4 Steps to Tackle Data Quality and Velocity Issues.

 

Let’s face facts—marketers have become complacent with poor-quality prospect and customer data. According to a SiriusDecisions study, 25% of the average B2B marketer’s database is inaccurate and 60% of companies have an overall data health that’s “unreliable.” Because it’s the norm, we’ve created many manual workarounds as temporary fixes for a growing problem — a problem that’s costs us precious money, time and performance.
This complacency has many negative consequences. Satisfaction with the status quo hinders progress, and with ever-growing revenue goals, every marketer is looking for ways to improve their performance and the customer experience. So why are we so complacent when it comes to the data that drives our marketing efforts? And, what can we do to improve our data quality and therefore our results?
It’s no secret that marketers are investing heavily in technology to boost the ability to engage and delight customers. But though we’re well into the marketing automation movement that depends on the smooth and consistent flow of prospect and customer data, we continue to downplay, or even ignore, the data quality issues that can plague our systems.
This is a problem we need to address.
For example, my team at Integrate recently examined its customers’ lead generation efforts and found that on average of nearly 40% of lead data was identified as poor quality (report to be published in January 2015).
When unchecked, quality issues have two major ramifications on marketing and automation effectiveness:

1. Wasted usage and diminished systems ROI: Engagement marketing and lead nurturing tracks depend on imported lead data being accurate. If a lead contains an invalid email address, it inhibits our ability to deliver the our full value to engaged prospects. If the data contains invalid values (e.g., job title, purchasing timeline, etc.), it’s just wasting space—or worse yet, it effects the potential customer experience because they may be placed into the wrong track.

2. Decreased lead velocity and impaired relations with sales: Most marketing organizations are more diligent than simply allowing poor data to pass through the cracks and enter their marketing automation and CRM systems (though some inevitably slips through). Instead, they have individuals comb through lead files to scrub the data before it’s injected (of course, this usually doesn’t help with email validation). What is problematic with this process is that prospects are often more than a week old before they’re re-engaged by a nurture campaign or sales rep. By that time, prospect interest has cooled and conversion rates through the customer acquisition funnel suffer. This obviously strains the sales/marketing relationship.

These are significant consequences, but because marketers are moving fast and looking to the horizon, their intentions to prevent these consequences are typically cast aside and it’s back to business as usual. Fixing data quality issues once and for all doesn’t have to be an Everest-like trek.
So, what steps can we take to address data quality and velocity issues?

1. Understand where and how data sources converge

This will help you identify the best place/time to implement data governance procedures. The best way to do this is to take inventory of all marketing-related systems/applications as well as the processes in place to leverage them. Then, pinpoint the tactical stages in the data flow where verification and cleansing will provide optimal efficiency and effectiveness.

2. Implement a mindset of standardization

Data communicated in multiple formats prevents quick and easy analysis. Think of the difficulty involved with following a recipe that uses the metric systems when you only have standard measuring cups—it requires a lot of extra calculation and slows everything down. Ensuring prospect data conforms to a standardized format also enables the next step…

3. Integrate systems

This will help you capture, refine, leverage and analyze customer/prospect data. Most marketers have integrations between their marketing automation and CRM systems, but these technologies are often still disconnected from lead sources that are distinct from a company’s website or email account (for example, third-party media partners, events, ecommerce sites, content syndication channels, call centers, etc.). By ensuring a smooth, automated flow of data all the way up the funnel to capture leads prevents bottlenecks that slow velocity and allow prospect interest to wane.

4. Automate data verification and cleansing

Of course, if you directly inject data from lead capture straight into a nurture track, you bypass the crucial step of checking the data quality. Adopting and implementing software and processes that automate lead verification and cleansing at the point of captured-data convergence (identified in step 1) is the best way to ensure clean data is imported into your marketing automation and CRM systems in a timely manner.
High-performing marketers are implementing these steps to face the data quality hurdle head on, and early on—before it affects the ever-important customer experience. And for their efforts, they’re seeing greater conversion rates, increased marketing automation ROI and greater marketing-attributed revenue.
Technology has helped marketers personalize, and track efforts like never before, leading to higher customer engagement. But if we continue to generate bad lead data or spend days refining it before feeding it into our marketing and sales systems, we’re hampering our ability to achieve our core goal — creating delighted customers.

Ebook: Leveraging Psychology in Digital Marketing.

Marketing and psychology share a common bond—they both strive to understand the motivation, needs, desires and responses of individuals. As a discipline, psychology has studied and gained insight into how human psychology drives our consumer actions. Kath Pay, Marketing Director at cloud.IQ illustrates that as marketers, when we integrate consumer psychology insights into our programs we are able to speak to our buyers more effectively—moving them through their buying lifecycle faster.
Without reading and researching consumer psychology studies, marketers can incorporate the insights into their programs by leveraging these seven psychology concepts:

1. Persuasion Architecture

Persuasion Architecture is simply using design (in an email or on a website) to help guide the buyer to convert. In this case, conversion does not necessarily mean purchase, it can be clicking on a call-to-action, reading an article, or going to the website. To effectively use persuasion architecture, your design needs to ensure that it is as easy as possible for a buyer to follow the path to conversion.  You can do this two ways:

• Implicit Directional Cues: Less obvious visual cues that include line of sight, color, and shape and size of objects that imply prioritization through visual weight.
• Explicit Directional Cues: More obvious visual cues that often take the shape of a line, arrow or curve that explicitly guides the viewer to the call-to-action.

2. Emotion Driven Behavior

Despite being conscious of making a “rational” decision, most people subconsciously make purchasing decisions based on emotion. Then they rationalize their purchase by coming up with explanations after the fact.
So while it’s important to educate your buyers about your products and services, it’s also important to engage their emotions in your marketing. This can be done through images, storytelling, persuasive subject lines or compelling copy. A good example of this can be seen in many television commercials, that build a story around the product instead of doing a ‘hard-sell’. By emotionally engaging your audience, you improve your chances of converting buyers emotionally.

3. Social Proof

Social Proof is the concept that people are more likely to engage in a behavior if they see others doing the same or are told others did the same. It’s basically the effect of peer pressure.
Social Proof can be used in a variety of ways—from encouraging purchase through peer evaluations, to using statistics to show buyers what actions other buyers ‘like them’ took, to suggesting a tipping amount—it can be an incredibly powerful way to prompt buyer action.

4. Scarcity and Loss Aversion

At the basic levels of human behavior, there are two main drivers—avoiding pain and experiencing pleasure. These are the key to every action that we as humans take and they shape the concept of scarcity and loss aversion.
When people are faced with either limited availability, or a limited opportunity to get they best deal, they are more likely to buy. This is why buyers act quickly when they are told that a product or special offer won’t last long. They want to avoid the pain of a lost opportunity and experience the pleasure of a getting a deal. Marketers can incorporate this principle into their marketing promotions with countdown clocks, and by using language that illustrates a sense of scarcity like ‘limited edition’ or ‘don’t miss out’.

5. Reciprocity

It’s human nature to dislike being indebted to others, which is the basis of the reciprocity principle. In order to effectively leverage this principle, marketers need to ensure that they offer their buyers something of real value.
Offering value makes asking for something in exchange feel acceptable to buyers. Often marketers will leverage this principle in their email list-building efforts—offering a discount code, or exclusive access to content in exchange for buyer contact information. By doing this, you not only gain information, you don’t annoy your buyer.

6. Commitment and Consistency

The principle of commitment and consistency declares that as human beings, we have a deep need to be seen as reliable and true to our word. Most people dislike saying one thing and then doing another, so if you can get a buyer to publicly commit to something, they are more likely to follow-through with it. For example, having a buyer commit to your brand in a small way, like a reward program or ‘liking’ or ‘following’ you on social media sites, makes them more likely to eventually purchase from you.

7. Anchoring

Anchoring comes from a cognitive bias known as a heuristic, which describes the human tendency to rely heavily on the first piece of information that you receive (the anchor) when making decisions. This strategy allows buyers to shorten their decision-making time and make decisions without stopping to think about every possible course of action.
When buyers need to choose between options, they look for a base from which to start—this is the anchor. An example of the anchoring effect in action is promoting a product on sale with it’s original price still listed. Buyers will see the original price and anchor it in order to evaluate how good the sale price is.

Agility Will Rule in the Era of Engagement Marketing.

I’ve frequently said that marketing has changed more in the last five years than it has in the past 50. And, I think it is going to change even more in the next 5. Change has become the new normal, and as marketers, we need to adapt. Today’s customers have a 24/7 mentality. And our success is no longer just based on how clever we are, but how adept we are at connecting with customers at the speed of today’s digital world.
When I’m on stage, I sometimes tell the story of my most recent move. I had a long list of things to do—like everyone else. There I was—in the passenger seat while my wife was driving—and I thought I would knock off one item off of my to-do list by trying to secure a mover. I searched on my phone, landed on some broker page, filled out my information, and off it went to 52 different moving companies. I got a call back in 5 minutes from one company. Then, over the next 2 weeks, I got 51 other emails and/or phone calls from the other companies. Which one do you think I gave the business to? The game was over before the other 51 companies even got to the stadium.
The internet never sleeps. When we go to bed in California, people are eating breakfast in Norway. When Birdman won the Academy Award for Best Picture, everyone knew it within a matter of minutes. Trending hashtags, viral videos, SnapChat—all of these provide ways for people to relay information within seconds. We have entered into a real-time marketing environment. Keep up or perish.

Marketers Don’t Create Customer Journeys…Customers Do

This is the world I keep talking about—the Era of Engagement Marketing. When we are on the receiving end of real-time information from customers, and from events around the world, marketers can’t afford to be last. Marketers cannot be deluded into thinking that they “map out customer journeys” and that customers dutifully follow those paths—on the marketers’ timeline. Anyone suggesting that is doing marketers a great disservice. For one thing, the idea of mapping a journey is so 2000-and-late, and…slow. Marketers must be able to have a conversation in real-time. I often will describe it in talks as the equivalent of mapping out your conversation flow before you go to a cocktail party. Try sticking exactly to that script. How do you think your evening will go? Why would someone think it any different in interacting with customers?
For the second thing, and even more importantly, customers create and guide their journeys—they have access to so much information, in so many places, that they are self-directed. Marketers have to be able to move with the discussion whenever and wherever their customers are—in real-time. We, as marketers, have to be always on—anticipating the start of the race and pacing ourselves to guide and react throughout the journey.
In the Economic Intelligence Unit’s conversation with Jim Stengel, former CMO at P&G, a different metaphor came up. If marketing used to be an assembly line, with marketers coming in at the end to figure out how to sell a product, they are now in a trading room, he explained. Marketers need to be able to respond to events as they happen. A much discussed example is how Oreo responded during the blackout at the 2013 Super Bowl with “you can still dunk in the dark.” It was quick, witty, and memorable. It seized the correct moment. Even a day later, and that response would have been DOA and utterly forgettable.
If you take a look at data from “The rise of the Marketer,” a survey conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit on behalf of Marketo, you can see these ideas emerge in the numbers.

New Skills and Structures are Vital

If you recall from my earlier post about the survey, more than 80% of marketing executives believe we will need to restructure marketing to better support business. Think about it—in an always-on, Marketing First world, how will our current marketing departments measure up? Most marketing teams aren’t equipped yet to respond to information 24/7, let alone proactively be communicating in an integrated way 24/7 When marketers need immediate responses, they won’t always be able to act based on a pre-established plan or journey that they dictated for their customers to follow. They will need to think quickly, and respond appropriately, in the right channel, at the right time and with the right message—at scale. Last week’s post highlighted salient statistics on this score—that when CMOs and other marketing leaders were asked what skills were the top areas they needed to develop, the #1 answer, at 40%,  was “digital engagement”, and the #2 answer, tied at 40%, was “marketing operations and technology.” Furthermore, 38% of marketing execs are looking for strategy and planning skills in the next 3-5 years. Among companies that see an urgent need for change, the number is even higher, climbing to 44%. Marketing leaders are recognizing that living in a real-time world requires much stronger strategic thinking as we all seek to adapt.
As the way customers prefer to communicate evolves, marketers need to respond with speed and agility. And to do this, we need to invest in skills and technology that allow us to meet customers on their level, in real-time. In the next era of marketing—Engagement Marketing—agility will rule.

Marketers Will Define Company Strategy.

We’re living in a Marketing First world. If you haven’t yet experienced this shift for yourself—bear with me; it’s coming.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve dug deeply into the results of “The Rise of the Marketer,” a survey from the Economist Intelligence Unit on behalf of Marketo, to highlight some of the study’s key insights. Last week, we explored the changing attitudes towards customer engagement. This week, I’d like to explore another finding from the survey—how marketers will play a larger role in company strategy. This is a huge development, and a dramatic shift in many organizations from how marketing was asked to contribute in the past.

Marketers Will Earn a Position on the Starting Line

In our survey, when asked if marketing would shape company strategies over the next three to five years, roughly 80% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that it would.
As we heard in our previous conversation with visionary Seth Godin, marketers have historically been like runners in the final leg of the relay race. We take a product or service and determine how to help it reach the intended audience. But this approach is going to change. In fact, the race will be redesigned entirely, and it will no longer be a relay. Instead of being handed the baton, marketers will be in the race from the beginning, playing a greater role, and having more influence in setting strategy to determine which product, service, or market a company should even pursue.
Why is this happening? Because, the shopping and buying process has changed forever. Buyers have more information at their fingertips than ever before and they are using it to self-educate. They’re reaching out to companies later and later in their decision-making cycles. As a result, if a company hopes to engage and influence that shopper, they have to do it earlier. This new digital, social, mobile world, is the domain of the marketer. That means that marketing is the only function that has a chance to influence buyers before they have all but made their decisions—putting the marketer in the driver’s seat, or at the starting line—either way, it’s Marketing First.
Marketers everywhere should be excited about this. Across the board, marketing has the chance to play a bigger role in company strategy than ever before. Validating this fact, in our survey, “Strategy and Planning” was nearly tied for the top spot in terms of skills that marketers felt like they needed to develop in their organizations .
When you look more closely at the data, you can see this change emerging even further; marketing teams are doing far more, and they expect to expand their reach in the future. Here’s more from our survey:

• 75% of marketers believe they will be responsible for the end-to-end engagement and ownership over the customer’s lifetime—not just marketing, but support and continued engagement as well.
• More than 80% of marketers agree with the statement, “We need to change the structure and design of our marketing organization to meet the needs of our business over the next three to five years.”

When asked which areas of business areas marketing teams will drive in the next three to five years, the answers were also intriguing: The focus on advertising and branding will decrease compared to today. More than 70% of respondents indicated that marketers are currently focused in these areas. When asked if their focus would remain the same in the future, only about 40% believed they would even have a person focused there. Instead, marketers will put more energy, time, and effort into areas such as strategy, digital, and customer lifecycle engagement..

From Participating to Leading

In many ways, this is already happening. Marketers have been leading strategy for years in many organizations. And, it has been accelerating in recent years as marketers have become increasingly responsible for customer relationships, and, perhaps even more importantly, increasingly responsible for being the source of customer engagement data. The marketer knows the customer better than anyone else in this digital world. They are the keepers of customer data, which means they can spot trends before anyone else can—trends in customer behavior, needs, and interests. These are core components of a successful business strategy.

• Marketers Know Their Customers: Marketers share a deep intimacy with their customers that is simply unmatched by any other business function in a company. We understand what channels customers’ use, where they come from, and how their unique backgrounds contribute to their unique behaviors. This ability to resonate with customers is absolutely critical to business growth.
• Marketers Know How to Leverage Technology: It’s a digital-first world, and marketers have a stronger command of the most forward-thinking technology. We know and use the tools needed to better understand our audiences and reach them more effectively.
• Marketers Drive Revenue: With better technology and tools, marketers can effectively demonstrate our ability to drive revenue for our companies. With the data to prove our initiatives are driving revenue, we’ve earned a seat in the boardroom.

If you are the steward of the customer and you are driving revenue, you probably should have a strong hand in leading company strategy—don’t you think?
I, for one, am excited to see how this Marketing First world develops. How is this movement toward the next generation of marketing happening in your organizations? Do you have any insight or personal experiences to add? If so, please share in the comments. I’d love to hear what you think.

The Life of a Content Asset: Tracking Real ROI.

We recently submitted one of our most successful content assets of the year, 2014 Sample Social Media Tactical Plan, for a content award on measurable ROI.  Instead of running a large report like I usually do to track all of our content assets, I got to do some deep digging into an individual asset to determine how successful it was. I looked at a variety of really interesting metrics to determine what impact, if any, this tactical plan had on Marketo’s marketing efforts and bottom line.
It is a fact that content marketers struggle to determine ROI of a single content asset—how well is it really performing and is it contributing to revenue and closed deals? In the case of this workbook, the answer is a resounding “yes”!
Let’s take a look at what I dug up.

Downloads

OK, so this is a pretty standard measurement, but one that is relevant and that you should be looking at. This number constitutes the number of downloads from your website, as well as downloads from any paid programs that you run. Make sure to set the specific timeframe you want to look at.
This particular asset was refreshed in June of this year, so I wanted to make sure that we were pulling numbers only for the new piece. We ran the download report in Marketo and determined that our asset has been downloaded 40,791 times since June 2014. Not too shabby!

New Name Acquisition

So then I wanted to know out of those downloads in paid programs, how many were new names—meaning how many new people had entered our database for the first time due to this workbook. This would count as First Touch attribution if these new names were opportunities or closed won deals.
This content piece has generated 3,847 new names in paid programs for Marketo since we published. Clearly, it is bringing new people into our database on a regular basis.

Opportunities

In addition to new names and downloads, you want to look at how many opportunities this content asset has generated over time. Opportunities can be defined as leads who have been accepted by sales and are being actively worked by a sales rep. In the case of our workbook, we have 1,664 opportunities associated with the asset.  So not only are we getting a lot of downloads, but a solid number of those downloads are qualified buyers already.

Social Shares

Social sharing is another important metric to track for your content marketing initiatives. Are people engaging with the content and actually sharing it with their network? Make sure you track your social sharing across all of the different social platforms—Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+–and others depending on your unique business case.
Of course with a social media topical asset, I was hoping that people were sharing it across their social channels. This asset has generated a total of 522 shares across social channels from our resources page. That means people who come to our page and download the asset have been compelled to share on a regular basis.

Revenue Attribution

Now for the holy grail of content marketing ROI—how has your content asset impacted pipeline and closed won deals? Is it moving the needle for your sales team? For this measurement, I ran a report in Marketo’s Revenue Cycle Analytics to determine multi-touch pipeline and multi-touch revenue. Multi-touch gives you a holistic picture of how your asset moved your leads down the sales funnel throughout their lead lifecycle.
Our social tactical plan had really good numbers so far at $582,471 in multi-touch pipeline created and $381,671 in multi-touch revenue won. And that is only from June of 2014!
It is definitely interesting to track the life of a content piece to see its real impact on business and I encourage all of you to consistently track these metrics. What else are you tracking for your content marketing ROI? And to get more information on tracking content marketing ROI download our ebook, Solved Mysteries: Tracking Your Content Marketing ROI.

The 3 Questions Every Email Marketer Should Answer: Holiday Edition.

 

I have something to tell you – I don’t like shopping. In fact, the thought of a shopping expedition fills me with dread. So when the holiday season swings around, I become a walking cliché – the guy who sets out at the last minute, and pays way too much for things that nobody would ever want.
I tell you this because we’ve entered that window of holidays and festivals across the world that are critical to many marketers. In the US, the National Retail Federation estimates that $602 billion in sales will take place during November and December. In the UK, The Guardian estimates that £5 billion will be spent online alone in December – lots of opportunity, right?
In short, this time of year represents a potentially lucrative period for businesses. As a marketer, you probably feel like you need to make the most of it.
But today, I’d like to speak as Ray, The Terrible Shopper Guy – a guy who, like many thousands of others, wishes that holiday shopping could be a little easier, and that holiday email marketing could be much, much better. I would like to propose 3 questions that all email marketers should be able to answer/address before they market to anyone (especially people like me!) around the holidays.
Here goes:

1. Have you already secured my trust?

If you are anything like me, when you glance at your inbox, you will filter or deprioritize emails from brands/companies you don’t know. This small, natural reaction demonstrates how trust is critical in that first interaction with any marketing communication.
How can email marketers build trust?

• Make sure I know when I am opting-in, and be clear about what I am opting-in to.
• Provide easy-to-reach mechanisms for opting-in and down.
• Be consistent in terms of frequency, triggers, and experience once opt-in has been secured.

2. Is your offer relevant to me, based on my behavior or profile?

Personalization of our online experiences has been evolving for some years, and we now expect seemingly serendipitous moments during all of our online activity – “Why yes, I was shopping for a new scarf!”
Whether it’s a retargeting ad, or a highly targeted email we receive after visiting specific product pages, we want our experiences to acknowledge who we are and what we have done. This has set the bar high for email marketing, so we expect a lot of precision in the offers we receive.
If I am a long-time customer, I want that to be recognized in every email’s tone, content, and offer. I want my behavior and the information I provided to make the communications I receive relevant and timely. If I’m going to give marketers my data, I want customization in return.

3. Will you deliver exceptional, continuous experiences for me across channels?

The modern, digitally empowered consumer is channel agnostic: we don’t think in terms of ‘channels’ the way marketers do. When I visit a website and sign up for a newsletter and then follow the company on Twitter, I expect all of this to be accounted for when I interact with that company online. For example, I don’t want to be asked to sign up for a newsletter that I already subscribe to, or to be asked for my information a second time.
So what do you think? If you’re an email marketer, can you answer “yes” to all of these questions? If you’re a consumer, would you add any questions of your own? Share them in the comments below.

How To Make Every Single Page On Your Website Evergreen.

How can you create content that garners traffic year after year? Contributor Neil Patel has some tips!

Web pages may not be meant to last forever, but I think that most web pages can do a lot better.
Many pages and articles published today lack evergreen qualities, which means that in a few months or years, they will be old and useless. They will join the billions of other pages littering the Internet with uselessness – unread, unindexed, and forgotten.
Sounds kinda sad. It doesn’t have to be this way, though. In this article, I want to show you how you make every single page on your website evergreen.

What Do I Mean By “Evergreen”?

Evergreen content is content that continues to gain search traffic and readers long after it has been published.
I want to point out a few features of evergreen content that are often overlooked, but still necessary to a successful content marketing strategy.

1. It’s About Search Traffic As Much As It Is Readers
The biggest misconception regarding evergreen content is that it’s all about readers as opposed to the search engines. Typically, when I preach about SEO, I’m telling people to create content for users, not search engines.
With evergreen content, I need to reverse this to make a single point. Evergreen content can’t be evergreen unless the search engines are indexing it and returning it in search results. What good is an “evergreen” article that’s not being returned in search results?
Unless the article is evergreen to the search engines, it’s not going to be evergreen for anyone else.

2. Evergreen Content Is Basically Relevant Content That means Different Things For Different People
The whole idea behind evergreen content is relevance. Relevancy is a slippery thing, because an old article might be relevant to a history-seeker, but irrelevant to someone looking for up-to-date information. Can you make pages relevant to both types of searchers?
Yes, you can; and I will explain how in the content below.

3. Some Types Of Content Just Can’t Be Evergreen & That’s Okay
The nature of some articles and topics refuses to be evergreened. Is that okay? Sure. Why? Because often, the upswell in search volume for these topics is worth the extra traffic it brings your way. It might not last long, but it’s good while it does last.
Articles of this nature might be something like “2014 Best Practices for Title Tags.” By 2015, this article will be viewed as obsolete.

4. It’s Not Just Articles
Don’t give in to the idea that “evergreen” applies only to articles. Actually, some of the most relevant kinds of content are videos and infographics. I encourage you to experiment with all kinds of content, not just articles.

What Kind Of Content Works Best For Evergreen?

Remember again that evergreen isn’t just for readers – it’s for search engines, too. There are specific types of content that are particularly capable of pulling in search traffic year after year. At the same time, this is the very type of content that readers will willingly devour.

Case Studies. Case studies seem pretty un-evergreen, but they’re actually awesome.
The term “case study” is an excellent search modifier for long-tail queries that get tons of traffic. Many of the best content producers in the business are publishing “case studies.” The content in these studies is often offered in PDF or report-style form.
Other researchers cite these studies and link to them, making them a powerful conduit for traffic and link building.

Definitions & Explanations. These are some of the most valuable sources of evergreen content for both readers and search engines. Have you noticed how Google pulls the most relevant answers for Knowledge Graph results on queries like this?

Definitions never go out of style. If you create helpful definitions of niche-specific long-tail terms, you will score major traffic almost forever.
A “definition” page doesn’t need to be short. The content should lead off with a succinct definition, like Google prefers. But you should back this up with plenty of additional content.
How-To Articles. The Internet has more how-to articles than anyone can count. That’s okay because Google still loves them and so do readers.
How-to articles are great because of their strong dwell times and practical benefit for readers. The more (and more relevant) how-to articles you can create, the better.
Reports. Like a case study, a report is a form of content that lives on long after its original publishing date. Many times, reports deal with a single year or timeframe.
In spite of this time-bound subject matter, reports are a gold mine for research. Again, this means that your reports will be a great source for garnering links and citations around the web.
Tips. Who doesn’t love tips? Give the tip article a try, and you’ll see traffic from it last a long time.

Non-Tech Articles Dealing With Behavior, Attitudes Or Other Personal Characteristics. If you’re in a techy niche (like I am), it can seem hard to create evergreen content.
In subjects like gardening, things can stay evergreen for a long time. (See what I did there?) The same is true for cooking, cleaning, child care, relationships, woodworking, and many other areas.
Tech is one area in which things are always changing, especially in the arena of digital marketing.
You can still create evergreen content that builds on the topic broadly, but retains evergreen status. For example, I wrote an article titled, “How to Be a Workaholic And Not Get Burned Out.” Broadly, it deals with my niche, but it will always have appeal. Even though my articles on Google Authorship may be dated, my workaholic article will never be.
Lists. Always popular, the list article is a great way to win evergreen style. We gravitate to lists, love reading them, and give them close attention.

How Do You Make Content Evergreen?

The most important components of creating evergreen content are, of course, relevance and quality. What is its subject matter, and how is it written? However, there are techniques that you can use that will make any page more evergreen.

Display The Date. First, show the date. There’s no good reason to hide the publish date of an article. When you hide the date, you are raising questions in the user’s mind as to the evergreen nature of your content. The user wants to know, Is this relevant to my interests right now?
Without a date, they may be left wondering — and simply leave rather than risk getting misled by outdated information.
When you display the publish date of article, you are creating an open admission of when the article was published and letting the user make a choice to stay or leave that page.

Update Your Content On A Routine Basis. Having an evergreen piece of content doesn’t mean that you never touch it again. Even evergreen pieces need an occasional spritz to keep them fresh.
Google’s “freshness factor” prefers pages that are updated frequently. To keep your content active in the index and the SERPs, touch it up now and then. The more content you change or move, the greater the freshness of the article in the search engines.

Explain That The Page Has Been Updated. Some content deals with subjects that are constantly changing. In this case, you can change your content, too. Simply adjust the content according to the changed subject, and place a note at the top of the article.
Here’s what you can write:

Note: This article has been changed to reflect the new publication that was released in November 2014.

State That The Page Deals With An Old Topic, then provide a link to a new article. If your content is truly outdated and can’t simply be spruced up, then you should add a section at the top that explains this.
At the top of the page, add a section stating that the information below has changed, then provide a link to a new page. Like this:

Note:  The information below was relevant as of July, 2014. To find out about the latest changes, check out our infographic on “Data-Backed Tips to Improve Your Brand.”

If Google is still favoring an old article in the SERPs, this is essential. When a user clicks on that result, an old piece of content, you don’t want him or her to bounce. Instead, you can drive engagement and further dwell time with an open admission of the dated content, with a link to updated information.

Conclusion

Creating evergreen content is a mindset that can completely change the way you do digital marketing. By creating with evergreen in mind, you’ll position your content marketing efforts in such a way that they endure.
Keep in mind, of course, that evergreen content takes ongoing work. Like I mentioned, you can’t simply leave it and expect to always have first rank, 100% CTRs, and eternal dwell times. Evergreen is about freshening as much as it is about style, substance, and approach.

Learning SEO From Google Employees.

What do local marketers really need to know about SEO? Columnist Chris Marentis discusses some tips that come straight from the horse's mouth.

As should be the case with any SEO professionals, we’re constantly on the lookout for new information and ideas that can aid us in helping our clients improve their results. While at a recent event, we had the luxury of speaking with Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Pierre Far.
The conversation sparked us into looking further into Google itself as a source of knowledge for how best to “win” at the local SEO game.
From live conversations to published tips, blogs and videos, we’ve gleaned some useful insights from a variety of Google employees. While each person looked at local SEO from a different angle, there were two very consistent themes that emerged over and over again.
Following is a summary of these two themes with some specific ways to achieve them.

1. Be Findable

This might sound like a “duh” item, but it just cannot be stressed enough, in part because there may be so many different ways to ensure that a particular business is actually findable online. Some things that should be utilized to increase findability include:

Create Schema Markup
Pierre Far pointed out that schema markup itself is not a ranking factor but that it is critical for its ability to affect other ranking factors, namely the crawlability of a site.
Schema markup makes content easier for search engines to parse and index, therefore improving the chances that it will get noticed appropriately.

Leverage XML Sitemaps and Atom/RSS Feeds
Similar to schema markup, these sitemaps and feeds optimize sites for search crawling. Google Feeds Team member Alkis Evlogimenos recommends adding the URL of any new or significantly changed page to these, along with the time that a modification was made. To disseminate information broadly and efficiently, he recommends using the PubSubHubbub protocol to indicate that a feed has been updated.

Look Beyond Websites
In a six-video series, Google Developer Programs Tech Lead Maile Ohye reminds us that local SEO is not just about a website. Things like reviews, local directory listings, social media and networking sites possess great power to aid in local SEO results.
In her videos, Maile also discussed the importance of being found on mobile devices, something that we consistently hear from Google if we are paying attention.
John Mueller, a Webmaster Trends Analyst, recently made a post about the new Mobile Usability Features in Google Webmaster Tools and the importance it can offer to businesses looking to boost mobile SEO results.

2. Be Usable

Traditional logic might tell us that step #1 is to be found online and step #2 is to offer usable information once found.
However, you could argue that offering that usable information is really step #1, because your site content is a huge part of what determines your search engine rankings (and thus your “findability”).
No matter which way you look at it, the need to provide the right information — complete information and consistent information — across all channels is a must. This includes NAP data (Name, Address & Phone Number) at a minimum.
Consistency of information should be thought of in two ways: consistent for the customer and consistent for search engines.
According to Pierre Far, NAP information can be displayed “normally” on local business pages, social sites, websites and other customer-facing vehicles. However, within schema markups, phone numbers should consistently be entered in full international format beginning with the country code (1 for U.S. numbers) and then the rest of the phone number.
From a customer perspective, businesses are urged to consider the full customer journey in Maile Ohye’s videos. Even with sales channels that may be initiated by word of mouth, online sources are commonly used as the means by which potential customers verify the credibility and trustworthiness of businesses before they actually solicit them.
This research can take a customer from a Google+ page to a review site to a Facebook page and then maybe to a website. At all stops along the way, the customer should receive a consistent view of the company with all information needed in order to proceed to the next phase in the journey with that business.
Once again, a special word about mobile here is needed. Google would not have released special Webmaster Tools targeted at mobile search if it was not an important factor.
These new tools give insights into valuable customer experience metrics such as the presence of Flash content, the placement of clickable elements, font size and viewports. Weaving these into the analytics and planning mix should be standard procedure.

Final Thoughts

From technical tips like how to create schema markups to marketing philosophies involving the customer journey, Google’s employees are urging us to help our customers take the steps needed to make it easy for crawlers to find them and easy for customers to contact them.