9 Essential Truths about Content Marketing – the Message with the Medium

"Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding that influences behaviour."
– Marshall McLuhan, author of "The Medium is the Massage"

1. Compelling Content is Vital

High-quality content and variety of information are what readers have an appetite for, and ultimately find value in. Authenticity, a new-order marketing term, is defined as expression in your own voice with input from various sources and perspectives. As an industry expert you are a catalyst for change or an authority expert on trends and insights. Reader curiosity happens when commentary on your processes used, the hiccups and how it was handled are essential components for true engagement. Offering examples in a personalized context of your own experiences ignites curiosity as it pertains to the relevance of a matter and what we want them to learn.   

2. Raised Standards Expected from Discerning Knowledge-Seekers

88% of B2B Marketers today use content marketing as a component of business development planning. Content within the realm of marketing and business development for law firms and professional services is a growing trend – in 2016 and into 2017, 50% of all B2B (and B2C) companies will increase their content marketing spends. Expect more content and more competition that will come with higher standards. Also expect an average read time of 37 seconds amplifying the importance of quality versus quantity.

3.  Fresh Insights for Fresh Content

Speaking to client needs and challenges through articles helps the decision-making process as they move along the discovery cycle to exploration and evaluation and, in due course, to selection. Fresh and new perspectives with white papers, webinars, Q&A pieces, articles, case studies are critical elements of content marketing. Be aware: just because you publish, doesn't always mean clients will follow. Quality content is digestible, not superfluous and should be less technical without over-simplification. Providing clarity over comprehensiveness is critical to continuous and active engagement.

4. Client Connectivity Grows with Fostering Trust

As the go-to source, what does your reader need to know – i.e., their pain points, what's keeping up them up at night? Engagement is earned when you understand and address their interests and needs and by providing value related to their company, their industry and its challenges. Intersect this with your practice or niche area, outside and inside peers and influencers. Remember, to have less of a product/service centric attitude.  

 5. Influencers are the Auto Go-To Source

Thought leaders within their own ranks back their brands by lending credibility to what they share and promote, hence the more popular on internal influencer groups, the more credible and visible a business becomes. Business leaders gravitate toward influencers – a potent component of a brand's content strategy. Know your audience and focus on what matters and what we want them to learn.

6. Content Strategy is about Timing

A moment or period of time with content such as insights on emerging legal and financial trends, a strategic point of view and advice, e.g. new legislation or case law, and then, combining it with selectively-timed placement using digital channels such as third-party-aggregators (Mondaq & Lexology) and social media is a strategic perfect storm. A content strategy must be an organized, documented strategy with more efficient use of valuable digital analytic resources. Almost half fail to document that strategy. Managing an annual content calendar for the long-term with quarterly updates contributes to heightened brand awareness and brand recall.

7. Pictures Speak a Thousand Words

Optimize content including images, video and text, even a cartoon. A 3 - 5 min. video with you as the spotlight enhances the narrative. Authenticity resonates further with a guided approach that's not scripted and very easy for clients/viewers to relate to your experiences as they relate to you.

8. Integrated Marketing Strategy is required to Reach all Client Touch Points

With heightened accessibility to your firm brand, a renewed capability exists to alter or shape how your clients think and behave. Alignment with a well-documented marketing plan and strategy inclusive of both corporate and marketing objectives, accelerates the rewards of your marketing investment. Defining the firm's brand and value proposition with its select target audiences involves regular website updates, social media,  digital advertising, sponsored content, sponsorships, email programs, SEO, and referral business development programs. Creating specific sub-brand/niche websites speaking to a particular issue or cause will further enhance your overall firm marketing strategy and will ultimately engage clients with your firm brand for a positive feedback loop.

9. Content Marketing with Integrated Marketing is an Investment, not an Expense

Content marketing drives conversion rates that are nearly SIX times higher than their competitors and traditional marketing counterparts. Don't join the 51% of marketers who say their content marketing efforts are only "somewhat" effective leading to a incomplete and/or broken customer experience, lack of brand loyalty, and customer confidence.

*Curata, Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs

 

Getting Video to Work to its Most Optimal Advantage

Lou Brzezinski is a partner of the firm's Commercial Litigation and Group and practices in all areas of law pertaining to insolvency and liquidation.

Production: East End Digital

Getting Video to Work to its Most Optimal Advantage

Like a photograph, video has the unique quality advantage of the visual experience over every other medium. They say a picture speaks a thousand words. The 3-5 minute video has the power to do even more. From a strategic-creative perspective, an accounting or experience of a case or case study, a topical subject, or a narrative in the most authentic style garners optimal engagement. For viewers, notably clients, the video experience increases trust delivering on an emotive connection. Authenticity is key in its natural backdrop: showing full context and a resonating narrative that's guided - and not scripted, leads into thought leadership and a polished first impression. Keeping your audience's needs first is key. Technically, video in the digital landscape shares similar qualities and capabilities of posted content that's also portable across multiple channels: social media, organic searches (SEO), embedded video lead forms on your website and qualified leads incorporating a firm's/lawyer/practice group. One of video's best advantages is that it aligns directly with ROI engagement and action - measurable by social media metrics (i.e. Linked In or YouTube). The costs to produce can be achieved for as little as $1,000.

Corporate brand messaging is secondary in the video experience. The sharing of a story within story-telling principles demonstrates your expertise and experience of the work you do, the learnings, successes and the unexpected that came with it. Video in its entirety, embodies core values of the brand expression. Viewers relate to experiences and they relate with you. Video should not a pitch of your brand, but the narrative places the opportunity to showcase your practice specialties and niche areas, and in many cases, better so than the written word. In marketing circles, it's what considered outbound marketing for an inbound effect; engagement and reverberation.

The level and boundless opportunities extends to a whole world of ideation and high performance when used strategically. With video, call to action (also a measurement tool) often gets overlooked, therefore when planning, it's important to give specific viewers 'next steps' to learn more, download an article or whitepaper, and contact you in some way - ie. filling out a well-crafted form or providing a link to your bio.

Distinguishing yourself from others provides for an instant competitive edge.

Finally, some stats;

Video First Marketing Trend:

Video: 92%
Company-authored curated content: 66%
3rd party curated content: 60%
Web events: 64%
Slides: 64%
Infographics: 63%

n = 217 respondents
Source: Aberdeen Group

Top Marketing Initiatives of Video Users:

Lead generation/customer acquisition: 85%
Brand awareness and credibility: 80%
Thought leadership: 79%
Sales enablement: 71%
Customer interactions and retention: 65%

n = 147 respondents
Source: Aberdeen Group

Exciting Times for an Adapting and Sharing Economy

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

― Henry Ford

 Disruption and Transformation.  Commonly and might even be excessively-used buzzwords in this new era, particularly so, in marketing circles. As I see it, a large part of it is as simple as evolving, adapting, pivoting and acting on worthwhile transitions that bring exciting opportunity at an easy, relatively fast pace and there’s more to learn.  Marketing change and evolving opportunities, in my mind, have been a mainstay since the Madmen days.

What I’ve learned from working with law firms and professional services is that each of them have their own strengths and are uniquely different, embracing change in a manner that works best for them.

We are evolving to a sharing economy that’s working for us. I’m sharing another quote from an ideator who jumped out of an airplane for a promotional stunt that worked and garnered big business for him and his organization:

 “As people’s access to the internet grows we’re seeing the sharing economy boom – I think our obsession of ownership is at a tipping point and the sharing economy is part of the antidote”  - Richard Branson, Virgin Group

We’re learning this couldn’t be more true. On a positive note, a sharing economy or the sharing of collaborative information, ideas and reciprocal business exchange have played a large role as it relates to an enhanced client experience journey for law firms and professional services.   We live in a sharing economy – the sharing of positive experiences and now responsible for driving client decisions. Word of mouth is the single most important tool in marketing and business development – that will never change.  Peer recommendations still drive the most conversions or work rewarded.  Working with marketing, notably integrated marketing through campaigns on a consistent basis drives word-of-mouth and those coveted referrals and recommendations.

The Client Experience – The Ultimate Value Maker

Clients and the organizations they work for have embraced change through innovation and naturally, their affinity is to align themselves with firms who do the same ®  it’s digital transformation and marketing technology. It has given savvy marketers the full picture of how their audiences are interacting with their brands, so that they can make more informed, data-driven decisions on how and where to communicate.  Channels are diverse and wide – strengthening at warp speed.

Now, more than ever is there a better time to continually embrace and activate the new world order of digital as a necessary part of doing business. Upwards of 75% to 90% of business buyers start their purchase decisions online through active engagement and research – a referral and the organic search to a firm’s website. There are 11 times more B2B organizations using marketing automation/technology now more than in 2011, according to Sirius Decisions.  

An evolving change is the converging role of marketing and business development in professional services and law firms as they define their markets and specialities that address and understand client needs.  With shared revenue goals, the convergence will become more collaborative, closer and with a shared purpose. Be on point with clients for the heartbeat check, as they may move from one firm to another to the next contingent.  Performance benchmarks will encompass:  brand exposure, campaign viewthroughs (web), level of engagement and the lift in overall opportunity. As firms compete vigorously for corporate clients and expand organic client relationships, use and leverage the data that is now available to us.

With forming trust in relationships being the top priority, using technology-based marketing helps that process to create opportunities.  Analytics help develop client connections as it relates to business and audience profiles, web and content.

Let’s consider a few critical elements as part of the marketing journey;

 The Brand Experience – Just What Is Your Firm’s Brand?

Now is the best opportunity to make, change and build brands. In assessing brand essence and value proposition of the firm, a culture-based mission for brand status (positioning statement) asks the following; what does my brand embody, client demands/needs, what’s our offering? Digital marketing, through content and other marketing channels informs a specific culture message.  Brand spirit, a succinct term used in brand development accompanied with value proposition is quite simply the look and feel of your firm’s voice, content material, language and visuals that represent the true brand, not one-offs.

Being clear and purposeful in your message and communications is an off-shoot of the brand essence.

Then, we share.  A sharing economy or share of information has specific powers to motivate:

   - Reason to Share -- An Ask to Share -- Easy ways to Share (widget).

Content Marketing Update – Strengthening and Getter Better By the Month

Last September, after writing 9 Essential Truths About Content Marketing and delivering a presentation at TLOMA, more information has come available. High Quality content  is about personalizing: expertise, knowledge, opinions and insights. The question arises is how are we differentiating content from journalism or a content piece from an article.  There is a difference. Content strategists are emphatic about one key criteria- Content should be clear, relevant and descriptive to be SEO worthy for organic searches and ultimately, be crave-worthy.

What’s crave-worthy in definitive terms?

·      Identifying client/customer pain points and their content preferences. Secondly, at different stages of the client service journey – identifying and describing those fears for opportunity.   All this, helps propel a firm’s brand.

·      High-quality content that evokes curiousity, confirm & alleviate fears, then  provides a solution. 

·      Content that uncovers a mystery.

·      Content can be about a rescue story and risk-taking.

·      Does the content deal with or address similar challenges?

·      To be engaging, does your passion shine through and is enthusiastic or deeply concerned?

·      Does it ask real questions?

Content marketing is a long term approach to connect with an audience.  Results in content can integrate cross-practice content collaboration for the optimum client experience. Be nimble with needs planning, scheduling social media and content postings. Ensure it’s positioned well in channels and research platform. In appropriate ways this is the return on experience.

Website – It’s a Conduit for Business.

 The website is an owned platform but too often it’s neglected. It’s far more than just a directory or announcements. Websites are where high-quality content is housed. Sophisticated buyers go to the internet for research and education, particularly high-complex matter decision-making. 

What’s new and evolving in websites? Responsive design, new browsers, robust sidebars, deep-linking across cross-devices for content, bios and better navigation.  As a precursor, understand and evaluate which portions of the website they visit. ·

       Display specific content to specific audiences.

·      Use predictive search tools to capture analytics and make matches quickly.

·      Create issue-based or specialized/niche microsites.

·      Tabbed menus (related data one tab at a time) and multi-screen : collapsible content, image carousels and navigation.

Google searches will be more intuitive that goes one step further by targeting the most relevant users who have a higher propensity to purchase through browse behaviour, purchase/enquiry behaviour, social data to properly model and predict behaviour.

Consider Reach and Unique Visits: Evaluate how many individuals have viewed your content – typically happens within a 30 day window and allocate budget accordingly.

Consider Viewing and Page Views:  how many did they read? What pages are getting the most views?

Always look at engagement levels:  bounce rates, real time spent with content are all indicators of how engaged your web traffic is.

Email Technology Innovations and Why It’s Here To Stay:

 Sophisticated email platforms are becoming more nuanced and more complex and much better at providing enhanced user experiences. The focus is on identifying unwanted or uninteresting blast messages and getting them out of the users way. Interactive email will take off as we close this decade:  to deliver exceptional in-box experiences, The future is: Animated GIF’s (moving images with content) that move – add an element of interest and engagement

Mass blast emails: With inboxes getting too crowded, delivering relevant and personalized content is a must.  The aim is send targeted, relevant messages for high quality content.

To read more articles and white papers, refer to www.beachstrategic.com

9 Essential Truths About Contenting Marketing

Intertwining Thought Leadership with Content for Niche Audiences

SmartLawReferrals

 Getting Video to Work at its Most Optimal

 Hurry Up and Wait

 e-Essentials: Engage. Enhance. Entrust. Enact.- Business Development, Communications & Marketing Guide for Law Firms

Rosemary Beach is Principal & Practitioner of Beach Legal and Professional Marketing Services. A strategic marketing and business development consultancy for Canadian law firms and professional services firms. Visit www.beachstrategic.com or email at rosemary@beachstrategic.com

ClosingtheGap-MarcomBD

Introduction

Business Development and Marketing with Communications together fall into the same category – driving revenue action. Human interaction is still and continues to be the coveted exchange when marketing your services. Human emotions do exist even in business. For businesses and c-suite: revenue/financial/operations, this means understanding buyers and the customer experience and has never been more critical, particularly for complex business transactions. In professional services in the digital ecosphere.

This whitepaper aims to challenge the silos of traditional marketing and sales approaches still in use, how these silos are disaffecting revenue gains and where the opportunities lie in quality content marketing technology with input from business development.

Who should read this? Chief Revenue Officers, Chief Sales Officers, General Managers, Managing Partners and Team Leaders.

About The Author:

Rosemary Beach is a Strategic Communications & Marketing Director – a visionary leader Marketing, communications and brand development in the professional services and b2b industries. Advancing persuasive communications and purposeful marketing planning with core digital marketing www.beachstrategic.com

The Power of Marketing with Co-Pilots: Marketing and Business Development

Marketing and sales teams' moving in harmony is the holy grail of delivering a better customer experience (CX).

Are These Two Functions Working in Unison?

Are there true roadblocks for marketing and business development teams? Why we should be asking ourselves if this is the time for a real convergence, working in harmony of these two critical functions.

Buying behavior has increasingly been focused on making sure that they have a good understanding of people’s experiences before they’re willing to purchase. Robust data, qualitative insights and forward-looking buyer personas inform on how to navigate uncertainty and natural inquisitiveness.

There is importance with your brand voice: Decisions are not always pragmatic and are emotionally connected to vendors and service providers.

Personalization of content creates meaningful connections. To gain brand trust, can we rely on organizations to start their marketing narratives with purpose and not the features? Are they choosing digital channels most preferred by their customer base that puts a selling-minded organization at an advantageous position?

A dramatic digital shift is coming in the next 5-10 years.

Do you know?

• What problems are we trying to solve with customers?

• If we are asking ourselves questions about our customer profiles?

• What type of long-lasting relationship are we trying to create?

• If we are creating a community around the services that we provide?

• If we paying heed to customer feedback, first-hand and in real-time?

Or is this too familiar in an email?

“Dear Mr./Ms. Marketer, over the course of the last few weeks you have received several emails from me regarding the latest in accounting software”

“I’d really like to sit down with you over lunch and discuss our newly released program”

“You’re a busy executive, and I don’t want to waste your time, so let’s get right to the point: our accounting software management system is not like anything you’ve seen before”

One thing that is true in today’s business landscapes are customer-centric initiatives that have been largely marginalized at a time when they shouldn’t be. We are experiencing underutilized customer data platforms that potentially are connected to other digital platforms within an organization.

Are we truly interacting with our customers in a meaningful way for the revenue-driving results we want?

We are learning that marketing and communication teams bring customers early in the buyer process, on point with the vibe-check to determine if there is a level of seriousness and fit-ready for business development engagement.

The blending of content nurturing for in-person conversation.

Buyer Personas and Understanding Your Target Audiences: A Crucial Exercise

Business development/sales enablement teams have the advantage of direct personal contact with audiences and their input, working collaboratively, can give marketers an advantage. Include them in your discussions for nuanced input not necessarily had by machine-led, data-driven insights.

Difficulties arise when marketing and business development work in silos and cannot extract full value from traditional CRM systems. One-third of surveyed sales leaders reported that incomplete data was a significant problem, and another one-half said they lacked access to customer data across all parts of the business.

Buyer Personas Act as a Compass for Leaders

Buyer personas are constructed around specific customer goals and action. We learn to influence behavior versus focussing only on traits of an individual. They range in differences in industry (tech vs. manufacturing), priorities, company size and their competitive sets. This could vary by threats and demands within their industry.

Understanding how they think and what they value:

• Particular pain-points

• Acknowledge what they value

• Challenges they face with possible solutions and outcomes

• Enhanced value your company offers

• Other sources of information looked at

• Their relationships with their customers and evolving customer needs

Consider the positive effects — better experience, more trust, and the higher likelihood of business development having meaningful connections with customers.

Customers Feel Understood With:

• Content your target customers use

• Topics they are interested in

• Types or formats of content they prefer

• Infusing keywords they use to search, organically

• Embedding anticipatory questions and answers

• Channels used and where your target customers are

• At a concentrated stage of the buyer journey

Business Development Teams Must Contribute

It is well known that to close deals, an organization needs content, digital tools, knowledge, and information presented in a way that captivates for veritable and authoritative buyer engagement. It is the business development action your company needs. Once on your website, consider what do you want these customers to do: download content, ask questions, subscribe to a mailing list, book a demo/meeting?

For complex business development transactions, according to Gartner research, B2B customers engaging in complex business transactions reported spending only 17% of their total buying experience interacting with business development teams. What they also said was that 27% of their time was online learning following by independent learning offline at 18%. Finally, they built consensus across company stakeholders (22% and 11%).

Business Development leaders should be concerned about the limited opportunity of direct, in-person interaction with customers. Some would say that if they were accessing a business development rep, it was for the purposes of acquiring the information necessary versus having a sales conversation.

Personalization with Quality Content That Breaks Barriers

Netflix serves as one of the most well-known examples of a brand with successful, innovative personalization. How? Netflix capitalizes on available viewer data.

Personalization is becoming a significant trend in the B2B industry. The insights derived from buyer personas help us craft tailored content and making it easier to do business with us. Personalized content is essential as it can be the difference between a potential client (lead) ending up on your landing page and signing-off, or a lead converting by scheduling a call with your sales or business development team.

• It can overcome leads’ common objections.

• Content that has structure and includes storytelling using an authentic voice.

• It must include your brand voice with value propositions woven throughout.

• Ensure click-worthy calls to action are the most direct way to influence consumer behavior.

Quick Fact: On average, a consumer of knowledge, needs 13 pieces of content before making a purchase decision.

Technology involved for personalization at scale includes:

Customer data platform (CDP): Connects first-party data across systems to create a profile customer (identity).

Data management platform (DMP): Helps segment data collected by the customer data platform as well as third-party data for digital campaigns.

Identity resolution platform (IRP): Helps supplement first-party data and build a clearer and fulsome picture of a target market.

Staying out of the status quo can become a danger point or an opportunity. Consumers of information want more that go beyond corporate events or boilerplate pitches to acquire for new information, opinion-education, or other engagement techniques.

Now, in these digital times, aim for the optimal in engaging content instead of resting on laurels that has previously led to stale messaging past its sell-by date.

Albert Einstein, said, “The measure of intelligence is the ability to change”.

Quality Content in Tandem with Digital Technology

Ineffective content becomes a lacklustre flimsy effort flooded with inconsistent and irregularity. Other times, when there is too much content online, we risk chaos and a disconnect in the buyer journey.

Multiple touchpoints that are not leveraged and offering just a few insights have led to a superficial understanding of their customers.

Hence the need for AI and predictive analysis tools.

B2B marketers have relied on CRM systems to manage customers and leads and harmonize efforts with business development teams. Unfortunately, they have become so hard to manage thereby contributing to the widening gap between Marketing and Business Development. In fact, just over half of 1,000 surveyed sales leaders indicated that their CRM costs them revenue, a recent survey found.

The main cause is the lack of ability to predict and prevent customer attrition and has many B2B Marketers finding new ways to tighten alignment with business development to deliver excellent customer experiences and maintain customers for retention and for the longest possible time. A modernized CRM platform powered by artificial intelligence (AI) can play a critical role.

Brand Loyalty and Customer Loyalty Will Break Down:

57% of sales leaders said they couldn’t predict when customers would churn.

56% reported increased customer churn in the previous 12 months.

48% reported not knowing why customers left or churned.

Just look at these pertinent facts:

“In 2021, almost 50% of executives read least 1 white paper a week. They prefer more concise takeaways, summaries, charts, and graphs” – Quartz Global Executive Study

Long form articles the most shared 84%

Charts and Graphs 47%

Videos 37%

Breaking News 36%

Seeking Information on:

• Industry analysis

• Insights from company experts

• Exclusive Data

• Information about the Product or Service Experience

Most state they are annoyed by ads that interrupt them or intercept activity but do like a high quality pre-roll ad.

Shareable Content: The Best Brand Endorsement in the Eyes of Your Peers

What could be better? And, with positive commentary – even better! It is close to ranking the same in business development success as a direct referral. It is another way of saying “I recommend.”.

• Shareable content increases instances of social exchanges, a definite influencer of consumer purchase decisions.

• Contains information that those leads can forward with other decision-makers in the company.

• Allows for guest posts – at the google search stage with publications they trust (because that publication has credibility).

You can increase the likelihood that this happens by making your content extremely shareable. Here are some easy ways to do it:

• Use statistics and facts in your content

• Create popular content types like opinion-ed, studies, how-to guides, statistics.

• Add relevant social media buttons to all your blog posts.

• Share all blog posts on your brand’s social media accounts and website.

• Include lots of visuals like images, charts, videos, and infographics.

Follow up with an email drip – You can provide and show value with additional education that relates to your company’s product or service and highly relevant.

Protect Revenue and Improve Business Growth: Align Your BD/Sales and Marketing Teams Working Together

Collaborate with your team to identify your target accounts. You should consider data from both your sales and marketing departments to identify characteristics like:

Industry

Location

Company size

Revenue

Chance of repeat purchase

Expected profit margin

Consider a Pilot Campaign for a Launch or Pivoting:

If the campaign does well these insights can be applied to the “official” launch.

Tapping into Marketing Technology

An AI-Infused CRM Platform Enables Dynamic B2B Marketing and BD/Sales Enablement:

Predictive, real-time customer journey analytics are essential to gathering and learning in customer behavioral attributes that can bring upsell opportunities and flag customers likely to churn.

For the best opportunities, we can now predict the customer lifetime value of that prospect at the start of the customer lifecycle, prioritizing leads via their historical success track record.

Furthermore, it essentially improves the marketing and sales dynamic.

Moving The Buyer to the Close: Is Your CTA Buried or Missing in Content?

Any content without a CTA is a missed opportunity – a big one.

Calls to action (CTAs) are the most direct way of influencing behavior and is made easier with quality content. An effective CTA navigates customers as to what they should do next i.e., download or read another piece of content, start a free trial be --re-navigate to another website landing page, subscribe to a newsletter, get in touch. Quick Facts: 80% of marketers describe account-based marketing as delivering higher returns than any other marketing strategy with one of the biggest challenges being attribution. It’s much easier to pinpoint where the sale came from if you are targeting buyers you already have a relationship with.

Smart and personalized CTAs should be tailored as possible to your customer, relating back to personas created around customer goals. Infusing the next logical and natural step in a storytelling way for that specific user is critical and they are more likely to follow your lead on the positive customer journey you’ve created.

Conversation rate

When evaluating leadership qualities and effective business development and marketing communication teams that are working collaboratively, ask yourself about the endless possibilities with data that likely already exists in your own digital platforms for other functions performed within your organization.

Along with quality content, the strategic placement in digital portals, channels and third-party distributors must be important criteria as a component of the campaign. Organizations must be providing the finest of quality content for the best human interaction business development conversations, which may go back and forth between in-person and digital.

New learning opportunities in a unified marketing communications planning including priority setting with business development is evolving and in 5 years, a wide world of digital support can only enhance meaningful conversations with customers.

Rosemary Beach is a Consultant and Practitioner at Beach Professional Marketing Services

Visit https://www.beachstrategic.com/knowledge-centre for more thought leadership

Contact: rosemary@beachstrategic.com to talk more about closing strategic gaps in your marketing and BD plans

Sources for this Whitepaper:

MarketingProfs

Institute Quartz

Institute

SmartBriefs.com

Forbes.com

How Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is Changing For The Future and What To Do About It

By Rosemary Beach

October 1, 2018 

“I think the search engines are the new equivalent of publishing: an enabler of information”

Sir James Dyson, British Inventor, Industrial Design Engineer and founder

  of the Dyson Company. 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been a never-ending system that started off using select “keywords”, and now it has turned into an elaborate necessity within every marketing strategy. SEO and organic page rankingis an ever-changing field within the Google ecosystem.  Google relies on many individual ranking signals and these signals change at various times. These signals are otherwise known as algorithms.  Be prepared for these excited and much needed changes to optimize searches faster and better. 

What's Changed and Why Is It Important Now for Professional Services? 

Google's methodology is understanding the search's intent and the contextual meaning of terms as they appear in the datasphere. Google's semantic search(or a string of words/contextual) has replaced key words. Google has been much better and sophisticated in understanding the meaning behind search queries. How? They return content that matches the actual meaning and intent behind the request. Mobile versions are tried and true and continues to trend upwards.  

SEO Trends Strengthening in 2018:

 1.      Page Rank Based on Your Mobile Website: 

Your website must be responsive to mobile devices. Ranking signal alerts lead to mobile indexing.  

Go-To Tip: Focus on a load time of less than 3 seconds.  User navigation, the design and information on your page ranking could drop.  

 2.     SEO Strategies for Voice Searches

Forget typing, rising popularity is abound of voice-activated smart devices 37% use Google’s Siri and 19% use Amazon's Alexa).  

Activate Long-tail (your conversational string) within a wide spectrum of searches.  I.e.  "What is the best firm that specializes in _____ and could help me with _________". 

Go-To Tip:Evaluate current keywords, start writing conversational words and put a call to your SEO specialist to update. 

 3.    Providing Instant Answers in Featured Content

Up to today, we provided a brief overview of content.  With the rise of voice searches it has become a requirement for featured content that provide instant answers. 

Siri and Alexa can provide instant results to questions but they need to be able to quickly scan your content for the answers they are looking for: FAQ and Q&A pages.

4.    User Experience Remains Top Dog 

Watch those analytics reports – if your visitors abandon your site after 30 seconds or you have a high bounce rate, this will disaffect your SEO ranking.

Go-To Tip:  Review and adjust your web pages or create new webpages. 

 Improve Your SEO Title

Not only will it have an engaging look, feel and sound, it will also aid in the long-tail effect. 

Content is Still King

Google identifies and disqualifies lower-quality content.  

Search engines today have a good idea, and statistically speaking, of what words occur together and makes it semantic correlations. 

Its activities include people, places, things, concepts, or ideas which are represented as nodes and connected by their inter-relationships. Make sure these are on your website: News, photos, facts, articles, press releases, and white papers.  Your content will have more viewing/reading when it contains original research insights and, especially your opinion, and what is called thought leadership. 

Leverage a trending topic also provides practical insights or authoritative news content on new products or developments. Google formulates answers to the users' questions through thought leadership content. 

Go-To Tip: Check content for titles that are engaging and the opening paragraph of any content contain long-tail wording and add captions to images. 

Backlinks:  A Powerful Form of Application for Getting Better Search Engine Rankings

When a webpage links to any other page, it’s called a backlink. In the past, backlinks were the major metric for the ranking of a webpage.  Now, a page with a lot of backlinks tends to rank higher on all major search engines, including Google.It is important to have backlinks from quality sites, and those backlinks should be contextual in nature.  Your goal should be to get links from authoritative and relevant sites.

Engage in influencer marketing to acquire links, as you will have a degree of control, it carries more weight and a contextual link which helps your site rank more highly in search engines.  It’s one of the best ways to acquire links.     

Go-To Tip:Create links to individual posts/pages of content, articles, whitepapers that lead them back to your homepage.

More of What You Can Do:

Add AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) To Your Site’s Content Pages

If your website hosts informative articles, blog posts, press releases or news articles, incorporate accelerated mobile pages (AMP) to your site – it allows you to serve content more quickly on mobile devices, and Google looks more favourably on sites that incorporate AMP.

 Shares are important but so do links from many other domains.  Attract new links and drive traffic to your site.  Social sharing is an essential component of your strategy.   You need both shares and links. Remember, social sharing is not enough and is not an amplification strategy.  

 Influencer strategiescontinue to be successful - Your CEO, Your Managing Partner, Your Leader. Your influencer should have multi-twitter followers but a much better strategy is in a niche with an influencer who has a highly engaged, but smaller (or niche) audience. 

Go-To Tip:  Syndicate your content on popular sites specific to your niche or specialty area.

Take an Integrated Approach

Content marketing, SEO and social media work together to drive traffic, build relationships and trust, and progressively grow your audience. 

You will want to attract large volumes of traffic via search and social media and then, filter this traffic through directing viewers to various types of targeted content in your website and email content.  

Quick Facts:

CEO’s on Linked In have an average of 930 connections.

Linked In is the most effective social media platform.

39% of the 562 Linked In users are paying for a premium account. 

40% of members visit their  professional social network each day.

80% of users prefer an authentic and honest personality on social networks.

Video can increase purchase/buy interest by 144%. 

 “Trust is the glue of life. It's the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It's the foundational principle that holds all relationships”. 

Stephen Covey, Author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People 

Sources:

Rank Brain

Content Marketing Institute

Curata