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Setting Goals (Not Tools) as the Foundation of Your Marketing – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by MackenzieFogelson

With new tools introduced so regularly, it’s easy for marketers to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out which ones are most effective for their own work. That focus, though, shifts our attention from what really matters: setting the right goals for our companies. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Mackenzie Fogelson walks us through the five-stage process she uses to make sure her team’s attention is on what really matters.

Setting Goals (Not Tools) as the Foundation of Your Marketing – Whiteboard Friday


For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard!

Video Transcription


Hey there, Moz community! I’m so excited to be here with you today. I wanted to share something with you that has been really powerful for the businesses we’ve been working with in the last year or so about building community. It’s a concept that we call “goals not tools,” and it works in this pyramid format where you start with your goals, you move on to KPIs, you develop a strategy, you execute that strategy, and then you analyze your data. And this is something that has been really powerful and helped businesses really grow. So I’m going to walk you through it here.

We start down at the bottom with goals. So the deal with goals is that you want to make sure that you’re setting goals for your entire business, not just for SEO or social media or content marketing, because you’re trying to grow your whole business. So keep your focus there. Then once you develop your goals, and those goals might be to improve customer communication or you want to become a thought leader. Whatever your goal is, that’s where you’re going to set it.

Then you move on to determining what your key performance indicators are and what you’re going to use to actually measure the fact that you may or may not be reaching your goals. So in terms of KPIs, it’s really going to depend on your business. When we determine KPIs with companies, we sit down and we have that discussion with them before we develop the strategy, and that helps us to have a very authentic and realistic discussion about expectations and how this is all going to work and what kind of data they’re expecting to see so that we’re proving that we’re actually making a difference in their business.

So once you’ve determined those KPIs, then you move on to developing a creative strategy, a creative way to meet those goals and to measure it the way you’ve determined in your KPIs. So this is your detailed roadmap, and it’s two to three months at a time. A lot of companies will go for maybe 12 months and try to get that high level overview of where they’re going for the year, and that’s fine. Just make sure that you’re not detailing out everything that you’re doing for the next year because it makes it harder to be agile. So we’d recommend two- to-three month iterations at a time. Go through, test things, and see how that works.

During your strategy development you’re also going to select the tools that you’re going to use. Maybe it’s Facebook, maybe it’s SEO, maybe it’s content marketing, maybe it’s email marketing, PPC. There’s all kinds of tools that could be used, and they don’t all have to be digital. So you just need to be creative and determine what you need to plan out so that you can reach the goals that you’ve set.

Then once you’ve got your strategy developed, that’s really some of the hardest part until you get to execution. Then you’re actually doing all the work. You need to be consistent. You need to make sure that you’re staying focused and following that strategy that you’ve set. You also want to test things because you want as much data as possible so that you can determine if things are working or not. So make sure that during execution there are going to be things that come up, emergent things, shiny things, exciting things. So what you’ll have to do is weigh whether those things wait for the next iteration in two to three months, or whether you deviate your plan and you integrate those at the time that they come up.

So once you’re through execution, then really what you’re doing is analyzing that data that you’ve collected. You’re trying to determine: Should we spend more time on something? Should we pull something? Should we determine if something else needs to completely change our plans so that we’re making sure that we’re adding value? So analysis is probably the most important part because you’re always going to want to be looking at the data.

So in this whole process, what we always do is try to make sure that we’re focusing on two questions, and the most important one is: Where can we add more value? So always be thinking about what you’re doing, and if you can’t answer the value question, you know, “Why are we doing this? Does this provide value for our customers or something internal that you’re working on? If you can’t answer that question, it’s probably not something valuable, and you don’t need to spend your time on it. Go somewhere else where you’re adding the value.

Then the last question is where you can make the biggest difference in your business, because that’s what this is all about is growing your business. So if you stay focused on goals, not tools, it’s going to be really easy to do that.

Thanks for having me today, Moz. Hope I helped you out. Let me know in the questions if you need any assistance.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com


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Kill It on Facebook by Being TAGFEE

Posted by quietcorey

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.

Last month, I presented a Mozinar on Deconstructing a Niche Market. Much to my surprise, the Q&A session focused almost entirely on my experience using Facebook as a niche marketing channel.

It’s true that Facebook is a dynamic and oft-misunderstood creature, especially in marketing. When building a strategy with long-term sustainability in mind, it’s important to avoid relying on any one source of traffic. Any channel can be fickle, and Facebook has certainly proven to be no exception.

That being said, Facebook still represents the largest share of the social space, and is at least worth considering for businesses looking to diversify their channel marketing portfolio, be it niche-targeted or otherwise.

Get Facebook Traffic
Just 9 months after we decided to give the platform the old college try, Facebook has become a substantial traffic source for our B2B business.

As I mentioned in the Mozinar, our business has spent the last nine months developing our Facebook channel. As a result, we’ve seen traffic from Facebook increase to the point where it is roughly equal to 30% of our organic traffic.

In this post, I’ll be going through the philosophy we use to maximize engagement and traffic.

Marketing like it’s 2013

In a recent post on LinkedIn, marketing wizard Gary Vaynerchuk delivered this gem: “It’s 2013 and 99 percent of people are marketing their products like It’s 2004.”

His assessment is spot on.

Successfully building social media channels that drive converting traffic is about more than a content schedule. On Facebook, you have a built-in audience of anywhere from hundreds to millions of people who have opted in to your message. Remind you of another platform you use? Email, perhaps?

Social media, of course, adds engagement into the mix. This means that you not only have the opportunity to push your message out to your droves of fans, but a responsibility to have conversations, contribute, and be a member of the community.

If you want to market like it’s 2013, you have to learn how to engage your audience, not just talk at them.

The (not so) curious case of Sue Bryce

Sue Bryce Facebook Page

Sue Bryce is an award-winning professional photographer that teaches photography through workshops on CreativeLIVE. If you take a look at her Facebook page, you’ll see that her engagement is off the charts. 43,000 likes with 8,870 talking about her page.

How does she do it?

Promotional Facebook Post

First things first, she’s not even remotely shy about promoting herself or her work. As you progress down her page, you’ll definitely see the occasional post promoting her events or cross-promoting her partners.

But therein lies the rub. The occasional post. The promotional posts are woven into a cloth of intensely personal, fun, and sometimes catty quips about life, the photography business, and people that she meets along her journey.

Among her most engaged-with recent posts? Sharing a story about getting dental work done, and how happy it makes her feel. I guarantee that each person who liked and/or commented on this post feels closer to Sue because of it.

Have a Voice on Facebook

In addition to sharing elements of her personal life, Sue communicates with her Facebook community in her own voice. There is nothing that feels remotely fake or forced about her posts. This makes it extremely easy for her fans to feel a connection to her, and to respond to her posts, which they do quite regularly.

Finally, Sue takes advantage of the fact that visual media performs exceptionally well on Facebook. In fact, a 2012 HubSpot study found that photos on Facebook generated 53% more likes than the average post. As possibly one of the world’s best photographers, of course, Sue has an unfair advantage in this arena.

Even still, one of her recent photo shares depicting her and fellow photography guru Kelly Brown in newborn poses garnered 2,174 likes, 156 shares, and 262 comments. Why? Because it was fun, relevant to the audience, and (let’s be honest) darn cute.

Despite the fact that you’re probably not a world-renowned photographer, it’s still extremely important to engage your audience with relevant visual media. Behind-the-scenes photos, product photos, and event photos are all a good place to start, and will work for most businesses.

Obviously, as a sole proprietor, Sue Bryce has a much easier time incorporating her personal voice into her brand, and this type of strategy won’t necessarily work for all types of businesses. If nothing else, this case exemplifies the possibilities of incorporating personality into your brand to achieve outlandish levels of engagement.

Channeling your inner Sue by harnessing the power of TAGFEE

Seeing success is great, but this article isn’t here to tell you how awesome Sue is.

Nicholas Longtin Draws Roger

Image credit: Nicholas L., from Minneapolis

Interestingly, what makes her such a great example for the Moz audience is that her Facebook page is a ridiculously great example of being TAGFEE. How can you incorporate this attitude into your own social endeavors?

Be transparent and authentic

While transparency can get bogged down with organizational hurdles, the lesson is to be yourself. Decide who your company is, and talk about things that reflect that, even if they’re uncomfortable. For example, if you sell industrial supplies, don’t be afraid to talk about the downsides of certain products. Modern customers know better than to trust claims that everything you sell is made out of sunshine, rainbows, and Adamantium.

Be generous

Offer special benefits to your fans that follow you on Facebook. Offer free trials and products, highlight their success stories on your page, and intentionally seek to add as much value to them as possible. This means thinking critically about what you’re adding to the conversation, not just extracting from the platform.

Be fun

Again, being fun is relative, and dependent on company culture. But, as can be seen in the example of Sue Bryce, fun drives engagement. The same goes for Moz. It never hurts to take a lighthearted approach, and a good brand personality will make your fans more engaged.

Be empathetic

On one level, empathy is about following the golden rule. Facebook manners are no exception. Strive to be professional and respectful on social media at all times. Additionally, I would argue that empathy is about continually seeking to understand how your audience feels, what challenges they face, and working hard to provide a product and resources that help them address those needs and challenges.

Be exceptional

There is no shortcut to being exceptional. Always seek to try new things, test new ideas, and be fresh and relevant. This is not only a healthy practice for your business, but a way for you to add unique value for your fans. Being exceptional lets you tell exceptional, unique, and fresh stories in a way that other brands in your industry may not be able to. It’s all about setting yourself apart.

Being exceptional includes making the most of the platform. Use well designed, cohesive image posts. Not only do you want each post to be interesting from a visual perspective, but you want your page as a whole to have a sense of visual flow. Doing this will not only boost your engagement, but also make your Facebook page look more professional and put together.

The same goes for copy. Choose a voice that fits your brand, remember to edit, and deliver your message exceptionally well. Know how you plan to format your posts, and how formatting works on Facebook. If you mention one of your fans, tag their name with @Username. Create a style guide and stick to it.

Paying to play

Facebook Advertising

The problem of “pay to play” on Facebook is worth mentioning, as past and future changes have and will alter your brand’s visibility on the platform. As it stands, our brand’s data shows that we can expect to reach between 7% to 32% of our built-in audience when posting without advertisements.

Facebook indicated in early 2012 that the average reach of an “organic” post was 16%.

Considering that open rates of between 15% and 25% are, in general, considered good in email marketing, we can say that non-boosted Facebook posts boast respectable performance as they are.

The counter-intuitive twist is that paying to play isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Much like a Google SERP in the dark ages of Internet marketing, a Facebook feed inundated with an uncomfortable slurry of poorly written brand messages and uninteresting posts isn’t really a worthwhile place for your brand to be.

A realignment in the signal-to-noise ratio is a serious come-up for a brand that uses Facebook responsibly and thoughtfully, and raises the bar to entry in a way that benefits brands that have their house in order.

Considering that Facebook advertising is relatively affordable, and allows you to target a ridiculously granular audience outside of your normal fan base, it is definitely worth a go. Lauren Vaccarello from Salesforce gave an outstanding primer on Facebook advertising in a recent WBF, and there’s an excellent crash course on YouMoz. I recommend checking out both of them if you think Facebook advertising is a good fit for your business.

Additional resources

The social media landscape is constantly evolving, and Facebook is no exception. Over time, citizens of the Facebook empire will likely grow more and more desensitized to advertising. While some best practices are bound to remain exactly the same, it’s important to keep an eye out for developments in the ecosystem.

That said, you can cover most of the basics with the following resources:

And that’s a wrap. Enjoy building an outstanding Facebook presence, and remember—keep it TAGFEE!

Have you had great success driving traffic with Facebook? Please share your experiences in the comments below.


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When Keyword (not provided) is 100 Percent of Organic Referrals, What Should Marketers Do? – Whiteboard Tuesday

Posted by randfish

For nearly two years, marketers have been frustrated by a steadily increasing percentage of keywords (not provided). Recent changes by Google have sent those numbers soaring. The site Not Provided Count now reports an average of nearly 74% of keywords not provided, and speculation abounds that it won’t be long before 100% of keywords are masked. Without that referral data, our tasks as Internet marketers become far more difficult—but not impossible.

In this special Whiteboard Tuesday, Rand covers what marketers can do to make up for this drastic change, finding data from other sources to stay on top of their SEO efforts.

Whiteboard Friday – Now that Keyword (not provided) is 100% of Referrals, What Should Marketers Do_1

For reference, here’s a still image of today’s whiteboard!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday! Today I’m going to talk about this extremely troublesome and worrisome problem that Google has expanded “keyword (not provided)” potentially to 100% of all organic referrals. This isn’t necessarily that they’ve flipped the entire switch, and everyone’s going to see it this week, but certainly over the next several months, it’s been suggested, we may receive no keyword data at all in referrals from Google. Very troubling and concerning, obviously, if you’re a web marketer.

I think it should be very troubling and concerning if you’re a web user as well, because marketers don’t use this data to do evil things or invade people’s privacy. Marketers use this data to make the web a better place. The agreement that marketers have always had—that website creators have always had—with search engines, since their inception was, “sure, we’ll let you crawl our sites, you provide us with the keyword data so that we can improve the Internet together. I think this is Google abusing their monopolistic position in the United States. Unfortunately, I don’t really see a way out of it. I don’t think marketers can make a strong enough case politically or to consumer groups to get this removed. Maybe the EU can eventually.

But in any case, let’s deal with the reality that we’re faced with today, which is that keyword not provided may be 100% of your referrals, and so keyword data is essentially gone. We don’t know when Google sends a visit—Bing, to their credit, and to Microsoft’s credit, enduringly has kept that data accessible—but we don’t know when Google sends a visit to our sites and pages, what that person searched for. Previously, we could do some sampling—now we can’t even do that.

There are some big tasks that we use that data for, and so to start with, I want to try and identify the uses for keyword referral data, at least the very important ones as I perceive them—there are certainly many more.

Number one: finding opportunities to improve a page’s performance or its ranking. If you see that a page of yours is receiving a lot of search traffic, or that a keyword is sending a lot of search traffic (or even a little bit of search traffic), but the page is not ranking very well, you know that by improving that page’s ranking you have an opportunity to earn a lot more search traffic. That’s a very valuable thing as a marketer. You can also see if a search query is sending traffic to a page, but that page has a high bounce rate for that traffic, low pages-per-visit, low conversion rate, you know, “hey, I’m not doing a good job serving the visitor; I need to improve how the page addresses that.” That’s one of the key things we use keyword referral data for.

Secondarily: connecting rank improvement efforts—things that we do in the SEO world to move up our rankings—to the traffic growth that we receive from them. This is very important for consultants and for agencies, and for in-house SEOs as well, to show our value to our managers, and our clients—it’s really, really tough to have this data taken away.

C: Understanding how your searchers perceive your brand and your content. When we look down the list of phrases that sent us traffic, we could see things like “oh, this is how people are thinking about my brand, or thinking about this product I launched, or thinking about this content that I’ve put out.” Really challenging to do that nowadays.

And D: uncovering keyword opportunities. We could certainly see, “this is sending a small amount of traffic, this is doing some long-tail stuff, hey—let’s turn this into a broader piece of content. Let’s try and optimize for some of those keyword phrases that we’re barely ranking on.” Or, we have a page that’s not really addressing that keyword phrase that we’re ranking on. We can address that. We can improve that.

So I’m going to try and tackle some relatively simplistic ways, and I’m not going to walk through all the details you would need to do this, but I think many folks in the SEO and marketing sphere will address these over the weeks and months to come.

Starting with A. How do I find opportunities to improve a page’s ranking or its performance with users when I can’t see keyword referral data? How do I know which page people are coming to? Thankfully, we can use the connection—the intersection of a few different sources of data. Pages that are receiving search visits is a big one, and this is going to be used throughout—instead of looking at keyword-level data, we’re going to be looking at page-level data. Which pages received referral visits from Google Search? Thankfully, that’s still data that we do get, and that’ll likely stay with us, because we can always see a referral source, and we know which pages are loaded. So, even if Google Analytics were to remove that, I think a third-party analytics provider would step in.

Pages receiving search visits plus rank-tracking data can get us a little close to this, because we can essentially say, “hey, we know this page is ranking well for these five or ten keywords that we have some reasonable expectation that they have keyword search volume. They’re receiving search visits, and yet they’re not performing well, or they’re not ranking particularly well, so improving them should be able to drive up our search traffic, improving their performance with users should be able to drive up our conversion rate optimization.

Optionally, we could also add in things like Google Webmaster Tools or AdWords data; AdWords data being used on they keyword side to fill in for, “hey, what’s the volume that a keyword is getting,” and Google Webmaster Tools data to be able to see a list of some keywords that maybe are sending us traffic. Dr. Pete wrote a good post recently about the relative accuracy of Google Webmaster Tools, and while unfortunately it’s not as good as any of the other methods, it’s still not awful, and so that data is potentially usable.

This will give us a list of pages that get search visits, or are targeting important search terms, that rank, and that have the potential to improve. So this gets us to the answer to this question. This used to be really simple to get at, now it’s more difficult, but still possible.

B. Connecting our SEO efforts to traffic growth from search. I know this is going to be tremendously hard, and this is probably one of the biggest tolls that this change is taking on SEO folks. Because as SEOs, as marketers, we’ve shown our value by saying, “look, we’re driving up search visits, some of it’s branded, some of it’s unbranded, some of it’s not provided—but you get a rough sense of this. And you really need that percentage: “What percent of the traffic is actually you going and getting us new visitors that never would have found us, versus branded stuff that’s just sort of rising on its own.” Maybe it’s rising because of efforts that marketers are making: investments in content, and in social media, and in email and all these other wonderful things, but it’s hard to know— it’s hard to directly map that.

So here’s one of the ways. Optionally, we can use AdWords to bid on branded terms and phrases. When we do that, you might want to have a relatively broad match on your branded terms and phrases so that you can see keyword volume that is branded from impression data. That gives you a sense of, “what’s the trajectory, here?” If we’re seeing it grow, we can identify “oh, that’s not us driving a bunch of new non-branded new keyword terms and phrases; that’s our brand search increasing.” So we can sort of discount that, or apply that in our reporting effectively. If we see, on the other hand, that it’s staying flat, but that search traffic overall is going up and to the right, then we know that’s unbranded.

Optionally, if we don’t want to be bidding and spending a lot of money with Google AdWords and trying to keep our impression counts high, we can use things like Google Insights or even downloading AdWords volume data estimates month-over-month to be able to track those sorts of things.

Certainly one of the things I would recommend doing even prior to this change is tracking rankings on buckets. Buckets of head terms, versus chunky middle, versus long-tail; so phrases that are getting lots of search volume, a good amount of search volume, and very little search volume. You want to have different buckets of those, so you can see, “oh hey, my rankings are generally improving in this bucket, or that bucket.” Same with branded vs. non-branded; you want to be able to identify and track those separately. Then, compare against visits that you’re seeing to pages that are ranking for those terms. We need to look at the pages that are receiving search traffic from those different buckets.

Again, much more challenging to do these days. But, any time we see the complexity of our practice is increasing, we also have an opportunity, because it means that those of us who are savvy, sophisticated, able to track this data, are far more useful and employable and important. Those organizations that use great marketers are going to receive outsized benefits from doing so.

C: How do I understand and analyze how searchers perceive my brand? What are they searching for that’s leading them to my site? How are they searching for terms related to my brand? Again, we can bid on AdWords terms, like I talked about. You can use keyword suggestion sources like Google Suggest, Ubersuggest, certainly AdWords’s own volume data, SEMRush, etc. to see the keyword expansions related to your brand or the content that’s very closely tied to your brand. And internal site search data. You’ve got a search box up in the top-right hand corner, people are typing in stuff, and you want to see what that “XYZ” is that they’re typing in. Those can help as well, and can provide you some opportunities that lead to D.

D: How do I uncover new keyword opportunities to target? Of course, there’s the classic methodology that we’ve all employed, which is keyword research, but usually we compare that to the terms that are already sending us traffic, and we go look and say, “oh, okay, we’re doing fine for these—we don’t need to worry.” Now, we need to take keyword research tools and add some form of rank-tracking data. That could be from Google Webmaster Tools despite its mediocrity in terms of accuracy. We can use manual rank data—we can search for it ourselves—or we can use automated data.

One of the criticisms for all rank-tracking data is always, “but there’s lots of personalization and geographic localization—these kinds of things that are biasing searches—how do I see all of that?” And the answer is, well, you can’t really. Personalization is going to fluctuate things. It may be sort of included in the Google Webmaster Tools data, but as Dr. Pete showed in his post, it looks a little funky right now.

For localization, you can add the geo in the string to be able to see where you rank in different geographies if you want to track those. That’s something you’ll be able to do in Moz Analytics and probably many of the other keyword tracking tools out there, too.

Optionally—and this is expensive, and I hate to say this is Google being evil, but this is probably what Google wants you to do when they give you “(not provided)”—which is run AdWords campaigns targeting those keywords, so that you can see new expansion opportunities. Areas where, “oh hey, we bid on this, it sent impressions, it sent some traffic, it looks like it’s worthwhile, we’re not ranking for it organically,” and again, you can see that through your rank-tracking data or through pages receiving visits from search, and then targeting those terms.

So, a lot of this data, and a lot of these opportunities are retrievable—they’re just a lot harder. I will say—this is somewhat self-promotional, but I think one of Moz’s missions and obligations as a company to the search marketing world is to try and help replace, repair, and make these processes easier. So, you can guess that over the next 6-12 months that’s going to be a big part of our roadmap: trying to help you folks—and all marketers—get to this data.

For now, these methodologies can and should be helpful to you, and I expect to see lots of great discussion about other ways to go about this in the comments.

Thanks, everyone—take care.


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