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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Posted by randfish
I just finished reading Jan Schaumann's short post on Why Companies Should Pay for Their Employees to Attend Conferences. I liked it. I generally agree with it. But I have more to add.
First off, I think it's reasonable for managers and company leaders to be wary of conferences and events. It is absolutely true that if your employees attend them, there will be costs associated, and it's logical for businesses to seek a return on investment.
What do you sacrifice when sending a team member to an event?Let's start by attempting to tally up the costs:
Total: $4,630–$10,230
That's no small barrier. For many small businesses or agencies, it's a month or two of their marketing expenses or the salary for an employee. There needs to be significant return on those dollars to make it worthwhile. Thankfully, in all of my experiences over hundreds of marketing events the last 12 years, there is.
What do you gain by sending a team member to an event?Nearly all the benefits of events come from three sources: the growth (in skills, relationships, exposure to ideas, etc) of the attendee(s), applicable tactics & strategies (including all the indirect ones that come from serendipitous touch points), and the extension of your organization's brand and network.
In the personal growth department, we see benefits like:
A gentleman at SearchLove London 2016 gives me an excellent (though slightly blurry) thumbs up
In the applicable tactics & strategies, we get benefits like:
Purna Virji at SMX Munich 2017
In the extension of organizational brand/network, we get benefits like:
But I said above that these three included "nearly all" the benefits, didn't I? :-)
Daisy Quaker at MozCon Ignite
It's true. There are more intangible forms of value events provide. I think one of the biggest is the trust gained between a manager and their team or an employer and their employees. When organizations offer an events budget, especially when they offer it with relative freedom for the team member to choose how and where to spend it, a clear message is sent. The organization believes in its people. It trusts its people. It is willing to sacrifice short-term work for the long-term good of its people. The organization accepts that someone might be recruited away through the network they gain at an event, but is willing to make the trade-off for a more trusting, more valuable team. As the meme goes:
CFO: What if we invest in our people and they leave?
CEO: What if we don’t and they stay?
Total: $A Lot?
The challenge comes in because these are hard things for which to calculate ROI. In fact, any number I throw out for any of these above will absolutely be wrong for your particular situation and organization. The only true way to estimate value is through hindsight, and that means having faith that the future will look like the past (or rigorous, statistically sound models with large sample sizes, validated through years of controlled comparison... which only a handful of the world's biggest and richest companies do).
It's easy to see stories like "The biggest deals I've ever done, mostly (80%) came from meeting people at conferences" and "I've had the opportunity to open the door of conversations previously thought locked" and "When I send people on my team I almost always find they come back more inspired, rejuvenated, and full of fire" and dismiss them as outliers or invent reasons why the same won't apply to you. It's also easy explain away past successes gained through events as not necessarily requiring the in-person component.
I see this happen a lot. I'm embarrassed to say I've seen it at Moz. Remember last summer, when we did layoffs? One of the benefits cut was the conference and events budget for team members. While I think that was the right decision, I'm also hopeful & pushing for that to be one of the first benefits we reinstate now that we're profitable again.
Lexi Mills at Turing Festival in Edinburgh
Over the years of my event participation, first as an attendee, and later as a speaker, I can measure my personal and Moz's professional benefits, and come up with some ballpark range. It's harder to do with my team members because I can't observe every benefit, but I can certainly see every cost in line-item format. Human beings are pretty awful in situations like these. We bias to loss aversion over potential gain. We rationalize why others benefit when we don't. We don't know what we're missing so we use logic to convince ourselves it's ROI negative to justify our decision.
It's the same principle that often makes hard-to-measure marketing channels the best ROI ones.
Some broader discussions around marketing event issuesBefore writing this post, I asked on Twitter about the pros and cons of marketing conferences that folks felt were less often covered. A number of the responses were insightful and worthy of discussion follow-ups, so I wanted to include them here, with some thoughts.
If you're a conference organizer, you know how tough a conversation this is. Want to bring in outside food vendors (which are much more affordable and interesting than what venues themselves usually offer)? 90% of venues have restrictions against it. Want to get great food for attendees? That same 90% are going to charge you on the order of hundreds of dollars per attendee. MozCon's food costs are literally 25%+ of our entire budget, and considering we usually break even or lose a little money, that's huge.
If you're a media company and you run events for profit, or you're a smaller business that can't afford to have your events be a money-losing endeavor, you're between a rock and a hard place. At places like MozCon and CTAConf, the food is pretty killer, but the flip side is there's no margin at all. Many conferences simply can't afford to swing that.
Totally agree with Ross — interesting one, and pros/cons to each. At smaller shows, I love the more intimate connections, but I'm also well aware that for most speakers, it's a tough proposition to ask for a new presentation or to bring their best stuff. It's also hard to get many big-name speakers. And, as Ross points out, the networking can be deeper, but with a smaller group. If you're hoping to meet someone from company X or run into colleagues from the past, small size may inhibit.
For years prior to MozCon, I'd only ever been to events with a couple keynotes and then panels of 3–6 people in breakout sessions the rest of the day. I naively thought we'd invented some brilliant new system with the all-keynote-style conference (it had obviously been around for decades; I just wasn't exposed to it). It also became clear over time that many other marketing conferences had the same idea and today, it's an even split between those that do all-keynotes vs. those with a hybrid of breakouts, panels, and keynotes.
Personally, my preference is still all-keynote. I agree with Greg that, on occasion, a speaker won't do a great job, and sitting through those 20–40 minutes can be frustrating. But I can count on a single hand the number of panel sessions I've ever found value in, and I strongly dislike being forced to choose between sessions and not sharing the same experience with other attendees. Even when the session I've chosen is a good one, I have FOMO ("what if that other session around the corner is even better?!") and that drives my quality of experience down.
This, though, is personal preference. If you like panels, breakouts, and multi-track options, stick to SMX, Content Marketing World, INBOUND, and others like them. If you're like me and prefer all keynotes, single track, go for CTAConf, Searchlove, Inbounder, MozCon, and their ilk.
I agree this is a real problem. Being a conference organizer, I get to see a lot of the feedback and requests, and I think that's where the issue stems from. For example, a few years back, Brittan Bright, who now does sales at Google in New York, gave a brilliant talk about the soft skills of selling and client relations. It scored OK in the lineup, but a lot of the feedback overall that year was from people who wanted more "tactical tips" and "technical tricks" and less "soft skills" content. Every conference has to deal with this demand and supply issue. You might respond (as my friend Wil Reynolds often does) with "who cares what people say they want?! Give them what they don't know they need!"
That's how conferences go broke, my friends. :-) Every year, we try to include at least a few sessions that focus on these softer skills (in numerous ways), and every year, there's pushback from folks who wish we'd just show them how to get more easy links, or present some new tool they haven't heard of before. It's a tough give and take, but I'm empathetic to both sides on this issue. Actionable tactics matter, and they make for big, immediate wins. Soft skills are important, too, but there's a significant portion of the audience who'll get frustrated seeing talks on these topics.
Hrm... I think I agree more with Freja than with Herman, but it's entirely a personal preference. If you know yourself well enough to know that you'll benefit more (or less) by attending with others from your team, make the call. This is one reason I love the idea of businesses offering the freedom of choice on how to use their event budget.
There were a number of these conflicting points-of-view in reply to my tweet, and I think they indicate the challenge for attendees and organizers. Opinions vary about what makes for a great conference, a great speaker or session, or the best way to get value from them.
Which marketing conferences do I recommend?I get this question a lot (which is fair, I go to *a lot* of events). It really depends what you like, so I'll try to break down my recommendations in that format.
Big, industry-wide events with many thousands of attendees, big name keynotes, famous musical acts, and hundreds of breakout session options:
Mid-tier events with 1,000–1,500 attendee:
Outside The Inbounder Conference in Valencia, Spain
Smaller, local, & niche events with a few hundred attendees and a more intimate setting:
This list is by no means exhaustive, and I'm certain there are many other events that give great value. I can only speak from my own experiences, which are going to carry the bias of what I've seen and what I like.
Help us better understand the value of conferences to youTwo years ago, I ran a survey about marketing conferences and received, analyzed, then published the results. I'd like to repeat that again,..
With organic social content from brands reaching new lows in reach and effectiveness, content marketers must look elsewhere for mechanisms to drive views and downloads.
Social sharing is key here, as recommendations from real people are more trustworthy than recommendations from brands, in most cases and circumstances. Thus, if a reader/viewer/listener likes the content enough to recommend it to their friends/followers in social media, the producer of that content has a heightened opportunity for exposure, often to a net-new audience.
But what type of content is most likely to trigger that sharing behavior, and how does it vary by industry and social network? New content marketing research from ClearVoice answers those questions (and more).
ClearVoice is software company with a nifty content marketing management platform and network of content creators. They are a Convince & Convert partner.
The Most Effective Kinds of Content MarketingIn their study, ClearVoice analyzed more than 640,000 articles, blog posts, infographics, and more across 14 specific industries (fashion, business, arts, etc). The results were striking.
The type of content marketing that works best in each industry varies considerably—much more than I thought. For example, infographics are the most effective content format in more than one-third of the industries.
Also, long-form content succeeds in tech, home and garden, beauty, and travel. But how-to content is a better bet for arts, and for hospitality.
Of course, you can’t only make listicles or infographics or how-tos. Your content editorial calendar must have variety. But these findings opened my eyes, and you’ll start to see more infographics on this site.
Infographics are the most effective content format in more than one-third of industries.
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Where Your Audience Loves to Share
ClearVoice also looked at where content marketing consumers in each industry are most likely to share, and the results here were even more divergent.
In the business category, 61 percent of trackable social shares occur on Linkedin. Facebook is second at 35.7 percent. (Note that Twitter is not included because they unhooked social shares from their API last year.)
In the careers category, 73 percent of shares are on Facebook, with 23 percent on Linkedin.
But in a category like beauty/health/wellness, 76 percent of shares on are Pinterest, with Facebook at 23 percent, and Linkedin essentially zero.
For each category, ClearVoice supplies a handy graphic that shows the top sharing tools, the best performing days of the week for social shares, and the top five category influencers (in terms of inducing social sharing). Helpful!
Knowing where your content marketing consumers are likely to share, as well as what they prefer to share, can help you craft a better content marketing editorial calendar. And the comparison chart ClearVoice provides showing most effective days of the week (sorted by industry) is worth a download all by itself.
If you think content marketing is content marketing, regardless of what category you’re in, this new research definitely proves that notion to be false.
Get the ClearVoice Data Study: Content Trends Across 14 Industries.
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Posted by Dr-Pete
As more people look for financial advice online, brick-and-mortar wealth management firms and financial advisors are competing harder than ever for search customers. More than 70% of millennials use search engines for research, and 15% of 18–34 year-olds are turning directly to search engines for financial advice. As consumers in their 20s and 30s grow their wealth, have families, and begin planning for the future, who is best situated to capture their attention online?
This turns out to be a more difficult question than you might think. Focusing on Google, there are three major areas where financial service providers can compete: organic results, local results, and paid results (ads). Even organic results are increasingly localized, with top rankings varying wildly from city to city, and traditional organic results are often pushed below both ads and the local 3-pack. Local packs command a large amount of screen real-estate — here’s a local pack for “financial planner” in my own suburban Chicago neighborhood:
In partnership with Hearsay Systems, which provides Advisor Cloud solutions for the financial services industry, we decided to find out who’s leading the pack (no pun intended) in 2017 for wealth management and financial advisory searches across organic, local, and paid results.
Research methodologyFor the purposes of this study, we decided to target five keyphrases related to wealth management and financial advisory services:
For each keyword, we looked at page one of Google results across 5,000 cities (the 5K largest cities in the contiguous 48 states, according to US census data). We then captured URLs and ranking positions across organic, local, and paid results.
To aggregate the data, we weighted each result by the population of the corresponding city and the estimated click-through rate (CTR) of its ranking position. We used a fairly conservative CTR curve, weighting top results a bit heavier, but not too dramatically:
For the final analysis across all five keywords, we weighted each keyword by its estimated search volume (according to Google Adwords) in the United States. By far, “financial advisor” was the most popular keyword, scooping up about 55% of search share across the keyword set.
Since some large brands use multiple websites (domains), we consolidated their numbers across those domains. So, for example, morganstanley.com and morganstanleybranch.com were grouped together in the final analysis. Quite a few brands have separate domains for their corporate site and local/branch locations. We’re interested in the strength of the brands themselves, not the particulars of how they divvy up their websites.
Top 5 organic leadersThe Top 5 for organic results were dominated by informational and news sites. The following graph compares the total “Click Share” based on all available clicks across all sites:
Investopedia led the way, scoring almost one-fifth of all clicks in our aggregate model, across more than 4,000 ranking domains. Among major players in the financial services space, only Edward Jones made it into the Top 5.
This is consistent with the idea that people are seeking general financial advice, and may not always be looking to organic results to find local service providers. Google’s results can often tell us a lot about how they’re interpreting search intent.
Curious case of keyword #4Across the five keywords, we generally saw similar patterns. There were ranking variations, of course, but most of the top sites for one keyword performed well across the other keywords in organic results. The notable exception was keyword #4, “financial consultant.”
The Top 10 organic competitors for “financial consultant” included Monster.com (#1), Indeed.com (#4), Glassdoor (#5), and Robert Half (#7). Google seems to be interpreting this search as a job-hunting search and not a search for a service provider. This goes to show how important it is to make sure you’re targeting the right terms.
Top 5 local leadersApplying the same analysis to the local pack, we came up with the following Top 5…
Traditional wealth management players performed much better in local pack results. Across our data, though, Edward Jones dominated the competitors in local rankings, consuming almost 40% of the total Click Share.
Interestingly, there was more overall diversity in local pack results, even with one dominant player and only three ranking positions per page. While just over 4,000 different domains ranked across organic results, local packs in our data set sampled from almost 7,000 different domains.
Morgan Stanley led the way in paid positioning, capturing just under 20% of Click Share. The rest of the Top 5 paid players were a bit more well-rounded, consuming roughly equal shares...
Interesting to note that relative newcomer SoFi seems to be spending pretty heavily in the space. SoFi (“Social Finance”) is an online finance community clearly aimed at the digital generation.
Given that this is a competitive space with relatively high costs-per-click (CPC), only 366 domains appeared in paid listings in our study. This was not due to a lack of ads — over 99% of the search results we examined displayed ads, and almost every search had a full complement of seven ads.
Non-traditional playersIn addition to SoFi, a couple of newcomers fared pretty well in our data relative to their size and spend. Betterment.com appeared in 25th place in organic and 16th in paid. NerdWallet came in 46th in organic results and 22nd in paid. Credio.com took 20th place in organic overall but had no paid presence.
The one advantage traditional players clearly still have is in local results, where none of these newcomers ranked. Big brands with multiple brick-and-mortar presences still dominate local pack results, for obvious reasons, and online-only players can’t compete in local/map results. This makes performing well in local results even more important for big brands with a strong, nationwide physical presence.
Big winner: Edward JonesSqueezing a lot of data into one graph can be a little dangerous, but let’s take a peek at what happens when we aggregate across all three types of listings (organic, local, and paid). Here are the Top 5 across all of the data in our study…
The combination of their dominant #1 position in our local data, #5 in organic, and a solid #25 in paid makes Edward Jones the clear overall winner, grabbing just over 14% of total Click Share in our study. Industry powerhouse Morgan Stanley comes in at #2, thanks primarily to their #1 paid ranking and #5 local position.
What’s the secret to Edward Jones’ success? Despite what the Internet wants you to believe, there’s almost never just one weird trick to search marketing success in 2017. One significant factor may be that Edward Jones has gone all-in on hyper-local pages. Their dominant local presence was made up of over 7,000 unique URLs representing their individual advisors.
Each advisor page has a clear, consistent Name, Address, and Phone number (or “NAP,” to use local search lingo), office hours, and other essential information. While the pages aren’t particularly unique, Edward Jones has done a good job of making sure that local offices are well represented and have a consistent, structured page.
It’s worth noting that even local rankings are very keyword specific. While Edward Jones ranked #1 overall in local packs for all four keyphrases starting with “financial…”, they fell to #23 for “wealth management.” Edward Jones has clearly carved out their niche.
The Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, maintains their dominant organic position with just a single page: a guide to choosing a financial planner. This page clearly benefits from WSJ’s overall authority, and it shows just how different ranking for organic and local search has become these days.
Based on this research, what advice would we give to financial players (big and small) who hope to be competitive in Google search?
Brick-and-mortar should focus on localThe big financial players with physical offices need to capitalize on that fact, because online-only players won’t be able to compete in local results (at least for now). While a hyper-local approach (to the tune of thousands of pages) is a big undertaking and not without risk, I’d highly recommend testing it if you’re a big player in the space. Edward Jones’ success with this approach can’t be ignored.
For local, focus attention on key marketsYou don’t have to compete in every market (you’re probably not even physically in every market). Across even five keywords and 5,000 cities, there were roughly 7,000 domains ranking in the local 3-pack. That means that the winners for any given market varied wildly. Invest your hyper-local resources in key markets with the highest potential ROI.
Online-only should invest in contentSure, the Wall Street Journal is a huge player, but the fact that they ranked across thousands of cities and highly competitive keywords with a single piece of content is still pretty amazing. Google seems to be interpreting these keywords as informational, and so online-only players need to invest heavily in content that hits the research phase of the buyer cycle. If big financial players hope to compete for organic, they may have to do the same.
You may have to pay for placementI’ve worked in paid search in a former life, and I believe a balanced approach to search marketing has to be an eyes-wide-open approach. Right now, ads have prominent placement on these searches, often with a full seven ads per page (including four at the top). If you have the money and want to compete against organic and local pack results, you have to at least run the numbers on advertising.
Special thanks to our partners at Hearsay Systems for their industry expertise and contributions to planning this project and analyzing the data. Hearsay provides Advisor Cloud solutions for the financial services and insurance industries.
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What do Neil Patel, Tim Ferriss, and Brian Clark have in common? They are three of the most influential personalities in the digital marketing sphere today. And they all started out as bloggers.
You can say that they blogged their way to fame and fortune. But it was not an overnight success. It was a rigorous process borne out of a passion for finding solutions and sharing their knowledge to as many people as possible through digital tech and the Internet.
In this post, we will identify the common qualities influencers share. We will also look at some of the best’s best practices that, hopefully, you can adapt to position your best content forward.
The Common Denominators
Just like Patel, Ferriss, and Clark, top influencers share these qualities that help put them in their stature.
Wondering if Facebook is still a relevant platform for marketing? Interested in how your colleagues and peers will use Facebook in the coming year? In this article, you’ll discover new insights that show where Facebook marketers are focusing their attention and how you can best take advantage of ads on the platform. #1: Facebook Advertising Spend
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
The first electronic television was introduced to the world 90 years ago. Right off the bat, everyone knew it was love at first sight.
Fast forward to the present day, and video content is projected to account for more than 80 percent of the world’s internet traffic.
That being said, it seems like every brand on the market is pulling out the stops to invest in video content as a prime vehicle for conversions. However, standing out in the crowd requires a great deal of planning. Let’s talk about how you can turn your branded videos into a cornerstone of your entire promotional strategy.
Know Your ConsumersNearly every aspect of business success, and the ability to convert customers, comes down to one common denominator: knowing the audience.
Conducting business is a constant game of meeting popular demand. First and foremost, you should always critically evaluate why exactly you are producing a video and what you want to achieve with it. Once there are clear-cut goals in mind, you need to gauge your audience down to the granular details. At the end of the day, conversions occur when you put the right content in front of the right eyes.
For inspiration, start by getting a feel for the trending topics across the web. Using content monitoring tools like BuzzSumo, you can search brand names, industries, or specific keywords and find out the most popular and relevant topics for your industry in real-time.
Using these insights, you will have a good idea of what issues to craft your videos around, and which channels would be most optimal for distribution.
Keep in mind that monitoring tools are only the tip of the iceberg. For instance, if you are in retail, there is a whole new dimension of preparation you need to consider when creating video content. The last thing you want is to release your branded content with a disorganized inventory. You need to know exactly what your demand scope is prior to distribution.
In these cases, predictive analytics are a necessity. If you have the crucial ecommerce numbers, such as historical sales rank, pricing data, and order volume, you can combine them with the trending issues you found through web monitoring, learn what kind of topics to address in the near-term, build promotional content in the appropriate form, and prepare your inventory accordingly.
Focus on Educating, Not SellingIn recent decades, it seems as though the very definition of promotion has changed. For example, it’s becoming painfully obvious that traditional forms of marketing are no longer as effective as they once were. Today’s audiences (especially millennials) do not like seeing intrusive ads with deals or coupons. They want brands to be authentic in a way they can relate to. Keeping this in mind, powerful video content these days is not blatantly focused on selling, but rather on educating.
Everything you produce should be properly synced up to the buyer’s cycle:
All too often, brands commit the deadly sin of creating content for themselves, not the viewer. Missing the mark in any area in the buyer’s cycle will almost always lead to disconnect further down the road.
In many cases, the most important piece of the puzzle is creating a high level of trust between brands and consumers. To do this properly, you need to place a priority on solidifying your status as an industry expert. Producing educational content in the early stages of the cycle is a must.
Depending on the nature of your business, consider creating how-to videos or webinars for this area. ClickMeeting is a video conferencing tool for preparing and hosting these types of sessions. With interactive “webinar rooms” designed for the everyday user, you’re able to answer questions and share educational content in a matter of clicks.
All too often, brands commit the deadly sin of creating content for themselves, not the viewer.
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Regardless of your campaign goals, ClickMeeting is extremely useful in nurturing leads and guiding users through the sales funnel, as you can send out customized invitations and conduct interactive meetings or seminars targeted at customers along each stage of the funnel. With insights gleaned from intuitive engagement analytics, you can build lifetime relationships with your audience.
Once you achieve success in educating your prospects and showcasing authority in your field, the sales will begin to roll in.
Keep It Short and SweetOne of the common observations attached to the rise of the internet is that attention spans are notoriously short these days. People don’t typically want to sift through extensive content to get what they need. They want instant gratification. For proof of this phenomenon, look at the success of Snapchat, Instagram, and other popular outlets for social video.
For the sake of conversions, it’s good practice to get straight to the point. Wistia, an online video hosting solution, includes a turnstile feature where lead capture forms are embedded within the content. They conducted a study of over 15,000 videos with turnstiles and found that the highest conversion rates occurred in the first 10 to 20 percent of the video’s duration.
Nowadays, you must keep in mind that many viewers consume content on mobile devices. In fact, it’s been a full three years since mobile became the primary browsing channel over the desktop.
With this knowledge, you need to do your best to create compelling content with only the most essential information. Upon completion, take a close look and decide if the message can be properly deciphered with a mobile, on-the-go mentality.
If you want to drive conversions, you need to captivate the audience with your messaging right out of the gate. Anyone can make a video, but producing ones that drive significant action can be quite a challenge. The key is to create videos that speak to every aspect of the sales funnel and provide value that people cannot get anywhere else. Once you solidify a reputation for authentic content that genuinely improves lives, conversions will be inevitable.
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