where it takes you.

This may help reduce the number of terrible infographics on the web which, unfortunately, our industry is at least partly responsible for!

Mobile-first design

There are stats upon stats showing the growth of mobile, so I’m not going to tell you those again. If you want to do some digging, I’d highly recommend the work and analysis from Ben Evans, who specializes in this area.

In relation to content, what we need to remember is that content discovery is becoming more and more mobile-centric. We typically think of content discovery as someone browsing on their laptop/desktop machines and clicking through from a blog, Twitter, or Facebook. In reality, though, it actually looks more like this:

When someone clicks on a link like this on their mobile device, they expect the content they land on to work perfectly on their device. If it doesn’t, the user is not likely to enjoy or engage with the content, let along share it or link to it from somewhere.

This deck from Vicke Cheung does a great job of showing the importance of designing for mobile, along with practical tips for doing this:

Ten Lessons in Designing Content for Mobile from Vicke Cheung

Another key thing here is to let designers design. Try not to restrict them by providing a brief that tells them 100% how something needs to be done. Give them the goals of the piece and some guidelines, then let them design. Of course give them feedback along the way, but try not to be too prescriptive.

Go-live checklist

One of the lessons we’ve learned the hard way is that in your excitement to get something live, you can forget some of the basics. A few common things that need to be thought about, but are easily forgotten, can be:

Social/Open Graph tagging
Analytics code
Responsive testing

To help with this, here is another Google Doc which you can download and use which contains a few things to remember:

While the things on this list seem basic, it can be very easy to forget!

Step 4 – Promotion

Here is one of the key takeaways: Spend just as much time on promotion as you do on the production. It’s so easy to get caught up on design, development, and the idea itself, you can end up spending most of your time on producing it and not nearly enough time on promoting it.

There are three different types of promotion we work on at Aira. These differ by client, but ideally, we spend time on all of the following:

A combination of all three can help ensure that your content reaches as many people as possible. I used to rely solely on organic content promotion via traditional link building outreach/digital PR, but this may not be enough and ignores some useful techniques.

Paid promotion

Paying to promote your content can be very useful in generating traffic to a piece of content, which in turn, can also help generate social shares and sometimes links. Larry Kim goes into detail on this in his post over on Search Engine Land. The basic principle is that you can use paid promotion to get your content in front of writers, bloggers, journalists, and influencers.

There are a few options for how you can do this. Firstly, to reach a wide audience, you can use platforms such as Taboola or Outbrain. These can work well for reaching a very big audience, but targeting options for specific demographics on these platforms is still rather limited.

Wil Reynolds ran an experiment using these (and other) platforms, which is definitely worth looking at:

The $10,000 Paid Content + Paid Linking Test that is 100% Google Safe from Wil Reynolds

Our experience with these particular platforms is very mixed, with it working well for some clients but sending very untargeted traffic for others. So we’d advise starting with a small budget and assessing the quality of traffic before spending too much.

Other options are more regular social channels such as:

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Pinterest

The one I want to focus on is Facebook, where the targeting options are almost scary. But they’re useful to us nonetheless. You can do things such as specifically targeting journalists using options such as:

You can put whatever list you’d like in here, but I’m sure you get the idea!

You can also go one step further in targeting people by uploading their email address into the custom audience feature of Facebook:

It’s straightforward here to upload your outreach list; if Facebook can find a match for the email addresses, you can advertise directly to those people. If you’d like to go into more detail on this, take a look at this post I wrote last year.

Earned promotion

This is likely to be more familiar to most of us because this section covers traditional link building outreach and digital PR. Essentially, we need to find a list of influencers and contact them in order to promote our content to them. This sounds simple, but can often be the trickiest part of the process… because it’s here that you may find out that you don’t actually have a great idea! This is why the idea validation step is so important — because it reduces the chances of promotion going wrong.

I’ve written multiple times about finding outreach prospects before, so I won’t repeat everything here. But I will point out my favourite techniques for doing this.

Finding existing lists of prospects

I honestly start every single piece of link building research with these kind of searches:

Simply switch out [INDUSTRY] for your own industry and you’ll find more than enough prospects to keep you busy!

Finding mainstream publications and journalists

Here, we’re trying to find high-level outreach targets who write for national newspapers and mainstream publications. The value of these can be huge, because many websites like this have the ability to send a LOT of traffic to your website.

Here are a few tools (mostly paid, unfortunately) that you can use for this kind of research:

You can of course do manual research as well, but these tools can help speed things up a bit.

Owned promotion

This one will depend heavily on what your client already has, but essentially we’re talking about using their own channels, such as:

Social channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Pinterest
Their existing blog
Their email marketing list

This may sound easy, but I’ve worked with some companies where the social team sits separately to the SEO/content team — which can make it harder to get them to work together! If you can bridge this gap, though, it’s a pretty easy win to get eyeballs on your content.

Step 5 – Conversion and tracking

So here we are, at the final step of our process, and I want to be really honest about this bit. It can be quite hard to convert a visitor to a piece of content that is designed for links and social shares. These kind of content pieces are often not designed to “sell” to the visitor, so getting them to click across to the main website or a product page (let alone getting them to buy something) is difficult. There are exceptions; this piece from Bellroy is one that comes to mind which is informational but very related to their product:

Generally though, this is difficult to pull off. So what can we do instead?

Micro-conversions

If we can’t convert someone into a buyer, what else can we do? One thing we’ve done for some clients is to try and capture a visitor’s email address so that we can then target them on Facebook or via email marketing. Or it could be any other number of things, such as:

Commenting on a piece of content (so you also get their email address)
Sharing a piece of content
Spending a certain amount of time on your content

Build retargeting lists

If someone visits a piece of content, you can build a retargeting list and then advertise to them in the future. There are two ways you can do this:

Advertise your products and services to try and encourage clicks and future purchases
Advertise your future content pieces — this can work very well if you’re working on a content series, i.e. a series of blog posts that all tie together

Build retargeting lists based on interactions with a page

This is a post for another day, but it is possible to go more targeted when building your retargeting lists, by building them based on how someone interacts with your content. For example, you can fire Facebook retargeting pixels when someone clicks on a certain link or when someone selects a certain option (if your content is interactive). This means that you can build lists that are very specific, and you can cater your advertising based on the interactions that users have carried out.

To wrap up

So that’s about it for today’s post! These are the five broad steps that we take for a content marketing campaign, and while we’re always iterating on them and improving them, they have increased our chances of success — which is what this is all about. You’ll never guarantee success, but whether you use the process above or your own, you certainly should utilize a process to enhance your chances.

I’d love to hear your feedback in the comments!

Continue reading →

When Data Just Isn’t Enough: The Hidden Context that’s Key to Content Loyalty

Posted by ronell-smith

(Image source)

When the client asked to “go mute” during our monthly client call, there was no reason to sound the alarm. After all, being able to talk through what they’ve heard as a team, in private, was normal. But when the always-skeptical global marketing director said the COO (who has been in the room for the 10 minutes of analytics discussion) wants to take the discussion offline for a bit, but wants you to hold on, I knew things had likely gone off the rails.

“Thanks for holding, you guys,” says the head of marketing upon taking the phone off mute after what seemed like an eternity. “Tim was just in here, and he had some questions about the data. He expressed concern that it appears [the team] is simply regurgitating a bunch of numbers.”

After it was explained that the numbers actually exceeded everyone’s expectations for how the site would perform after the redesign, the link detox and having new content in place, she made things crystal clear.

“Let me cut to the chase,” she said. “The numbers are great. We’re happy with the numbers. But this the same thing our last agency provided us: great data. What we’re looking for is someone to share what the data is telling us about what to do in the future, so we can focus only on those areas that are likely to benefit the brand. We’d like to know what will help us attain success in the future, not what [your team] thinks will lead to success in the future.”

What this client needed was the Oracle of Delphi, not someone to analyze their data.

But she was right. They were looking for all-important insight, insight that could not be gleaned from data alone. However, this agency and all the others she’d worked with had led her to believe the data is gospel. Follow it to the Promised Land.

She knew better.

Data alone is never enough.

Though many in online marketing prefer to see data as the be-all and end-all, at best data alone tells us what’s likely to be effective in the future. It does not provide the “if this, then that” clarity we crave.

The more we share “according-to-the-data” insight, the more we walk a tightrope that never ends. Data tells us what happened, can yield great insight into what’s likely to happen, and is at its best when used to discern what is happening.

However, in the real world, things change constantly and often without warning, a fact that cannot be accounted for via data alone.

“[Data] is an abstract description of reality,” writes Jim Harris on his blog, Obsessive-Compulsive Data Quality. ”…The inconvenient truth is that the real world is not the same thing as these abstract descriptions of it—not even when we believe that data perfection is possible (or have managed to convince ourselves that our data is perfect).”

To be sure, data is integral to attaining success in the information-rich online marketing arena. Everything from our websites to our campaigns to conversions depends on it. In fact, data is a large part of what sets online marketing apart from traditional marketing, which can, at times, feel like so much guesswork.

But over the course of the last two years, through interviews with more than 300 folks in the content marketing/inbound marketing space, I’ve come to realize that many wonder if data (insofar as how it’s used to make decisions) isn’t as much a curse as it is a blessing.

(Image source)

In conversation after conversation, I’ve heard CEOs, SEOs, CMOs, PPC nerds, and content folks say the same things, which is summed up nicely by these comments from a director-level SEO at one of the most successful agencies in the US: “Even in those cases where we deliver to clients data that far exceeds their expectations, they often fire us. Heck, especially when we deliver those amazing results, they fire us.”

I think this occurs for one of two reasons:

They realize data doesn’t yield the solution they’d hoped for, or
They falsely believe data highlights the end-game, meaning they can now thrive on autopilot.

As any of us working in online marketing can attest, nothing could be further from the truth.

Data is an important part of a large picture, one that is as nuanced and as varied as it is ever-changing.

Because of that, we need context.

“Data doesn’t come with context,” says Tim Gillman, an analytics nerd at Portent Interactive in Seattle. “For example: measuring content. If your data says people spend ~15 mins reading your post, there’s always the chance that they simply left their computer for awhile. You don’t know for certain they were loving your content.”

I struggled with this reality for months, wondering what, if anything, could be done to bridge this gap, which would allow us to (a) be given the time to do quality work for our clients and (b) have clients realize the efficacy of our efforts.

I read big data and data science books, started following the words and works of big data nerds active on social media, in addition to listening to podcasts, watching YouTube videos, and talking to as many people as I could to discern how we, as online marketers, can be successful.

Training ourselves to think about data differently

In the end, it was the sage words from Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen that helped me gain some clarity.

Data, at best, can only tell us about the past, he writes. It cannot help us see into the future.

For that, he adds, we need a theory for helping to explain what’s likely to happen. Taken together, both data and theory, serve to provide us with the building blocks of what can become the framework for success we crave.

To make this work, he says, we must go “dumpster diving” — hanging out in the real world, observing and noticing how things occur in real life — which will lead us to more effectively posit the hows (things really work) and whys (they work as they do).

Then, once we have the data, we use it to empirically assess the observed behavior, devoid of emotion.

The framework looks a lot like this:

Observe – Dumpster-diving in the real world
Theorize – Posit the how and the why
Test – Assess and compile data
Construct – Develop a framework for future efforts

With this model, we’re training ourselves to think about data in a different, but no less valuable, way. In the above scenario, data is an important part of the equation; it is not treated as the equation in its entirety.

This, to my mind, gets us closer to seeing data in the proper context. That is a part of the solution. But changing how we think about data won’t allow us to keep clients any better, won’t immediately make us better marketers and cannot, by itself, lead to better overall decisions being made.

For that to occur, we have to change two things: the data we act upon, and how we choose to act upon it.

A framework for finding your data goalposts

(Image source)

Without knowing it, Matthew Brown at MozCon 2015 provided us with the veritable playbook for how to use data to improve our content marketing efforts. During his talk, which was one of the best of the entire event, he highlighted the key to content marketing success: content loyalty.

The more loyal our audiences, the better able we are to sustain our content marketing efforts. (A loyal audience comprises the folks who most frequently visit your site.)

The key, Brown said during the talk, is to find the goalpost that helps you determine content loyalty for your brand, then optimize for that metric. So, instead of chasing Likes, shares, or links to your content, you’re focused on creating loyal visitors to your site.

This is important because one of the reasons content marketers end up getting lost down the data rabbit hole is we too often chase the wrong metrics (e.g., they highlight activity but don’t lead to conversions) or we attempt to track too many metrics, most of which don’t lead to the goal we, or our clients, are hoping for.

Here’s how such an effort could work for your brand, using the OTTC framework borrowed from Christensen’s work:

Observe
Determine what comprises “loyal visitors” for your brand. It could be visits per day, per week, or per month. This is the crucial first step. Get this wrong and nothing else matters. What you’re looking for is the metric that correlates with visitors becoming loyal to your site. Put simply, you’re looking for the gotcha that says “These folks are now loyal visitors.”
Theorize
Gather the team and spend some time thinking through what it is about your site and/or content that likely leads to these audience members becoming loyal fans and followers. Is it the length of the content? The number of images? The author? The amount of content above the fold? The number of ads?
Test
Use the information gleaned from that meeting with the team to begin testing the various on-page elements until you have a good idea of what it is that leads folks to become loyal. This is the fun part. To make it even more rewarding, you can rest assured that many of your competitors won’t be following suit, as many of them are content to guess at what works, then throw more of the same at the wall.
Construct
Develop a process by which you continue to optimize for content loyalty, in large part by creating the types and formats of content that you’ve uncovered as leading to content loyalty. Keep in mind, however, that this process is not static, as your audience’s needs are likely to change with time. But by analyzing the data, dumpster diving by interacting with the audience via emails, polls, Q&A, and sundry other methods of staying connected, your brand will be in great shape to continue putting the ball through the uprights.

Summation

This is a post I thought long and hard about writing. During this quest to better understand data and shine a light on how to make it work for us and not against us, I’ve developed a deep, sincere fascination for big data and the role it can play in answering some of our biggest questions.

I’m in no way anti-data. Hardly. What I’m against is the “data-tells-us-all-we-need-to-know” mindset I so often encounter.

I’m hopeful that, in the future, more and more of us are willing to be honest with ourselves and our clients, acknowledging what we know to be true: the data alone won’t save us.

Continue reading →

The Content Marketing Campaign Playbook – Guaranteeing Success in 2016

Posted by SimonPenson

Introduction

Stage One: Setting expectations and objectives

Stage Two: Audience understanding

Stage Three: Brand activation

Stage Four: Campaign plans

Stage Five: Finding the right prospects

Stage Six: Social

Stage Seven: Retargeting

Free downloadable campaign planner

__________

“How do I know if my content campaign is going to work?”

This question is the one I get asked more than any other at present, and for good reason; creating hit content, consistently, is one of the biggest challenges in marketing.

I’m certainly not going to pretend that every piece of content I’ve ever been involved in has been a hit. In fact, the opposite is probably closer to the truth — but failure teaches you much more, and allows you to iterate faster.

The result of that heartache and frustration is a process I want to share with you today, one that’s designed to maximize the possibility of success with content campaigns.

It is also important to point out here that I’m not talking about content strategy or the wider picture, but specifically those bigger campaigns that should punctuate your wider marketing plan.

The difference between good and bad ideas

So, why did we fail so many times? Why were truly exceptional campaign ideas not hitting the mark?

The answer to these questions lay both in our ability to answer a handful of very simple questions, and understanding how to align the various marketing disciplines required to ensure you deliver.

Let’s look now at the process that has made the difference between us delivering content that, while good on the face of it, didn’t deliver the objective, and the pieces that absolutely flew.

Put another way, the process that makes the difference between a campaign asset like the one below — which smashed every one of its key objectives — and one of the many that seemed like a good idea, but just failed to “fly.”

I’m sharing this example, not because it was our best-performing piece, but simply because it was the first time we saw the benefits of getting the process right from the start.

The objective for the piece was a sampling exercise: to get a challenger brand’s condoms into hands of 5,000 targeted men with a relatively small budget.

The resulting piece was an interactive quiz designed to capitalize on the “Fifty Shades of Grey” noise, as it coincided with the film’s launch. It worked by asking the site visitor a number of questions about their sex life before presenting them with a result between 0–50. The “Greyer” you were, the higher the score.

There were then calls-to-action around social sharing, further learning, and the main “sample request” option.

The piece was so popular that all 5,000 sample requests were taken up in just two days. The Buzzfeed post on it received 2,100 views in the first week, and ten major national websites covered the concept, in addition to numerous smaller blogs.

Facebook traction was also very impressive, with more than 4,500 post “Likes,” 560 comments, and an average engagement rate of 7.4%.

So how was this made possible? Let’s walk through the same process that spawned it now…

STAGE ONE

Setting expectation and objectives

Ground Zero for any successful campaign is objective setting. The process is still overlooked by many, but before you start, you must define what success looks like.

And that MUST come topped off with a healthy serving of realism.

If your budget is a couple of thousand pounds (or dollars) for the entire piece, then you must be honest about what this may achieve — both as a standalone piece and as part of the wider content strategy it sits within.

You must also be clear about where the value is coming from. Is the piece a brand play or a performance marketing effort? Metrics that may suit each of these can be seen below:

Brand content metrics

Dwell time
Social sharing
Eyeballs reached
Sentiment
Visits

Performance marketing content metrics

Visits
Leads generated
Effect on organic search visibility
Citations and links earned

There are many others, of course, but for a campaign to be measurable, you should set clear and realistic KPIs against any of these relevant to the campaign.

For instance, in the earlier example we talked through, the KPIs were simple and we captured them in a format similar to the one below:

Main Objective: Obtain 5,000 product sample requests and reach 100,000 new “eyeballs.”

Secondary Objectives: Improve social engagement, gain coverage on high-profile sites, and increase traffic to the site during the campaign period.

KPIs

PR Placements: 6+ high-profile site placements (notional Hitwise Traffic target of 100,000 for those pieces).

Social: Organic – Reach: 75,000; Engagement: 5,000 | Paid – Reach: 250,000; Clicks: 20,000.

Visits and actions: Doubling of traffic to the site during campaign period and 5,000 sample requests.

STAGE TWO

Audience understanding

Who

Once these KPIs are set and agreed upon, the next phase is to center your thinking on the audience with whom you want to engage, in order to achieve those objectives.

For the example campaign, the target market was relatively broad, but ended up being focused on females in the 18–34 range. The insight from the brand was that the trialling needed to understand that, and required a process for collating all known customer information — allowing us to create Campaign Personas.

I have written previously about how you can extract data from social to inform audience understanding, and while Facebook has changed Graph Search a lot since penning the piece, there is still value in following some of that process.

Also worth a read on the wider persona process is this excellent guide by Mike King. It contains a huge amount of information on how to leverage data to build an accurate picture of your customer or clients.

Creating campaign- or distribution-specific personas allows you to focus very clearly on creating the right content, angles, and distribution plan to hit those key objectives.

To do that, however, you must first dive into the data.

The starting points for this are existing marketing insight, social data, and/or output from Global Web Index, a SAAS offering (and paid-for tool) that allows you to mine a vast swathe of Internet usage data. Many of the ad platforms you use buy this data to power their own targeting.

Where

From social, you can extract data that helps add richness to the picture and how much time people spend on any particular platform. However, GWI aggregates that information and allows you to produce insights such as in the example below.

From this kind of data, you can plan a detailed, focused, and informed social distribution plan as part of the wider seeding strategy.

What’s also interesting to know is both the type of content this audience currently engages with and also how they believe your brand fits within that picture.

Mistakes are often made when businesses understand what the people they want to attract consume, without taking into account if the brand has the right to play in that specific space.

The good news is you can easily gain insight into both of these areas.

What

The starting point for this insight piece is a dive into Google Display Planner. This free tool is designed to help media planners with display ad targeting, but its data can also be used to understand which sites a select demographic may frequent.

In the example below, you can see we have entered a couple of keyword interests and a topic interest to form a target demographic.

By clicking that “Get placement ideas” button, you’re entered into the main dashboard where you can further refine everything, from age and gender to device use and back again.

A section I use quite a lot both for paid and PR targeting (as well as for initial audience insight) is the Individual Targeting Ideas > Placements > Sites drill down. This gives you a list of sites visited by your “audience,” which can be downloaded into a CSV file and sorted based on a number of metrics, including traffic, popularity, and more.

This then allows you to select a small number of sites that will most likely be visited by those thinking about your product or service for the next level of analysis.

Why

To understand what they’re into, you must now drill into what your audience shares most on those sites. The best tools for doing that are Ahrefs’ Content Explorer and Buzzsumo.

Taking a random site from the list we created, we can now look at the most-shared content on the site.

For this specific task, we’ll use the former, selecting the “Top Content” option within the main Site Explorer:

Here, we can see the most shared and linked-to assets, and start to understand the sort of content our audience wants to engage with.

We can also make this picture even richer by then looking at a “whole-of-market” view and typing in associated topics into Buzzsumo. This then gives us a full list of the most shared content pieces in a broader sense.

STAGE THREE

Brand activation

As already discussed, however, not every brand can cover every subject, or has the right to do so — understanding this is key to success.

To get a fuller picture here, qualitative survey data is needed. To paint this picture, we will again turn to Global Web Index data. In the absence of such a tool, a quick survey of existing visitors will give you this critical insight.

Below, you can see the answer to what this target audience expects to see from the brand. This doesn’t mean specific content ideas, but rather the type of content it has the authority to produce in the eyes of the audience.

As we can see here, the brand is looked to predominantly as a source of information and knowledge sharing (great brand-as-publisher strategy opportunities!).

It is also clear, however, that they want to engage with the brand and expect relevant, timely content — an important point we will come back to later.

So, we now understand a little more about our audience’s needs and we can use this alongside existing research data and customer knowledge to create personas specific to the campaign.

In the example we’re walking through, those personas were as follows:

The image above is a simplified version and we always use our persona template, which you can download here, to ensure we paint a thorough picture.

The point here is to humanize the data. The mind processes all that information in a much more structured way if you do this, and that means you end up making more precise decisions in how and where you target the campaign.

Personas also make it much easier to scale data understanding outside the group that created them. By having a shared “face” to each segment and trying to align each one to a famous person, it makes it much easier to ensure there’s a shared understanding across the whole working group.

Once this stage is set in stone, the next phase is to move into the campaign idea itself.

Ideation – informing ideas with data

At Zazzle we use our much-publicized ideation process as the basis for this process and it is something I have written about previously for Moz.

The principle is that you create left-brain structure around the creative process to ensure you can consistently output great ideas based on the objective.

We follow a 13-step process for doing this, which starts with an underpinning of the ideas against the objective — ensuring that they will achieve it — and defining the content types (as in infographics, video, articles, etc.) relevant to the audience we want to reach.

This process will always unearth great ideas, but not always ideas that fly from a campaign perspective — and for a long time we really struggled to understand why.

It was an anomaly that perplexed us for several months and it took a session of digging into feedback from journalists at real scale, as well as work on the entire distribution process, to really figure it out.

The answer boiled down to not asking the right questions of each concept at an early enough stage, and it required a reversal in how we plan the campaign as a whole.

Testing ideas

The result was a new process that included a session at the end to ask questions of each and every idea recorded to ensure it is “fit for purpose.”

1. Why now?

The first and most important question is, “Why are we doing this now?” We learned the hard way that an idea can be the best idea in the history of content marketing, but if it hasn’t got a “news hook,” you may well be fighting a losing battle.

Such an angle can be manufactured with a little forethought, of course, so this doesn’t mean that only “newsy” content will work.

For instance, if we take a look at a piece on a subject such as finance, there’s always a way to weave a new study, political opinion, or law change into the campaign to give it that critical “run it now” message.

Without it, a journalist or blogger — almost all of whom are motivated by news and trends — will have something more important to run before your piece, and it may just get lost in the noise.

2. What’s the angle?

If your idea passes the first stage of questioning, then the next phase is to look at how you may break that news angle down into a series of angles, or exclusives.

While having one really strong “story” can be enough, it is much better to be able to present a number of different flavors on the same thing. That way, when pitching it, your PR team will be able to approach a larger number of sites with that exclusive they all hunger for.

Below you’ll see an example of how this may work. In this case, we designed a series of exclusive angles for the idea we ended up opting for (an interactive quiz based on the “Fifty Shades of Grey” hype). The data-informed rationale behind it was as follows:

Why now? – “Because the film is launching.”
Why this? – “There’s a huge existing conversation in this area and we can tap into it. The audience is also perfect.”

As you’ll see, there are a number of clearly different angles here supported by supplementary content.

This process then actually shapes the way you build the assets themselves, ensuring that you maximize potential reach.

3. Who is it for?

Once you have established it has legs as a trending opportunity campaign, the next stage is to work hard on understanding who would be interested in it, and where you may find them online.

As we now have several exclusive angles, we can go back to our personas and add an extra layer of detail to define which ones would be interested in each angle/story.

For instance, we know that the free condoms giveaway is most likely to resonate with our male persona, and so we want to push that through relevant websites and social channels more attuned to that audience.

4. Where will we find them?

There are myriad tools and ways in which to do this, enough for a post in its own right, but while I can’t share every one, it’s worth discussing the key tools we use daily to do this.

You find these distinct groups in different places on the web, so grouping those people together helps you to then understand which sites they frequent.

At this stage we often use upstream and downstream traffic data from Hitwise to inform our decision making in a more data-driven way. The platform allows you to see where visitors go before and after visiting specific sites, widening your prospecting list.

STAGE FOUR

Before we get into the influencer outreach piece, you must first create a site framework for your PR team to work from.

This means creating a handful of example sites for each distribution persona, giving clear examples of where we may find them.

For example, we may find “Steve” on the main social platforms, Buzzfeed, and so on. From this, you can then build a list of similar sites.

The final list of agreed upon and approved prospects is then added into our Content Campaign Planner, which you can download for your own campaigns either via the link here, or later on at the bottom of the article.

Building campaign plans

Below you can see a screen shot of the top sheet of the plan, which captures the overall timeline of each element. The tabs below it then contain all the info on:

The paid social plan – Targeting, spend, target CPC, etc.
The PR plan – Exclusive angles, the sell, content being used, etc.
Prospect list – List of publications to be targeted
Other – A tab to capture any other activity, such as above-the-line activity, if appropriate for the campaign.

Budget distribution

Before we get into the plan details, however, one important point we always cover is budget breakdown.

Regardless of how much budget you have to play with for the overall campaign, it is important to look at wider media planning benchmarking to ensure you split it in a way that will maximize the chance of success.

We used a famous ad campaign in the UK as the basis for this decision-making process, and learn from one of the most successful going: the John Lewis Christmas campaign. It is a wildly successful TV-first creative with a tasty £7 million budget.

Critically, however, only one million of that is spent on creative; the rest is all distribution. While it wins award after award for being an undeniable hit, that budget split ensured it was always going to be successful.

“6 in every 7 campaign dollars should be spent on distribution.”

All too often we get carried away with making the creative stand out, when we should be much more focused on distribution planning.

Exact breakdown will vary, but as a guide, aim for a 70/30 split towards distribution.

STAGE FIVE

Find the right prospects

Distribution is key, and in the majority of cases your PR plan should deliver the biggest impact, if executed correctly. And that makes your approach to prospecting key to the overall success of the project.

As you’ve already carried out a lot of work around target sites, the next phase is to understand who the right journalists or influencers are inside those businesses.

At this stage, there will also be further work on blogger influencer identification, to ensure that the PR plan has the breadth of targets to cover as many eyeballs as possible.

To do that, you need to look at who is already sharing your content, using a tool like Ahref’s Top Referring Content. Reaching out to those already predisposed to linking to you is a surefire way of kickstarting your PR efforts with warm conversations.

Outside of this, there are myriad ways to reach the right bloggers, and this certainly isn’t a guide on influencer outreach. If you did want to know more, I suggest checking out these resources:

Link Prospecting on Steroids – A Streamlined Process by Matthew Barby
The Definitive Guide to Guest Blogging by Brian Dean
The Ultimate Guide to Advanced Guest Blogging by Pratik Dholakiya

From a PR perspective, we only use two tools to simplify the process as much as possible. After trawling through every process and option possible, we’ve settled on a combination of Gorkana and Linkedin. That may be a process that disappoints some of the more technically-minded, but this is based on tens of thousands of hours of experience.

And the process couldn’t be easier, because it is simply about people:

Take your list of sites selected as part of the audience-understanding project.
Enter them into Gorkana and/or Linkedin to establish the best section editor, journalist, or influencer to reach out to.
Note name, email address, phone number, and any previous communication notes into your planner.

Outside of this, we have been trialling JournoRequest to bolster those efforts and take the legwork out of social monitoring (an effective but labor-intensive process for finding trending opportunities from the journalists themselves).

This simple tool delivers targeted journalist content requests to your inbox and can help when it is part of an “always on” monitoring process that feeds in at the ideas stage.

The pre-pitch

A major mistake often made at this stage is to pick up the phone too early. It’s all too tempting to do that when so much work has led to this point, but before you do, it’s important to pre-plan what you’re going to say and to whom. This ensures that you maximize take-up and don’t confuse who you pitch which angles to.

This is where the prospecting list from our planner comes into its own. As you can see in the example below, it segments that process and makes it possible to scale the communication across multiple PR team members.

It can often help PRs to write a script before making the call, to ensure the sell is as strong as planned. We ALWAYS tell the journalist that we’ll follow up with all the details on email.

This not only creates an excuse to get their email address if we don’t already have it, but also ensures that it stays front-of-mind and that we make it as easy as possible for them.

STAGE SIX

Social

PR is, of course, only part of the story. It’s important to plan around every other available channel opportunity to maximize reach.

Social is the next consideration, as it will support PR activity. We know from the initial audience piece how much time our target market spends on key platforms.

Supporting the content by creating a regular organic sharing plan across social and other owned channels is the first logical step, but there is obviously much more you can do. The chart below is a great starting point when considering how wide you can, or could, spread the net.

Which option you choose is dependent upon a) the topic of the campaign and b) what insights tell you about the audience you are targeting.

In our example, the interactive quiz was hosted on the site and was pushed organically via all key social channels, as well as being the subject of a significant PR campaign.

Organically, we ensure we can get the most out of the channel by, again, creating a number of editorial angles. In the case of the Skyn piece, this meant creating a number of quotes obtained from the survey results, memes, and so on, both to vary the messaging around the campaign and to ensure we kept it front-of-mind.

It was the paid media side that we focused on most, however, as we saw the targeting in the space as the best way to capture the attention of our audience.

That meant focusing on Instagram and Facebook with the majority of spend, but also drip-feeding it through Twitter to a really tightly-controlled custom audience created from existing customer email data.

Speaking more generally, when there is a paid social budget, our split would start looking like this, to be refined based on insight and the content subject matter:

Facebook 70%
Instagram 20%
Twitter 10%

For the majority of markets, with the possible exclusion of B2B, Facebook will almost always trump the rest simply due to the size of the potential audience and the quality of the targeting its ads platform offers.

And while targeting simply by interest sets will work, we almost always find that the best option here is to add the Facebook Website Custom Audience Pixel to your site, and to then use that data to create a custom audience based on those already visiting. It can also be useful to test this against a custom audience created from “lookalikes” based on uploading your email database (if you have one).

However, if the campaign were designed to attract a completely different audience, then we would look more towards modeling the targeting on interests and/or competitors.

For example, if our campaign is designed to attract men to a survey about marriage but the piece is for a wedding and engagement ring specialist, the likelihood may be that the majority of the site’s audience will be female. In this scenario, we would choose interest targeting to make sure we were reaching the right eyeballs.

The same is true of Twitter, too, although clicks here will be more expensive. Instagram is still at a very early stage in its paid lifecycle, which means that CPCs here are relatively affordable but are undoubtedly heading north as more advertisers jump on the platform.

LinkedIn is the most expensive, and hardest to target, of all options — but where there is a high average lifetime value of a customer and your product is in the B2B space, it can work.

There are, of course, several other considerations. You may also want to add other levels, such as native ad opportunities (think Taboola and Outbrain), and even paid search and/or display.

STAGE SEVEN

Retargeting

Display or retargeting can work very well as part of a wider, longer-term strategy to nurture the new visitor in the weeks after they land on your content.

The idea here is to either provide a really targeted piece of content or offer to follow up, thus feeding the whole inbound marketing strategy.

Let’s say your content was the quiz we’ve discussed throughout this piece. We’ve captured their details as part of that activity, but we want to stay front-of-mind. Here we can use retargeting to do just that. Rather than simply using it generically, you can segment to show something like a “10% Off Your Next Purchase” offer, or a follow-up piece of content on the results of the quiz, for instance.

Email

This is where email can come in also. As well as simply promoting the campaign through an editorial newsletter, we can choose to personalize that message further, as we did with our retargeting. This only serves to strengthen the relationship you have with that individual.

Fitting it within a wider strategy

There are many, many thousands more words to write around the topic of lifecycle marketing, but that is the subject of a post for another day.

Before we finish, however, it is definitely worth touching on how that standalone campaign should sit within a wider content strategy.

This is something I have always been incredibly passionate about, as we see time and time again how larger organizations throw money at campaigns without really thinking about how they fit within the whole picture.

Getting that right is about understanding a concept I call “Content Flow,” and measuring it is a subject I have written about previously here. We even built a simple tool to enable marketers to do just that and map the output of their content strategies easily.

The point is that a “big” idea is only as good as the other content that surrounds it. Great ROI does not often flow from a singular piece, but from the overall approach to content strategy. Being able to consistently deliver is the difference between success and failure.

Free downloadable campaign planner!

Content campaigns are a hugely important part of getting that right, and if you’re not already creating them, there should now be fewer barriers in the way of your success.

If you’d like to have a go at it, you can download the campaign planner I use day-to-day by clicking on the image below.

Continue reading →

Page 145 of 397
« First
…
120
130
140
«
143
144
145
146
147
»
150
160
170
…
Last »