Scroll down for five of the most interesting developments in digital marketing from the past week – or, catch up on last week’s roundup, where we discovered how Google screwed Mastercard users, the impact of ‘shoppable’ and how to get more reviews…
This week we take a look at the following:
Pinterest has announced that it now counts 250 million monthly active users on the site. Jon Kaplan, Pinterest’s Head of Global Sales, commented that,
“If Pinterest were a country, [it’d] be the fifth largest in the world!”
The company also announced that:
Pinterest’s growing numbers are likely to attract more and more brands and businesses to the platform, and they are launching several new features and perks for advertisers and companies that use the platform – such as wide-format Promoted videos and enhanced business profile pages.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was introduced in May 2018, and a survey conducted in Q3 2018 found that 54% of the senior marketing executives anticipated that they will no longer be able to use behavioural data and stay compliant to the rules of the GDPR.
The full survey found that :
The future of reliable behavioural data post-GDPR will depend on how strict the regulators are in enforcing the rules. Using behavioural data to serve even a single ad requires numerous tech vendors, and if the the regulators demand that each of these vendors obtain user consent, then targeting ads with the help of behavioural data will become costly and laborious.
91% of marketing directors believed that successful digital marketing must align with the brand strategy as a whole, however, many brands fail to do so. Digital activation needs to be in line with the brand positioning – and brand positioning should be at the centre of all business related decisions or changes.
A consistent brand position will help the marketing department to stay on track across all platforms, and will create a more streamlined brand experience. Successful digital activation requires both long-term and short-term goals; don’t lose sight of the overall brand message in order to gain short-term business results.
A company’s employees play an important role in digital activation – how they represent the company in their online activities will greatly affect the brand reputation. Thanks to social media, blogs and other channels and platforms, employees have many more ways of publishing information that may concern their place of work.
Staffing agency, Kelly Services, adopted the EveryoneSocial platform in order to effectively communicate with their employees about the work that the company is doing. Staff at Kelly Services would use the tool to catch up on news and information about the company and the industry at large.
Employees could share this news, as well as their own opinions and views, and track engagement with the built-in reporting tool. Kelly Services found that this service made their staff better online brand representatives, which boosted social reach by 1000% and web traffic and social media hits by 1150% in under two years.
In the wake of the GDPR, data-driven marketing may become less effective, with a lower ROI that makes it harder to drive traffic and find new leads. We take a look at three ways that marketers can continue to effectively perform under the GDPR.
As companies can no longer collect data without consent, marketers are beginning to create ‘contextual advertising’. Contextual advertising tracks what user’s view, selling ad space to brands that they believe align with the customer’s interests.
Tools such as Google AdSense and YouTube Ads allow marketers to perform the keyword targeting that is necessary in order to work out which ads are relevant to which sites, placing the relevant ads next to the user’s search results.
Ads that are crafted specifically around groups of keywords or site pages tend to see increased clicks, ROI and conversions.
Identifying the metrics that are most useful to the business’s target audience is invaluable in getting the most from a data set. Asking specific questions about a narrow audience will reap better rewards than trying to ask broad questions about a large and varied audience.
Stakeholders from across the company should be consulted when trying to determine which metrics are the most important, collaborating to find the pain points and aspirations of the customer.
In the increasingly technical marketing landscape, businesses do well to adopt high-tech solutions, such as predictive analytics. Predictive analytics collects the behaviour of groups of customers, which it then ties to specific KPIs, such as sales.
Insights about specific categories of people can be found through predictive analytics which can be used to work towards the company’s goals.
There are many outdated SEO tactics that are still being widely used in the industry, so we take a look at the five most commonly used yet ineffective tactics….
Using AdWords and Keyword Planner is no longer recommended for keyword research as it hides a vast number of keywords that they do not believe are commercially relevant.
Both AdWords/Keyword Planner are imprecise and they lack a number of critical metrics, and so it is highly recommended to use a tool that is driven by clickstream data, such as Ahrefs, SEMrush or Keyword Explorer.
Dominating the SERPs by adding a number of subdomains to your website, or by registering separate domains is no longer an effective strategy.
Google has started to give priority to multiple subpages in a single SERP from a single domain, and so it is far better to replace the old technique with barnacle SEO and subfolder hosted content.
Obsessing over reaching the number one ranking in the SERPs is no longer worth it as SERP features, such as Google’s featured snippets, mean that the number one spot isn’t actually the top spot.
Companies would do well to focus on getting their information into the featured snippet, because it’s click through rate is far better than the number one spot.
Link building in order to reach the top of the SERPs no longer works – however they are still a powerful ranking factor, so they shouldn’t be entirely forgotten about. Replace link building with searcher task accomplishment, UX optimisation, content upgrades and brand growth because each of these better serve the searcher.
Having strict rules about keyword placement – obsessing over having the keywords and phrases perfectly placed in H1, H2, the headline tags and the URL – can be a waste of time and energy.
That time and energy would actually be better placed adding related keywords and topics. Of course, the title and the headline should contain the keyword, however, including related terms can actually be more effective in the other areas.
For example, trying to rank for ‘New York neighbourhoods’ with content that doesn’t include Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens or Staten Island is much harder than trying to rank with each of those easily recognised, related terms.
Adding 5 to 10 terms that feel like they’re missing can have a profound impact on rankings, so this is well worth looking into…
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