Home            Blog
Showing posts with label linkedin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label linkedin. Show all posts

Thursday, January 9, 2014

Big Idea 2014: Marketing Becomes the Giving Tree for the C-Suite

Big Idea 2014: Marketing Becomes the Giving Tree for the C-Suite

 
"Marketing is everything." I hear that phrase - or a variation of it - a lot these days. I agree with the sentiment given how brands can turn almost any moment with a customer into an interactive experience. However, while it’s easy to say “marketing is everything,” the truth is that marketing can’t do everything. That’s why I think 2014 will be the year that marketing leaders must become givers: providers of insight, creators of connections, deliverers of performance improvement. Succeeding in this kind of giving will be critical if marketing is to drive above-market growth.

Let me explain. As companies become ever more responsive to and informed by their customers, their range of interactions will continue to expand. Those customer interactions hit many different parts of the organization (call center, sales staff, web sites, mobile apps, etc.). Since those interaction points are often owned by many different parts of the organization, the customer experience is often disjointed, inconsistent, and unfulfilling. Those experiences need to be integrated into consistent customer journeys. That’s where marketing comes in.
Here are three areas where marketing can really make a difference:

Provide relevant insights: Big Data and analytics have opened the door to mind-blowing insights about customers – how they behave, what they like/don’t like, what they’re interested in, etc. While carefully staying within the bounds of privacy parameters, marketers can know so much more about their customers than was possible even two years ago. Marketers need to identify, bundle, and serve relevant insights to the various parts of the organization. Insights are the foundation of any commercial strategy. Those insights, in fact, provide a vocabulary that the organization can share across silos. Data – and the insights derived from them – become the lingua franca of the organization.

Create valuable connections: CMO's know their effectiveness will increasingly lie in a brand's ability to make the execution happen at the front-lines of interaction with a customer. But marketing cannot control them all. What that means is that marketing will need to tighten their partnerships with sales, service, and product development around all sorts of things, such as how the brand should handle personalization and privacy. Service organizations, usually under the COO, now need to also coordinate with marketing as the volume of requests coming in through social media blurs the lines between what is remediation help and selling support. CMOs will need to increasingly guide IT on what their priorities should be for investing in new technologies that drive personalization and new experiences. Marketers are helping CFO's understand that "working media spend" ratios no longer define the efficiency of marketing operations when more investment has to go into content for owned and earned media.

Deliver performance excellence: Beyond creating tighter relationships, CMOs and marketing in general will need to help various other parts of the organization connect with each other. Product design should be working closely with sales. Marketing can be the glue to help bind these groups together around a vision based on deep customer insights and a clear go-to-market strategy. That growth comes from having balanced and connected marketing and sales capabilities. We have found that companies with that profile perform 2x to 3x better than the market in terms of revenue growth. And while only 14 percent of companies in a separate survey believe they have the right investment levels across their capabilities, almost 2/3 of that group has much greater confidence in their ability to beat the market compared to those that aren’t investing effectively. When the organization can effectively work together better, marketing becomes a “performance multiplier” for the entire business.
These are all fundamental acts of giving. But unlike ending of “The Giving Tree” (a great book, by the way, as any parent knows) where the tree wilts away after giving away so much, the marketing version will enhance marketing’s influence. If marketing can really deliver on insights, design great experiences by pulling together the right parts of the organization, and then deliver those services and products at the right place and time to the right person, then marketing will see its influence increase significantly. I’ve seen it happen at a number of clients already. In 2014, I expect to see that giving role for marketing expand.
Learn more on our McKinsey on Marketing & Sales site, and please follow us on Twitter@McK_MktgSales. And please follow me @davidedelman.
Graphic: Cienpies Design / shutterstock

Friday, April 5, 2013

Can Quality Score Be Gamed?


Can Quality Score Be Gamed?

  |  April 5, 2013   |  1 Comment
Like most complex games with many intelligent participants (such as financial markets, chess, and high-stakes poker), your first hunches about how to "get ahead of the pack" in the Google AdWords auction are likely to be trivial, clichéd, or just plain wrong.
This year, as ever, you'll read plenty of articles focusing specifically on Quality Score and "what to do about it." Conference sessions will teach you Quality Score "tips and tricks."
Since this is about rank and CPCs, admittedly we'll always be driven to crack the code in some way.
This dates all the way back to when Overture ran a pure PPC auction. Under those circumstances, would it make sense to write extremely restrictive, "filtering"-style ads to maximize the value of a click to your business, while garnering a lot of free impressions? Of course it would. High CTRs, in that instance, wouldn't be desirable. Overture tried to address that problem with a laborious, cumbersome human editorial process. (Arggh.)
When AdWords finally introduced CTR into the ranking formula, it led to a great leap forward in relevance, and fewer opportunities to game the system. That being said, many of us enjoyed early-era tricks. Fun in a time machine set to 2002: come in guns blazing so you enjoy very high CTRs associated with high ad positions. Then, "lock in" that CTR history by doing this at a reasonable volume, then gradually walk your bids down, holding your position. That worked pretty well then. The system is much more sophisticated today.
People are still routinely coming up with "Why don't I move my queen way over there now and put my opponent in check?" moves for AdWords. Those moves are usually neutralized by a more sophisticated algorithm. Google's spokespeople - not always wanting to say much about the formula beyond the published overviews - have often felt compelled to dispel certain AdWords myths. The "don't get your hopes up" points made by AdWords product developers in recent years have included:
  • AdWords normalizes for match type. You're not going to be penalized for using broad match or rewarded for using exact match.
  • AdWords normalizes for ad position. Aim for the positions that make sense for your business. Lowering ad positions that by definition enjoy a worse CTR does not harm your keyword Quality Score or any account-wide factors.
  • You can't improve Quality Score with negative keywords. (Really?) Well, I've heard that said by a high-ranking Googler, and no, I don't really believe it.
  • While there is an account-wide Quality Score factor (enough bad history across the board can affect your whole account), one of Google's top AdWords architects has denied that there is a specific factor at the ad group level. One badly chosen keyword in an ad group won't "contaminate" others in an ad group.
Current industry consensus is that 50 percent to 75 percent of AdWords keyword Quality Score comes down to CTR, with personalization elements adding complexity. Since Quality Score is reputedly calculated on the fly for each query, the reporting you see in your account is not "the" number, but rather an average. (For Google's ever-changing summary of how Quality Score is calculated, go here.)
"Other relevancy factors" round out the CTR factor. These may involve semantics; display and destination URL (Google can tinker with how much users, and Google, trust your company's main identifying factor); and the vagaries of how many ads Google wishes to show on a page.
"Landing page experience" is another component of Quality Score. It's probably exaggerated by third-party pundits today. Note the word "experience." User experience is best measured by user behavior patterns, not solely based on some arbitrary formula about which keywords match which landing page elements, etc.
Further to the landing page question: recall that Google started out by banning a narrow range of user experience violations, such as pop-ups. Later, it extended the policy to a wide range of trust-eroding practices. It's important to scrutinize both the letter and intent of Google's Landing Page and Site Policies to understand if there is something you're doing wrong. Google is trying to protect users from scams and bad user experiences, and it does so through a combination of automated and editorial means. Hobby horses such as landing page load times enter the mix at various times, sending some advertisers scrambling to overreact to those stats for all the wrong reasons. (Speeding up your site is always a good idea, but you have no idea how much AdWords Quality Score is penalizing you for having a slow one, if at all.)
There are too many moving parts to user experiences for Google to be effective in policing them with human and bot oversight (though a quick read of the guidelines implies that human oversight and manual scoring shouldn't be ruled out as elements of Google's practices). Rather, proxies for bad experiences may be used as Google's models become better and better at confirming bad patterns statistically. (Do horrible bounce rates factor in? Well, they should, but then, why does Google let you keep spending so heavily on pages with horrible bounce rates? Assume nothing.) And it might be easiest for Google to do relatively little on this front unless real humans take a real dislike to your ads or business model. Now, as ever, Google does not like "thin" affiliate sites, click arbitrage, fake comparison sites, banned pharma products, and so on.
Make no mistake: "crappy" pages often have little difficulty being associated with keyword Quality Scores of 10. If the site is good enough to get the job done, and the whole campaign does a good job of matching up users with related commercial intent, then Google isn't going to throw up roadblocks needlessly.
It's not a good idea to obsess over Quality Score. Advertisers are doing a bad enough job settling on the correct metrics to manage campaigns to; testing ads methodically; understanding statistical significance; understanding campaign settings; unraveling attribution puzzles; and so on, that they're likely to fail in attempts to test cause and effect in Quality Score engineering.
That being said, the system isn't bulletproof. We can still prevail over competitors if we follow strong hunches about the vulnerabilities of Quality Score and the effects of the overall formula on rank and CPC. Consider the following tips:
  • In addition to keyword-level calculations, Google may apply an account-wide calculation that impacts your ad positions and CPCs. Many advertisers get paranoid, therefore, about low Quality Score keywords, and race to pause them. But they may be overreacting. Low Quality Score keywords are probably diffuse or wrong in intent, and need to be addressed. But if they're not high volume, they probably don't hurt that much. What is more interesting is the opportunity you might have to lock in a higher overall account Quality Score by continuing to hammer hard at your high volume "10" keywords. Maybe you're bidding a bit higher than you would like on some of these. But more impressions for 10-Quality Score keywords that are working OK for you economically can't hurt your account Quality Score. You're laying down all of this positive history. Maxing that as a proportion of your spend in the account may be a benefit from a Quality Score perspective.
  • Google has kept "Display URL" in the mix as a kind of wild card in Quality Score calculations. I believe it is largely a "rich get richer" shortcut for Google to emphasize trust and quality in the results. Think broadly about your business strategy. Everything about the way you build your brand and conduct your business should be aligned with improving that brand's reputation. "Throwaway domains," generic microsites, and quick shifts in strategy won't be aligned with Quality Score health, long term. This also means that Quality Score benefits recognizable brands and well-liked micro-brands. The Johnny-come-lately with a weak offering and a stop-and-start ad spend is not going to garner the same responses as a business with a consistent marketing strategy.
  • Units like Sitelinks, designations like Trusted Stores, captivating visuals like Seller Ratings Extensions: various ad innovations of these types tend to goose up CTRs, all else being equal.
  • In a Quality Score world, trying to finesse your spend by not buying your brand keywords is a counterproductive strategy. You need to own these and you need most variations of these to become 10s. Combine premium placement in the large ad unit with Sitelinks (for example), and your CTRs may go through the roof. As such, you're laying down statistical evidence that you're significantly more loved and trusted than Google's models would predict (i.e., what your competitors can muster).
  • If you're managing only to CPA and failing to push your ad tests harder to find potential mutant ads that deliver great ROI along with "less bad" CTR, you're not optimizing your account fully. Reconsider the advantages of more clicks on ads.
  • Geo-target if that helps you push up response rates to ads and user engagement on-site.
With these ways to legitimately "trick" Quality Score, you'll have enough on your plate. Meanwhile, many of your competitors will be frantically moving their chess pieces into clichéd or trivial positions, until they finally realize you've been thinking 10 moves ahead. Checkmate.

    Monday, February 11, 2013

    10 Common Link Building Problems


    10 Common Link Building Problems

    6 Comments
    Get Found First is a leading Pay-Per-Click agency specializing in BIG PPC accounts and BIG ROI.
    For a long time many publishers viewed link building as a practice that stood on its own. The purpose was to get links to drive search rankings. It served no other marketing purpose at all.
    This has led to large numbers of sites being hit by link penalties or new algorithms like Penguin. Successfully recovering from link related penalties requires a comprehensive approach to link removal. Part of that is understanding what types of links you need to remove.
    What follows are 10 of the most common link problems that have resulted in link related penalties or lost rankings due to a Google algorithm update.

    1. Article Directories

    Article directories were hit in the initial Penguin release on April 24, 2012. If you are currently adding article directory links, then stop the program right away.
    In addition, if you have some links that resulted from article directories, then work on getting them removed. If you can't get them removed, then use the Google Disavow Tool to request that they be ignored by Google.
    For those who want to debate the merits of this tool, we have used it, and it works like a champ.

    2. Low-Quality Directories

    There isn't clear evidence that low-quality directories were explicitly punished in a Penguin release as yet, but it does not really matter. The right policy here is clear. Participate in the major directories: Yahoo DirectoryDMOZBest of the Web, and Business.com.
    After that, consider a very small number of directories specific to your vertical market. If you find yourself with 10 or more directory links, something is wrong. Directories are not a volume source of links.

    3. Low Relevance Guest Posts

    relevancy-score-graph
    Guest posting on sites that you are truly proud of is a great idea. But this can be overdone too. For example, if the post is not relevant to your site, or the site is not relevant to your post, don't do it.
    For your guest posting efforts, shoot for the highest possible targets you can. Would you brag about being posted on a particular target site to your customers? If not, then keep looking for a better target.

    4. Low Relevance/Accuracy Infographics

    This is a popular strategy many people use to promote their sites. Infographics are cool looking, and they can communicate certain types of information very effectively, which is why they are popular with users and publishers.
    However, many people have fallen into cranking out infographics, focusing on volume, not quality. This is another one to stop.
    Still need convincing? Here is what Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts had to say in my recent interview with him:
    "I would not be surprised if at some point in the future we did not start to discount these infographic-type links to a degree."
    I think that low quality infographics (for example, ones with inaccurate information) or low relevance infographics are a natural target for Google, thought these things may be hard for them to detect algorithically. However, infographics may get targeted a bit more broadly as Google has concerns about whether people accepting infographics really care about endorsing the page that they end up linking to.
    Important footnote: Algorithmically detecting these types of links is obviously somewhat hard, but when you submit a reconsideration request a human gets involved. Sticks out like a sore thumb to them!

    5. Paid Guest Posts

    To me, paid guest posts are one of the more obvious ones, but a lot of people still do this. One big flag for this is a site that has a significant number of incoming links from posts that have rich anchor text embedded in the middle of the text.
    If you do guest posting work for your clients, you should never pay for any posts. In addition, the links you get your clients should always be simple attribution links at the bottom of the post.
    Aim for very high end (brand building caliber) targets. This is the type of branding and link building work a Googler would love.

    6. Anchor Text

    This one may upset some people. As I predicted in "SEO Revelations for 2013", I believe Google will take action (or more action) against sites that have too much rich anchor text in their backlink profile. You could argue that their EMD update was a step in that direction, but there is much more they can do here.
    Some rich anchor text is fine, but when your Reebok ZigNano ProFury sneakers page has 25 links pointing to it, and all the anchor text says "Reebok ZigNano ProFury Sneakers" or some derivative of that it looks a bit manipulated, know what I mean? You might as well paint a bullseye on your back. Human reviewers looking at your reconsideration request will pick this out in a heartbeat.

    7. Doorway Pages

    doorway-page-illustration
    An oldie but goodie! These are thin content pages/sites that exist only to capture search traffic and then to get people to go to another site (in this case the site with the penalty).
    This is a practice that can a publisher banned all on it own. You need to dump these as fast as you can!

    8. International Sites

    I always chuckle when I see a site with lots of links from Polish sites where the page is written entirely in Polish and right in the middle somewhere is this rich anchor text phrases in English. Ouch. You might as well go to building 43 at Google wearing a sign with your URL on one side and the words "I am a spammer" on the other.
    More broadly, ask yourself: does that international link have any relevance to your brand at all? If you market a product or service solely in the U.S., why would you have any international links? It just doesn't make sense.

    9. Blog Carnivals

    Stated with an optimistic eye, blog carnivals are communities where people share content, some editorial review is, or isn't, provided by the person running the carnival, and other publishers can then come find articles for publishing on their site.
    Unfortunately, Google doesn't like blog carnivals. Like article directories, they have had way too many problems with them being used as link schemes. Best to stay away from these, and any other "marketplace" for content.

    10. Poor Quality Content of Any Kind

    You can argue about how this might be measured by a search engine. Here is a place where social media signals may add some real value as a signal.
    Does your site, or articles you write, get social love? Or, do they get little attention at all? You could also look at the time on page type signals. Do people spend 2 minutes or more on the page, or do they stop by and run off right away?
    The authorship initiative by Google is the start of an overt effort on their part to figure out who is publishing quality content. And, as I mentioned in my SEO Revelations article, they are already measuring and acting on time on site signals.
    We don't necessarily make people remove these in the process of moving towards a reconsideration request, but we do press them hard to alter their strategy. Publishing content without regard to its quality is bad for your brand, and it will hurt your search rankings one way or another.

    Some Overall Rules of Thumb

    There are may other types of bad links we have encountered along the way, that I chose not to highlight above. The above list are the 10 most frequent scenarios we encounter and not an exhaustive list!
    Here are a few more questions you should ask yourself to determine whether a link is good or not:
    • Is an argument required for you to prove it's a good link? A good link should not be the subject of an argument. No argument is required with good links, when you see a good linkyou know it right away. Once you start debating whether it could be considered a good link, or justifying it, it isn't.
    • Would you build the link if Google and Bing did not exist? Any good link is something that has value even without search engines.
    • Does the nature of the link enhance your brand in front of your target customers? Would you show it to a target customer as evidence that you are a high-quality, trustworthy business?
    • Did the person giving you the link intend it as a genuine endorsement? If not, Google wants to torch it, and so should you.

    Summary

    Link building should just be a form of branding and marketing. Reviewing your link profile and identifying the problems is a key part of the process. But, it is only the start. Once you get your penalty removed, you need to adapt your link building efforts to avoid doing these types of things again.

    Friday, February 8, 2013

    Who Needs a Social Media Policy?


    Who Needs a Social Media Policy?

    Click Here!
    A few years ago, everyone seemed to be talking about the need for companies to develop and implement social media policies. Nowadays, the topic seems to provoke little more than yawns. What happened?
    recent New York Times article got me thinking about this. It described a series of cases in which the National Labor Relations Board found that some companies had gone too far in prohibiting their employees from discussing their work in social media. As the NLRB sees it, because workers have the right to form unions, they also have the right to discuss work conditions and related matters as part of organizing efforts. Companies with blanket policies proscribing such conversations are, apparently, in the wrong.

    Unjustified Fear

    Because I had once seen David B. Thomas discussing social media policies at a MarketingProfs event (our 2009 Digital Marketing Mixer in Chicago), I asked him about the changed landscape of social media policy-making on the most recent episode of Marketing Smarts. Specifically, I wanted to know why people didn’t seem to talk about this stuff anymore.
    His take was simple: People were afraid that employees were going to run amok on social media, badmouth the company and its clients, reveal trade secrets, and mess up everything. But, as it turned out, “We were wrong.”
    We were wrong because, generally speaking, employees can be trusted to do the right thing on and off of social media. If you can’t trust them, a social media policy isn’t really going to help.
    “We’re talking about people, salespeople, marketing people, HR people, who you might send to a conference to meet with people,” Dave told me. “And if you don’t trust them to talk one on one with a customer or a prospect or a member of your community, then that’s not a social media problem, that’s a management problem.”

    Everybody Makes Mistakes

    Dave also pointed out that most of the social media blunders that we’ve witnessed over the last year or so boil down to one thing: People make mistakes.
    “We used to have this idea of companies being this gray, corporate edifice,” he said, “that only spoke through press releases and it was easy to say, ‘Big Company! How dare you do this?’ But what all these things come down to is—no, it’s one person inside the company who accidentally made a mistake.”
    Whereas some such mistakes may have been preventable via policy—for example, “If you are logged into the corporate Twitter account, you may not be logged in to any other social media accounts”—in most cases they could not. But as long as the person was adequately contrite and the company promptly acknowledged and apologized for the mistake, as it turns out, things tend to blow over relatively quickly.
    “Social media has shown us that companies are made up of individuals,” Dave added, and people tend to be more forgiving towards individuals when they make mistakes, than they are towards faceless, gray edifices.

    We’ve Already Got One

    Which is not to say that you don’t need a social media policy. In fact, as it turns out, some 68.9% of companies already have one.
    The key to any such policy, according to Dave, is that “you have to be specific with your employees about what they can and can’t do.”
    To that end, a policy can’t just be a list of prohibitions. Instead, it should provide guiding principles for using social media, specific do’s and don’ts, and examples of best practices.
    In addition, he adds, you need “someone in the company they can go to when they have questions.”
    Because people will have questions, they will need encouragement to use social media and they will make mistakes.
    http://www.mpdailyfix.com/who-needs-a-social-media-policy/?adref=nl020813