Where Does Pinterest Fit in Your Marketing Mix?
When thinking about organic or paid traffic, Google and Facebook often come to mind. Pinterest, for most, does not.
Acquisition
How to acquire more customers? How to attract the right people? These posts are all about data-driven approach to customer acquisition.
Paywalls, SEO, and the Need for a Damn Good Brand
Think it’s tough to earn links or shares for your content? Try earning money.
Is Click Fraud Devouring Your Ad Budget?
Click fraud occurs when a pay-per-click advertisement is clicked on by a user with malicious or disingenuous intent. Click fraud first came to light in 2005, when several major cases were taken to court.
However, it continues to poison marketing campaigns—and find its way into more and more courtrooms. Juniper Research estimates that click fraud cost advertisers $42 billion in 2019.
In a time when advertising budgets are being cut and many businesses are facing economic uncertainty, putting every ad dollar to good use goes a long way.
Advertorials Can Work—If You Get It Right
Advertorials are long-form paid ads, presented as informative articles—hence the name, a blend of “advertisement” and “editorial.”
In past print and current online versions, they match the appearance, perception, and function of the media outlet where they’re hosted, so they don’t really look like ads.
Executed well, advertorials provide value to the target audience while also selling a product or service. They’re a content marketing play that borrows the credibility of the site on which they’re published (if they’re “native ads”) or promoted (if they live on other sites).
Enterprise SEO: Don’t Outsmart—Out Execute
Enterprise SEO has been my topic of choice for extracurricular “thought leadership” over the years. Last year, I gave a presentation on how we generated 40% year-over-year organic revenue growth by focusing on out executing the competition, not outsmarting them.
While my presentation focused on the in-house side of enterprise SEO, I’ve also experienced (and written about) getting things done—or trying to get things done—at an agency. SEO strategies for Fortune 500 brands often take 12+ months to see the light of day or, worse, never do.
Eventually, I got tired of that lack of action, which led me in-house. In two-and-a-half years leading SEO initiatives at Qualtrics, I’ve learned that most companies don’t have a strategy problem—they have an execution problem.
Content Research: 4 Ways to Find a Ton of Wins
If I told you that a post earned 30 links and 100 shares, how would you respond?
“Wow, must’ve been amazing!”
“Not bad.”
“Total flop!”
Your gut reaction says more about the site you’re used to working on than it does about my hypothetical example.
Indeed, the size and power of a site—not necessarily the value of the content—can have the greatest influence on results. That matters, especially when it comes to content research.
On-SERP SEO: The Future of SEO
The SEO game is changing. Long gone are the days when all it took to rank on Page 1 was a good keyword choice and a few backlinks.
Google’s search results are becoming so much more than 10 blue links, in part because those links are now richer and more interactive—and sending fewer clicks to sites.
A new concept is replacing the traditional SEO approach. Instead of monitoring and improving organic rankings alone, you need to embrace a more integrated strategy: on-SERP SEO.
30+ Killer New Content Ideas in 30 Minutes (and How to Prioritize Them)
Every marketing team needs fresh content ideas.
Maybe you’ve been producing content on the same subject for so long that your idea well has run dry.
Machine Learning for Paid Ads: Best Practices in a New Era
Digital advertising relies on serving the right ad to the right audience in real time. The better we get at that, the better we do—that’s the industry mantra, and for a reason.
We’ve witnessed vast improvements in the volume and accuracy of customer data, and worked in increasingly sophisticated ad platforms.
Machine learning and AI improve the ability to recognize patterns and pull the right responses from a database. Anyone who doesn’t learn to use the AI features of ad platforms now will be left behind. Many already have been.
Updating Content: Process and Results for CXL
The traditional blog format—regular, sequential publishing of diary-style entries—no longer makes sense for most businesses. To be honest, it never did.
A B2B website that educates potential buyers isn’t a personal “weblog.” It doesn’t toss out unsubstantiated opinions. It doesn’t age the same way. The earliest articles may cover the most valuable topics, but our throwaway content culture lets older posts rot.