Not many people know this, but the second-largest search engine behind Google is actually YouTube. With 1.5 billion people watching over one billion hours of video a day, YouTube is gathering a lot of data on its users. All of this data allows advertisers to target specific audiences with a high level of granularity.…
The post Getting Granular with YouTube Audience Targeting appeared first on Seer Interactive.
To improve your content marketing, you need to stop thinking in terms of content marketing and start thinking in terms of content experiences instead. Here’s why:
The phrase content marketing has become so watered down and generic. Simply calling it content marketing and thinking about it in terms of sharing blogs, publishing articles, emailing ebooks and promoting webinars dilutes how valuable and important content marketing truly is. Content is the blood that runs through the veins of a company. Without it, there is no inbound. No sales enablement. No demand generation. No social media. And no sales too.
UberFlip defines the content experience as this:
A content experience is the environment in which your content lives, how it’s structured and how it compels your prospects and customers to engage with your company.
So starting today, we’re going to shift our thinking to the entire content experience. Because when we shift our thinking to experiences, we change the focus from simply publishing a blog post to personalization, organization, and the entire strategy instead.
What is content marketing if it isn’t about coming up with a strategy to engage your customers to buy your products and services?
What is content marketing if it isn't about coming up with a strategy to engage your customers to buy your products and services?
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And I have the perfect way to shift your thinking and show you how companies like GE, Cisco and SAP are implementing a content experience strategy to vastly improve their content marketing results. It’s called The Content Experience Coffee Break, a no-cost, 4-part webinar series I recorded with my friend Randy Frisch at UberFlip. Don’t worry, each webiNINE is short — only 9 minutes. It’s fast, it’s fun, and you’ll become a content experience expert in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee (or two).
If you’re more of a reading type, here’s a brief recap of what we discuss in The Content Experience Coffee Break:
Simply having content on your website and in your channels isn’t good enough anymore. In fact, according to a study by SiriusDecisions, 60-70% of all content doesn’t get used at all. Ouch.
But content is more important than ever.
According to a study by SiriusDecisions, 60-70% of all #content doesn't get used at all. #ouch
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Here’s a sneak peek of the Content Experience Coffee Break
Content touches inbound marketing. It touches account-based marketing. It touches demand generation. And it touches sales enablement, to name a few. You can — and should — think about the entire experience and how you can leverage content with:
I love this example of account-based content that Randy shared from Snowflake. See how Snowflake customized the content for the account they were targeting? AWESOME.
We talk so much about marketing your content, but we don’t actually do it. I wrote about this more than 6 years ago in my book Youtility.
For 2019, you need a content experience framework to create and market personalized content for every part of the buyer journey. And you can download an awesome framework that UberFlip created. With this schema, you can plan for an end-to-end experience that works. It sounds more complicated than it is. This framework from UberFlip makes it easy.
According to recent UberFlip’s Content Experience report (download it now), by putting your content in more than one place (for example, under different types of navigation in your website), you can increase your content views by 8X (no, not 8%—8X)!
Placing your content in more than one place can increase views by more than 8X (yes, 8 times, not 8 percent)
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It makes sense: if you house your content in more places, you’ll get more engagement.
Creating new content isn’t the only way to increase views and sales; you should place the content in more contextual places too. In fact, adding more than two headings to your navigation bar can increase content views by 200%.
I like it.
For example, let’s say our team at Convince & Convert creates an ebook on social media that would fit in a topical dropdown on ConvinceandConvert.com. We could achieve a nice bump in views by also placing that same content under a vertical focus or solution focus dropdown.
It makes sense: the more specific and relevant your navigation is, the more likely people will be to view your content.
Not convinced on the business impact? Just remember: it takes 7 pieces of content to make your prospects sales-ready. If you personalize your content and make it easier for prospects to access your content, you’ll move them closer to opportunities — faster. Cha-ching.
It takes 7 pieces of content to make your prospects sales-ready. If you personalize your content and make it easier for prospects to access your content, you'll move them closer to opportunities — faster.
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If the content experience is so important (it is!), who is in charge of it in your organization? Here are a few options Randy and I discussed:
The Content Marketer
I can make that case. If a content marketer is involved with storytelling and content assets, they should be in charge of the content experience? In small organizations, this makes sense.
The Demand Generation Marketer
Demand gen marketers tend to be involved with lead nurturing and lead management, so they should care about what content they’re using in their lead nurturing campaigns. Having the demand gen marketer be in charge of the content experience would make sense in some organizations.
The Digital Marketer
If you’re a digital marketer in charge of website content, it would probably make sense for you to own the content experience, while working closely with the content manager too.
And how about a new role: the Content Experience Manager/Director/VP? This could be you!
Still pondering who owns the content experience? UberFlip created an entire ebook on this topic. Check it out. Maybe you could be the first (or next?) Content Experience VP in your organization.
Now that you’ve shifted your focus from content marketing to the entire content experience, make sure to grab a coffee (or even a beer, I don’t judge), and join me for The Content Experience Coffee Break to see how you can achieve incredible gains from your content in 2019. See you there.
The post This Is the One Thing You Can Do to Vastly Improve Your Content Marketing appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.
AWS CEO Andy Jassy announced Amazon Textract at the AWS re:Invent 2018 conference. Textract allows AWS customers to automatically extract formatted data from documents without losing the structure of the data. Best of all, there are no machine learning skills required to use Textract. It’s something that many data-intensive enterprises have been requesting for many years.
Our customers are frustrated that they can’t get more of all those text and data that are in documents into the cloud, so they can actually do machine learning on top of it. So we worked with our customers, we thought about what might solve these problems and I’m excited to announce the launch of Amazon Textract. This is an OCR plus plus service to easily extract text and data from virtually any document and there is no machine learning experience required.
This is important, you don’t need to have any machine learning experience to be able to use Textract. Here’s how it generally works. Below is a pretty typical document, it’s got a couple of columns and it’s got a table in the middle of the left column.
When you use OCR it just basically captures all that information in a row and so what you end up with is the gobbledygook you see in the box below which is completely useless. That’s typically what happens.
Let’s go through what Textract does. Textract is intelligent. Textract is able to tell that there are two columns here so actually when you get the data and the language it reads like it’s supposed to be read. Textract is able to identify that there’s a table there and is able to lay out for you what that table should look like so you can actually read and use that data in whatever you’re trying to do on the analytics and machine learning side. That’s a very different equation.
Textract Works Great with FormsWhat happens with most of these forms is that the OCR can’t really read the forms or actually make them coherent at all. Sometimes these templates will kind of effectively memorize in this box is this piece of data. Textract is going to work across legal forms and financial forms and tax forms and healthcare forms, and we will keep adding more and more of these.
But also these forms will change every few years and when they do something that you thought was a Social Security number in this box turns out now not to be a date of birth. What we have built Textract to do is to recognize what certain data items or objects are so it’s able to tell this set of characters is a Social Security number, this set of characters is a date of birth, this set of characters is an address.
Not only can we apply it to many more forms but also if those forms change Textract doesn’t miss a beat. That is a pretty significant change in your capability in being able to extract and digitally use data that are in documents.
The post AWS CEO Announces Textract to Extract Data Without Machine Learning Skills appeared first on WebProNews.
You may know this open source fanatic as WordPress Core Contributor or esteemed speaker on WordCamps and other conferences. Today, Software Engineer & WordPress Consultant Alain Schlesser shares the details of his first experiences with open source and how to learn from, as well as contribute to open source projects. And, he is clear on one thing: “A world without open source would see less frequent technological advances, and they would come at a higher cost.” Read the 4th interview in our shout-out to open source interview-series, and find out how we all benefit from open source!
Q. Why is open source so important to you?
My belief is that open source is the principle that allows ‘knowledge’ to scale in the software engineering field. Reinventing the wheel before being able to tackle the actual problem can only take you so far. If everyone can stand on the shoulders of others, we can all reach higher and higher with time.
Q. In what way do you contribute to open source?
I contribute or have contributed to a lot of different existing open source projects, the most popular being WordPress Core. I also maintain or co-maintain projects, like WP-CLI, the command line interface for WordPress. Additionally, I also make sure that the client projects I work on contribute all reusable code back as open source packages. I usually collect these projects under the ‘brightnucleus‘ GitHub organization.
Q. When did you hear about open source for the first time? What were your thoughts about open source back then? And what are your thoughts about open source now?
I became more directly aware of open source in the mid-’90s. At the time, I got fascinated with the Sourceforge site, which hosted thousands of open source code repositories. It was the first time I had access to that amount of source code to freely browse and reuse for my purposes. It was a game changer for me. Endless amounts of knowledge in the software engineering field freely shared among peers!
At the time, I did not even have internet access at home, so whenever I had the opportunity to get access to the internet, I browsed the code repositories on Sourceforge and downloaded ZIP archives of whatever I wanted to inspect closer, to take the code back home with me (on floppy disks!).
Nowadays I think that open source is a critical part of our modern society. Almost everything is software-driven, and almost all software builds upon open source code, directly or indirectly.
Q. Does open source say something about the quality of the product?
Open source does not directly state anything about the actual quality of a product, but it does make it possible for anyone to assess the quality of a given product in detail. Proprietary software is not necessarily better or worse, but you only find out about its real qualities after starting to use it, you cannot vet it upfront.
Q. When and what was your first open source contribution?
I’m not entirely sure I remember correctly. I think it must have been a hardware driver for the Linux project, somewhere around the mid- to late-90’s. When I was experimenting with Linux for the first time, the driver situation was still really bad, and a lot of the less common hardware was not supported at all, or only supported in an incomplete and buggy way. It was pretty normal back then to write hardware drivers for more exotic hardware yourself, if you really wanted to get that new gear working.
Q. How do you learn from open source? How can others learn from open source?
Just open the code and read it! Most of it comes with both documentation and inline comments, so it should be easy to figure out what it does and why it does it.
If you reuse existing open source libraries, you can easily jump into and out of the libraries’ code and examine what it does. This open source variant of ‘learning by doing’ is a very fast way of improving your own code.
Projects that are well maintained will also usually provide you with free code reviews when you submit a pull request or patch. This is pretty close to having a mentor looking over your shoulder and telling you where you can further improve, all at the cost of zilch – it can’t get much better than that.
Q. Why is open source important for everyone?
It is difficult nowadays to find an electronic device that does not use any open source tools or libraries. Everyone is literally surrounded by the benefits of open source. A world without open source would see less frequent technological advances, and they would come at a higher cost.
Q. Do you have to be a developer to be involved with open source? How about diversity within the open source community?
No, you can easily get involved in open source without being a developer. Just take a look at the WordPress Community as a vibrant example of this, where people of all industries and backgrounds come together to collaborate on common goals.
Q. I want to contribute to open source! Where do I start?
Take whatever you are very passionate about and be very curious about it! I would bet you don’t have to dig deep to find open source projects that are related and that would welcome your contributions. If you need more hands-on guidance, start with an open source portal like GitHub, where you can browse thousands of popular projects and see what they need help with.
Read more: 3 reasons open source is awesome »
The post Reaching higher together: how we all benefit from open source appeared first on Yoast.
Today’s roundup focuses on WordPress 5.0 and its upcoming release date, but we’ll also discuss some interesting and new Gutenberg related news. And, I did my best to introduce a couple of interesting bits throughout this roundup. Every single link is certainly worth checking out! Let’s dive in, shall we?
The question I heard most in the last couple of weeks was this: When will WordPress 5.0 be released? And that is a great question! Unfortunately, not one we have a straight answer to at the moment. The first Release Candidate (RC) was released last week and we’re expecting RC 2 today. But, that still doesn’t point to a specific date. The best answer we currently have is that the date will be communicated. Basically, this means the Core team is working hard to fix the outstanding issues but is not quite ready to commit to a specific date.
My take is that they don’t want to send out a message with a specific date again if they’re not 100% sure they can commit to it. Matt Mullenweg certainly isn’t excluding a December release in his Gutenberg FAQ:
Is it terrible to do a release in December?
Some people think so, some don’t. There have been 9 major WordPress releases in previous Decembers. December releases actually comprise 34% of our major releases in the past decade.
So, let’s just wait and see what happens in the next week.
A few Gutenberg related things have happened in the last couple of weeks that I think could be of interest for you to know. Matt Mullenweg’s post about Gutenberg FAQs is one of them, but there are more.
In a previous roundup, I talked about how ACF would be used to generate blocks for Gutenberg. But they aren’t the only ones trying to figure out how to improve this flow. Block Lab is trying to do exactly this as well. It introduces an interface in the WordPress Admin and a simple templating system for building custom Gutenberg blocks. Definitely worth checking out if you’ve been looking for easier ways to implement custom blocks.
Jetpack 6.8 was released this week and with it shipped a couple of blocks for the new WordPress editor. You can read all about it in WP Tavern’s post about Jetpack 6.8 or read the full release post for Jetpack 6.8 on Jetpack’s blog.
Smashing Magazine published an interesting article, by Leonardo Losoviz, about the implications of thinking in blocks instead of blobs. One thing Leonardo says particularly rings true for me:
I believe that switching from blobs of HTML code to components for building sites is nothing short of a paradigm shift. Gutenberg’s impact is much more than a switch from PHP to JavaScript: there are things that could be done in the past which will possibly not make sense anymore.
A paradigm shift is indeed what we’re looking at here. I’m enthusiastic about the things this new WordPress editor allows us to do that were previously very hard to do.
At Yoast, we’re also very excited about the possibilities the new editor introduces and we’ve already got some great ideas lined up. Not only will it allow our content analysis per post to be much more granular, but we also see a great opportunity to improve lots of different kinds of rich data. Our current How-To and FAQ blocks, introduced in Yoast SEO 8.2, being the first examples of this.
Delivering a speedy website has to be a number one priority for you. We’ve talked about how to use a page speed test to optimize your WordPress website before. Site speed is a topic that will become increasingly important as we move forward. This week, I came across an interesting project along the lines of our post about improving site speed that got me very excited.
Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages that is part of the Chrome browser. You give Lighthouse a URL to evaluate, and it runs a series of audits on the page for performance, accessibility, progressive web app capabilities, and more. It then generates a report on how well the page did.
Imagine bringing those audits fully into the context of WordPress powered sites. Wouldn’t that be amazing? Well, we may very well be heading that way. An interesting project aiming to do exactly this is to be kicked off at WordCamp US next week (will we see you there?). Imagine the impact of such a tool! Wouldn’t that be awesome?
Read on: What is Gutenberg? »
The post WordPress 5.0 RCs, Gutenberg related news and food for thought! appeared first on Yoast.
With the growing content clutter online, it’s just not easy for content marketers to consistently get leads and conversions for their business. The following data from Smart Insights is a testimony of the vast amount of content that’s getting churned out every minute:
Content marketers and business owners often fail to realize that leads and conversions are not an immediate result of content marketing efforts. I have come across clients who start measuring the rate of conversion from the first blog post they publish!
Content is not a sales pitch, period.
It’s a strategy to publish what your audience cares about. It’s not even a magic ranking formula that helps you add keywords, stats and images in your content. It’s a long-drawn-out and continuous battle of building an audience that prefers your content over everything else. When you’re a leader, you have loyal fans and followers who look up to your content.
Now you might say “Ok, accepted, what next? How on earth are we supposed to build a loyal audience for our business?” It’s not as simple as it sounds, but here it is:
Identifying intent is the first step in that direction.
'User intent' simply means the purpose behind an online search query. If you know what users mean when they type a search term, you can provide the most relevant answers.
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That’s exactly what Google looks for when choosing which publisher to rank on the SERPs. It’s no secret that quality content is king. You can’t create good content without knowing what your audience wants. Let’s take a simple search query like:
CRM software for small business
The searcher intent here is to look for the best CRM software for her small business. Many content marketers make the mistake of targeting this keyword phrase with the wrong content piece. You’ll find them creating a blog post like CRM trends 2018 while targeting the above keyword. That’s a big blunder!
It’s obvious that searchers looking for trends are not looking for a tool and those looking for a tool are not looking for trends.
Here is the correct way to find the right topic for the above keyword. Since the user is looking for the best CRM tool for her business, you can create a listicle showcasing the top CRM software available in the market. Something like this:
Top 10 CRM Software for Small Businesses
If your content piece is the best in the niche, it will have a high probability of ranking up higher on search results. Google algorithms have evolved over time. The search engine makes use of advanced machine learning to predict the meaning of search queries and provide more accurate results. Google aims to provide its users with relevant answers and the best user experience.
User intent helps you make content work for your audience and thus get preferred by search engines.
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Let’s now look at the most common intentions behind user queries and understand how you can deliver smarter and user-friendly content.
Before understanding each of these in detail, let’s first understand customer lifecycle and its various stages.
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Each individual in your audience goes through various stages before they turn into loyal customers of your business. This is called customer lifecycle.
Here are the five key customer lifecycle stages:
Let’s now understand how you should create content that satisfies user intent within the framework of the customer lifecycle.
Search intent in this stage is typically informational. Let’s suppose we’re selling CRM software. A sample keyword in this phase would be something like:
‘website lead generation strategies’
The target user is usually a small business owner or a marketer looking to get more leads for her business. She is looking to learn more about lead generation. You could, therefore, create a content piece like:
A Quick Guide to Website Lead Generation Strategies
Here are the top Google search results from the query:
Since at this stage the user has yet to learn about CRM as a solution for her business, she is not looking for stuff that’s directly related to CRM.
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This is a phase when you’ll find users typing niche keywords. They know the solution to their current business challenge is CRM and they would be looking to gain more knowledge about the subject.
Here’s a sample keyword phrase for this stage of the customer journey:
‘customer relationship management strategies’
The user intent here again is informational. You need to target the keyword with an educational piece like this:
10 Steps to Create a CRM Strategy for Your Business
Take a look at the actual search results from the keyword:
This is the stage when the customer is comparing different CRM solutions. Let’s look at some sample keywords:
‘CRM software for small businesses’
‘Zoho vs Salesforce’
The user intent over here is commercial. The user is looking to understand the key features of different CRM tools to be able to make a wise choice. You can target such keywords with listicles as well as comparative posts.
Let’s look at the top Google search results for both these keywords respectively:
The screenshot above shows that Salesforce has targeted the comparative query with a blog post and achieved the second spot in organic SERPs.
This is the stage when the user has a transactional search intent. S/he would usually type a query like:
‘Salesforce pricing’ or ‘Salesforce crm’
To satisfy the user intent for these keywords, you must have a bunch of well-structured website landing pages catering to the respective queries. It’s essential to provide your users with detailed product information and features through these pages.
Here are the top organic search results for the keyword ‘Salesforce pricing’:
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In the retention stage, the customer intent is to gain more understanding of the product they are already using. They’re looking for support or user guides while searching about the product online. The search intent here is informational. Let’s look at sample queries for this phase:
‘salesforce for beginners’
To answer such queries, you’ll have to create a knowledge base to educate your existing customers about your product. A content piece like this would surely help:
The Ultimate Guide to Salesforce for Beginners
Now let’s look at some of the top search results for this keyword:
As you can see in the screenshot above, Salesforce has targeted the keyword and created a knowledge-base that’s ranking on top of Google search results.
You must create a content plan that aligns with your audience’s search intent.
Once you have your keyword bucket ready, you should categorize it on the basis of customer lifecycle and user intent. This will help you create the applicable topic bucket. I’m creating a sample content plan using the keywords in the above-mentioned examples:
This way you can create a monthly or a quarterly content marketing plan based on user intent and customer lifecycle.
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I spoke to a few experts on what they feel about user intent and how they are applying it to their content marketing strategy. I received some insightful inputs and cases.
From Grayson Kemper, Senior Writer at The Manifest
Earlier this year we published an article titled Mobile App Usage Statistics in 2018. This article now ranks on page one for the query ‘mobile app statistics 2018’, which is a highly trafficked search term.
Essentially we knew that businesses and individuals interested in developing a mobile app, especially those at the top of the funnel, use broad-based search terms like ‘mobile app statistics’.
So, in response, we created content that directly addresses that intent. We optimized the content for the key term ‘mobile app statistics’ and formatted it using SEO best practices (bullet points, short sentences, meta descriptions).
As a result, we were able to achieve first-page ranking within a few months of the piece being published and the page consistently earns unique pageviews month-over-month.
From Ulysis Cababan, Content Strategist at RapidVisa
Knowing your customer intent is basic to determining the keywords you are targeting. If you optimize for the wrong keywords, you might generate traffic but the rate of abandonment will be high since your visitors would not get the information they are looking for.
User intent, therefore, helps you to reduce bounce rate and improve the average time on site.
From Avlesh Singh, Co-Founder & CEO at WebEngage
At WebEngage, we use content to solve a fundamental problem for specific audience segments with every piece of content. We try to gauge user intent by looking at popular search terms related to our domain (Marketing Automation).
We use this data along with customer feedback and latent semantic analysis to come up with a bunch of exciting post ideas. We created an in-depth post on the keyword: ‘how to avoid spam filters’. This search term is popular among marketing professionals looking to run email campaigns. We provided our audience with a high-quality post and it soon got the top position in SERPs:
Similarly, we created another informational post around ‘marketing automation trends’ to get to the top of the search results:
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User intent is the foundation of a solid content marketing plan. It goes beyond search volume and competition to understand the user psychology and purpose behind each query. At the end of the day, you’re creating content for your target audience and not for the search engines. It’s an essential step to optimize the overall user experience of your site and your content in order to get better search rankings.
The post How to Implement User Intent to Build an Audience for Your Content appeared first on Single Grain.
More than 500 engineers, designers, managers and other staff from across global Google offices have signed an open letter at Medium.com calling on the search engine to stop their Dragonfly project and for company leaders to “commit to transparency, clear communication, and real accountability.”
Google’s project Dragonfly first came to light in August via The Intercept and their reports surrounding leaked documents containing details about the project. In a nutshell, the project looked to be a fresh attempt by Google to re-enter the Chinese search market since having been blocked by the state back in 2010.
Dragonfly was speculated to be taking the shape of a mobile search engine. This is unsurprising, as more than 97% of internet users in China go online via mobile devices (according to CNNIC) and it is in this vertical that the industry is seeing most disruption from companies such as Shenma, Sogou and Haosou.
What was surprising were the subsequent leaked details from The Intercept and other sources hinting that Dragonfly users would be forced to sign-in to make searches, with IP addresses and phone numbers being linked to their activities too. It is also expected that the service would be censored in order to adhere to the country’s ‘cyber sovereignty’ laws – and, an as yet unknown, domestic partner would also have access to this customer data.
Consequently, there was significant uproar among many Google employees. On August 20th, senior research scientist Jack Poulson left the company and published his lengthy resignation letter online. ‘I believe that Google is largely composed of altruistic employees,’ he wrote. ‘But, due to my conviction that dissent is fundamental to functioning democracies, I am forced to resign in order to avoid contributing to, or profiting from, the erosion of protections for dissidents.’
The latest open letter published on November 27th echoes much of the sentiment expressed by Poulson in his resignation document. ‘We are Google employees and we join Amnesty International in calling on Google to cancel project Dragonfly, Google’s effort to create a censored search engine for the Chinese market that enables state surveillance,’ it says.
‘Our opposition to Dragonfly is not about China: we object to technologies that aid the powerful in oppressing the vulnerable, wherever they may be. The Chinese government certainly isn’t alone in its readiness to stifle freedom of expression, and to use surveillance to repress dissent. Dragonfly in China would establish a dangerous precedent at a volatile political moment, one that would make it harder for Google to deny other countries similar concessions.’
The post also describes 2018 as a year of disappointment for Google employees. It references Project Maven (where Google assisted with development of AI in US military drones) which saw protests and resignations, as well as the Rubingate scandal which saw Android developer Andy Rubin given ‘a hero’s farewell’ and a $90m exit package after claims of sexual misconduct were made against him – ultimately leading to a global synchronized walkout on November 1st.
Google are yet to address the direct requests as detailed in this latest open letter. At a Q & A session during the WIRED 25 Summit in October, Google CEO Sundar Pichai sung the praises of the technical achievements of Dragonfly during recent tests. He also justified Google’s position by saying: ‘We are compelled by our mission [to] provide information to everyone, and [China is] 20 percent of the world’s population.’
Pichai also made reference to Google’s stated position on China back in 2010, when it decided it would no longer censor its SERPs at google.cn essentially putting an end to its operations in the country (this is regarded as the preferable position among employees signing the latest open letter). He stated it was time to ‘re-evaluate that choice’ and when asked about employees who were critical of such changes in company policy remarked, ‘we don’t run the company by holding referendums.’
This letter arguably hasn’t yet captured as many headlines as the walk-out earlier this month. There are a number of likely reasons for this – the biggest being that Dragonfly isn’t at this point in time a tangible product which we can see. It is understandably hard to get the public and mainstream press behind a campaign criticising a product that doesn’t even have a launch date.
The ethical issues with Dragonfly are also less black and white than those raised with Project Maven and Rubingate earlier in the year. As one user asks in the comments under the letter: ‘If Google drops dragonfly, the Chinese netizens will end up using “Baidu”, is it better or worse for the netizens of China?’ Another user argues: ‘The debate here really is about sacrificing the western pride and values surrounding censorship in favour of enabling a billion people that are already censored to the freedoms of information the west has.’
These positions might be surprising to some of the Google employees who have signed the letter or left the company, but it is in-keeping with data published at The Drum showing that more than 72% of Weibo users (one of the country’s leading microblogging sites) would choose Google over Baidu et al. if it were to launch its new service. There is something to be said for the potential for Google to disrupt the monopoly Baidu has in the country, and to potentially deliver better quality results if not less censored ones.
The signees, of course are not alone either. They are joined by Amnesty International (and a number of other organisations) who are bolstering the argument that Dragonfly will endanger human rights defenders and journalists who might use it. The number of employees signing the letter is growing, and the number of organisations joining the opposition to Dragonfly looks to be growing too.
Many are now looking to a Congress hearing on December 5th where Pichai is set to defend Google against accusations of bias in its algorithm. It is likely that the subject of China and Dragonfly will rear its head there, too, and that Pichai will likely face his toughest round of questioning yet. As things stand, Google re-entering the Chinese search market is looking more and more likely to happen. We can reasonably expect that the closer we get to that time, the more people we will see join the voices of the signees of this latest letter and the more heated the debate will become.
The post Dragonfly: 500+ staff sign open letter for Google to drop new Chinese search engine appeared first on Search Engine Watch.
What follows are the most popular articles that we published in November 2018, recognizing that articles published earlier in the month are more likely to make the list than later ones
The post November 2018 Top 10: Our Most Popular Posts appeared first on Practical Ecommerce.
Category pages are important to optimize because they target the keywords that consumers search for. But it can be difficult because the pages tend to have little content. In this post, I'll describe six ways to optimize ecommerce category pages
The post SEO: 6 Ways to Optimize Category Pages appeared first on Practical Ecommerce.
We are still in the very early days of cloud adoption in the enterprise says ServiceNow CEO, John Donahoe. Also, something that is often overlooked is that governments are finally embracing the cloud which presents a huge opportunity to all of the big cloud players.
“Governments are now aggressively embracing cloud, not just the US government, but government’s all over the world,” noted Donahoe. “Just like in our consumer lives where cloud-based applications gave us better user experiences, hid the complexity and greater efficiency, the same things now happening in the enterprise and in government.”
John Donahoe, ServiceNow CEO, recently talked about cloud adoption by the enterprise and government in a conversation on CNBC:
We’re still in the very early days of adoption of cloud in the enterprise. You see it in companies and you see it in governments. Governments are now aggressively embracing cloud, not just the US government, but government’s all over the world. Just like in our consumer lives where cloud-based applications gave us better user experiences, hid the complexity and greater efficiency, the same things now happening in the enterprise and in government. They need to deliver better experiences for their customers and their employees and they need productivity and cloud can deliver all three. If it were a baseball game I would say we’re in the second or third inning.
What I hear from customers is that they want to adopt four to six core strategic platforms, sort of modern tech stack of the future. Typically that includes a Salesforce, a Workday, a ServiceNow, maybe an Office 365, an Adobe, and SAP. They want to put as much as they can on those core platforms and take all that data together and deliver better experiences for their customers and better experiences for their employees. What ServiceNow does, sort of unique among that, is we help build some of the connective tissue across the different platforms.
I see a shift with governments and the cloud. Two to three years ago government’s were suspicious of cloud, they were worried about security and that has changed and that has changed in a powerful way. Governments are under pressure to deliver better services to their citizens, whether it’s the IRS or any other sector, and drive efficiency in productivity.
You see very large government entities embracing cloud. You saw the contract yesterday with Microsoft. We’re seeing it both in the federal government in the US, federal government’s around the world, and many state and local governments, because cloud platforms like ServiceNow enable them to drive tremendous productivity and provide better experiences.
It’s the early innings. There is enormous growth left with cloud at the infrastructure level and at the software level. At the infrastructure level where AWS and Azure and Google Cloud play you see that cloud adoption happening around the world. I think there’s going to be a lot of growth for both organizations.
If you talk to customers, customers don’t want to be sole source on this, customers want to have choice. Even in the public cloud, they’re often embracing one or two or three different public cloud providers to make sure that they’re they’re mitigating the risk and they’re getting the best of what each of those platforms has.
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It’s the scourge of effective marketing: content that caters to everyone and thus caters to no one. It’s plain old vanilla – ubiquitous, bland, and the default choice when you don’t really know what people want or care about and can’t be bothered to find out.
When you follow a storytelling approach informed by data, it’s possible to be much more specific, and thus relevant, to your customers’ needs and interests. Instead of plain old vanilla, it’s goat cheese marionberry habañero. Instead of just a chocolate bar, it’s Tony’s Chocolonely Dark Pecan Coconut. Or, instead of yet another white paper about the virtues of a hybrid cloud environment, it’s a personalized video or peer-to-peer roundtable hosted by CIOs for CIOs.
Data-led content makes for much better stories, especially if you can personalize the message and delivery. What kind of data do you need to do that? Where do you find it? And how do you use it to create a more effective content strategy? Fortunately, you don’t have to be a data scientist, but it does require both art and science to connect the insights in your data to content and conversations.
Data-led #content makes for better stories, especially if you personalize the message and delivery. @CarmenHill
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“If you have customers and you have salespeople and you create content, then you have giant barrels of (data) monkeys that are just waiting to be linked,” says Julie Wisdom, co-founder and creative strategist for London-based agency ALIAS Partners, where she has developed a rational, proven approach for creating data-led content that doesn’t lose its sizzle and pop. “I say that because it absolutely can feel like a daunting task. But if you stick with it and just focus on linking a few at a time, your content strategy can confidently carry your marketing strategy.”
If you have customers & salespeople & #content, then you have barrels of data monkeys. @juliewisdom
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With 24 years as a journalist-turned-B2B marketer, Julie has specialized experience and perspective on how to best use data to create more relevant, effective content strategies that tell a great story.
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First, Julie advises, dig into your existing customer data. When maintained, it’s the single best view into the behavior of your ideal customer. While search and social data are typically the easiest to analyze for topic popularity, customer data provides the richest insight for planning content stories and adding empathy to each stage of your buyer journeys. “Customer and prospect data are precious,” she says
Customer data provides the richest insight for planning content stories, says @JulieWisdom.
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Too many companies overlook or even avoid the data they have internally, either because it’s unstructured and difficult to get or they don’t have a strategy for how they want to use it. “It’s worth the time, pain and anguish of doing whatever is required to access that data, because it’s so hugely valuable,” Julie says, “as long as you remove anything too dated.”
The data in your CRM and marketing automation systems can help you understand how and why your customers became buyers in the first place. Looking across hundreds of thousands (if appropriate) of records, you can get aggregate insight into the buyer journey. Customer engagement data can reveal how your content is performing, including which content drives the most interest and what helps to move people most aggressively from awareness to consideration to purchase to optimization and back to consideration for the next thing.
“If you are feeding this information into Salesforce, for instance, you can see what decision-makers and influencers from a single account consumed through their journey,” Julie says. “This is one potent way to inform your content strategy for their future and also for like accounts.”
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Some of the most interesting insights relate to how people – and companies – make or influence buying decisions. Are they more emotional or rational? Do they make decisions quickly or more deliberately? There are distinct differences, depending on a person’s role, department, company, and industry – and the buying personality of the company.
“Two companies in the same industry can be radically different,” Julie says, “so why do we focus just on grouping profiles of roles rather than profiles of businesses?” She adds that different types of companies often have a distinctive style of decision-making based on their culture and leadership.
ALIAS uses a model for profiling prospects and target accounts based on buying modalities. This allows Julie and her team to create content based on stylistic differences, tailoring the tone of voice or format for different preferences, rather than producing different content for every possible segment.
Here’s how different decision-making styles might be implemented in your content strategy:
To do this, you must get to the first-party behavioral data that reveals how your customers buy from you. Behavioral data can also be used to generate a targeted list of look-alike companies. This natural alignment between customers you have and prospects who share similar buying behavior helps you to not only choose the right accounts to go after but also to create the right kind of content to engage with prospects in those companies.
Interviews with your sales team and with customers are another critical source of firsthand data. “You simply should not do any kind of strategy without it,” Julie says, adding that too often marketers get it wrong, especially when it comes to their colleagues in sales.
Don’t create your #contentstrategy without talking to sales team & customers, says @JulieWisdom.
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“Your sales team can be an absolute gold mine when it comes to understanding how your existing customers are aligned and make decisions,” she advises. “There are ways of teasing out good data from salespeople, but you have to ask the right questions. Bring in the voice of the customer and ask questions that get the salespeople talking about customers as if they were the product you are selling. This will help you frame and market to your ideal customer profile.”
You also need to talk with customers. Julie recommends using customers to provide peer insight, and both emotional and rational anecdotes. “You can then use these insights and anecdotes to inspire storylines that show not only what’s possible but how,” she says.
Finally, don’t overlook the greatest value of your subject matter experts. “They tend to think and act like peers to your customers, living and breathing their experiences,” Julie says, which makes them a valuable source of thought leadership stories to tie to your brand. “Ask where they go for inspiration, what they look like when they are at home, and roll this into your content strategy.”
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First-party data is the richest source of data, but third-party data can provide a valuable aggregate view of your audience that can help to inform your content strategy. Just be sure that the data provider captures that information in an ethical way and adheres to high standards of data privacy and security.
Understanding what your target audience is searching for and viewing online reveals valuable clues about their interests and propensity to buy. Tracking data on your owned properties, along with data from third-party websites and social networks, can help you identify which prospects are in market and ready to buy.
Find out what the audience is searching for to reveal clues to interests & propensity to buy. @CarmenHill
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“By layering this intelligence into your content strategy, you can make smarter decisions, because you’re not wasting money creating late-stage content for an industry that isn’t truly ready for the solutions you have to offer,” Julie says.
You can also incorporate install-base or technographic data into your content strategy.
This is particularly useful in tech companies, as install-base data measures the number of units of a product or service in use. In a nutshell, it indicates how many companies currently have your software installed. Some martech companies allow you to conduct searches based on “what companies have product x installed” and reveal what else they have in their tech stack.
By understanding which hardware and software a company uses, you can customize your content to address product challenges or insights. This information is particularly powerful for technology companies that offer complementary or competitive solutions.
For example, you might tailor your messaging to address the challenges of a competitor’s product and focus on the benefits that differentiate your own solution. Alternatively, you might use install-base data to exclude prospects from a campaign. It makes sense for a company that offers an accounting solution built on Salesforce to target only those companies that use Salesforce.
If this sounds like the kind of data you might use in account-based marketing you’re right. Although the specific tactics differ, ABM and content marketing share a common philosophy that puts customers at the center and communicates in a way that addresses their needs and interests at every stage of the buying journey.
At the center of this Venn diagram is ABX – the account-based experience.
The ABX framework calls for content rooted in actual customer and competitive data and insights tied to your value propositions through the customer perspective. All content has a purpose and is connected to other content.
In account-based experience, all content has a purpose & connects to other content, says @JulieWisdom.
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From customer data and interviews to intent and install-base data, you have a treasure trove of information to create stories that are relevant, resonant, and valuable. Julie says the secret is in discovering what is different – or what you can make different. And to do that, she says, “You have to get dirty in your data.” Instead of settling for a simplified, top-level view, you need to dig deep into the data, combining and comparing data sets in different ways, to uncover more interesting and less obvious insights.
Use the insight to deepen your understanding of the customer experience and worldview. Then paint a picture of how it could be better. What’s the fresh, interesting perspective that connects your value proposition to each audience? “The goal is to create a vision of the future without talking about yourself,” Julie says.
A conversation map documents the knowledge you have gathered about your prospects and articulates how to frame the narrative around their worldview. Even a simple conversation map, like the one below, helps inform great stories and more effective content. As Julie explains, “A truly ownable story is rooted in the more intangible aspects of a value proposition. The ‘narrative’ is what teases this out.”
By aligning your value proposition to real value and mapping it to relevant messages, content, and offers, the conversation map serves as a blueprint for persuasive conversations.
“ABX isn’t just about the individual assets you’ll create but about the framework for your content strategy as a whole,” Julie says. “When you follow an approach that is informed by data, you force that strategy in a direction that naturally is more effective, differentiating, and relevant.”
With apologies to all you vanilla lovers, there is really no excuse for marketers to fall back on bland, generic content when data gives so many more interesting ways to tell your stories. The extra effort you put in up front will not only deliver higher quality content to your customers but also higher ROI on your content marketing.
A version of this article originally appeared in the November issue of Chief Content Officer. To expand your strategic content marketing toolkit, subscribe to CMI’s free weekday newsletter.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
The post How to Make Your Bland Content Strategy Delicious appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
