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.

Content Curation: Pruning Old “Fresh” Content To Reveal The Evergreen.

Most sites deliver regularly-produced content as part of their architecture. At its simplest, it might just be a blog section through which company news, updates and outreach are posted. At its best, however, it’s a carefully pruned source of evergreen SEO traffic and a lean component of your site indexing strategy.

The General SEO Theory

Most SEOs that have been in the industry for a while would largely agree that overall domain SEO performance can be generalised to be a balance between the total backlink profile of the site (its “Authority”) and the total number of pages indexed on the domain (the total “Domain Sprawl”).
Obviously, this is a massive generalisation. But, in my experience, it is a fundamental axiom for SEO that’s stood the test of time and is a component of SEO that still moves the needle when SEO strategies built around it are executed.
With that in mind, it’s apparent that any content which is indexed (and therefore contributing to domain sprawl) has to pull its own weight or it will drag down the overall performance of the site.
This requirement is the basis of site architecture optimisation but is often ignored in the day-to-day management of a site’s SEO campaign. Why? Freshly generated content will always be a crucial part of a good domain architecture, but without a regular review of effectiveness, it can simply drift into long-term domain sprawl with little traffic return to show for it.
There are a couple of neat, quick search tricks we can use to find older content that’s failing to deliver return for its indexed SEO value. Let’s walk through them.

Finding The Old “Fresh”

Given that we’re in the business of reducing our indexed pages, the first tool you should turn to is Google. Using a combination of site index operators and indexed date range tools provided by Google, we can get a list of indexed URLs within any range of dates we’d like.
Let’s take a look at the BBC to see how this might throw up some opportunities to prune.
Chaining our operators and setting an earliest first index date of two years ago, we can dig out some cruft pretty easily:

I think we can agree that content like this and this are not necessarily of the highest value in the index (though they do now have extra backlink value, of course!). Though not necessarily “out of date” — their contained data is dynamically updated by the BBC — their indexing makes them landing pages without the surrounding BBC website. This makes for a very poor searcher experience; thus, this content is best cleaned away from the index.
On a side note, we can then quite easily find the BBC’s xml sitemap listing these pages. This strategy isn’t ideal, as it would override any canonicals and is just promoting the indexing of effectively frame pages.
We can take a more extreme view of the indexing date range to dig out some better examples of old content that could well be retired to benefit the domain as a whole. Tweaking the search to set the latest first index date to 2001 hits a goldmine.
By further refining our operators, we can dig out all examples of particular types of content that would do well to be removed from Google’s index. In this example, chaining an intitle operator of “VOTE2001″ with the site operator and setting a comprehensive date range will allow you to hoover up all example URLs that should be canonicalised into more useful content in the same section.

Additionally, if your underlying CMS system is flexible enough, you may be able to use the URL/Content patterns identified using this process to export and redirect all relevant content instead. Just beware that if you use a hard 301 redirect, and you leave link references to the content elsewhere on the site that are likely to be visited by real people, then you would be creating a poor user experience by forcing a redirect on them.
This is why I favour a canonical solution, as only the search engines are “redirected” — this means that for the edge cases where the old content is still relevant to users arriving from elsewhere on the site (like your own internal search function), the content is still accessible. Crucially, your old content is no longer pulling SEO value away from the rest of the domain.
With a site as large, and a history as long, as the BBC, this technique can be dramatically influential in improving overall rankings across the board for more relevant terms with tomorrow’s fresh content.

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.