Thanks xxxxxxxxxxx. It’s a pleasure to be here today moderating this discussion, one of the most important topics in marketing as there are new and dynamic tools driving user experiences across platforms. These experiences have fundamentally changed the way that organizations work – how they create products, communicate with consumers, and how people engage with information, use services and perhaps buy products.
Today we’re living in Our own world of what I call “relevance bubbles”. A world where information finds us, where it’s pushed to us, rather than we go out looking or searching for it. As we all know, highly targeted content is now presented to us on our multiple devices – not only real-time messages, but right time messages. These messages sometimes blur the lines between content types, editorial and paid, earned and owned media. But they all target relevance bubbles – individuals or cohorts as they move between interacting with marketing silos over time. We can now target Relevance bubbles and know who you are, where you are and what you need and when you need it. We know if you are on a mobile phone, or looking for a local store, so we can give you something most relevant to you built on local search metrics. That content will be displayed with all of the relevant information, maps, integration to social media, and contact information as well as offers and promotions. To some it may sound a little creepy – but we need to understand that “privacy, or at the very least, autonomy, is dead as we knew it. That your relevance bubble is driven from many of your online and off line behaviors – from cell phone data and signals, where you are, where you’ve been, over time, to browsing behavior – what you’ve read and viewed and multiple devices over time. Some call this phenomena, Content Marketing, others call it Inbound Marketing, Discovery Marketing, Cross-Channel Marketing, Ominichannel Marketing, On line/Off line Marketing, Response Marketing. Regardless of what it’s call this Convergence Marketing, is based on the fundamentals, common keys, or normalized data which can be acted on. In this webinar we will explore these new dimensions, and we’re honored to have James Mathewson with us who will share how IBM is both thinking about, and is actually putting into practice these new realities. Before we hear from James, I want to try and set the stage with some of my recent observations about the 4 Ps. This Convergence is driving what I’m calling the new four Ps – Those of People, Process, Platform and Purpose. That is not to say that the old 4ps are gone, Those of Price, Product, Promotion and Place! but Many have now realized that we need to add in another for today’s, mobile driven and content rich marketing.
So, Marketing is Evolving, but why now you ask? We’ve all heard about Moore’s law – while he wrote about hardware issues they have been applied more generally to mean that the costs are being driven down at a dramatic and staggering rate. These costs inclued the cost for CPU and processing; the cost for storage of information and the costs for sharing and communicating this information. TO use the catch-phrase dejure – this all makes BIG DATA possible.
There’s a convergence of many things. Not only is All of this new capability driving the output of Marketing, or the targeting and the creating of Relevance Bubbles, it’s also forcing the definition and refocusing of marketing itself around the New Four Ps- In the old way… we had dedicated silos of technology, and we had dedicated experts in that technology. We had our SEO technical experts who could optimize keywords for page content and others who would optimize technical page SERP results. We had analysts who bought PPC ads, and others who wrote the copy. We had product marketing people who wrote content for the web, and others who wrote content for Press Releases, and still other who wrote for data sheets and who wrote product descriptions. All that was the digital domain. Yet, there were still other copy writers who created for offline - TV, Radio, and Print channels. That’s all changed today as our content cross channels, from online to offline; across digital channels from email and websites, to the mobile web to mobile and social apps, and back again. This Demands that we look at marketing in a new light. And the successful organizations are doing just that. Whole new roles are being created like Content Engineer, Growth Hacker, Chief Digital Officer, Chief Data Officer, Chief Analytics Officer, Chief Content Officer, Chief Social Officer, Chief Mobile Offer and teams. Some say that the role of CMO is changing and morphing, and others say that it may go away as we know it unless the challenges of siloed content are addressed.
People and new marketing roles The Common denominator “or common key”, in all of this is data. Our ability to collect data, transform that data for actionable analytics… changes the game and our roles. No longer does one person feel one pain. The new roles will cross all of the marketing silos and need to apply this big data driven content – essentially applying conversion numbers to words that convert… and to defined objectives… over time. And add predictive modeling driven by “data scientists” and you can see that new process, needs to be established to help and define these new roles of who does what, when, why and how. Poll Question Are you in the process of reorganizing your marketing department? Yes No
Process So, You now have the people in place. and you have established a new process, you can now start creating that content that will lives across channel. and is delivered to you at the right time, when you need it . And, you need to map your roles and process to the most important P of all – Purpose.
Purpose Needs to be established Just like building a web site, where you have to define your conversion objectives, and optimize your user behaviors across all of your new online channels – where there are four principal objectives for you site… which mirror off line objectives – sell more, service better, create sticker content, or more generate leads. Your new marketing needs to have equally well defined measureable, testable with actionable objectives. And to do that you will need, or fourth P, a platform that supports your new organization. James will share his thoughts and how they are addressing this at IBM in a few minutes. But first, we thought we’d introduce you to the RIO Platform - One important note… the purpose has changed from silo-based, to cross channels. When you do this you’ll find that not only does the processes changes, but so does the purpose. It becomes more interactive like a Marketing automation application, collecting data, scoring data and making it actionable. But, like a Marketing automation tool, It also will add a time dimension and you will tend to look at things over a Life time value of the total of interactions, with appreciate scoring of each. While each channel before had a more liner conversion metric, now when one moves horizontally across silos things becomea bit different. As we all know, content is relevant within context and the engines work towards finding the most relevant content for your target bubble (person or cohort), so that you can convert them. What’s now key is that you do much of your work is done, “upfront” before you cross those channels. To do this you will need to start your research by listening to what’s being discussed in social channels. You need to identify those keywords and topics and make sure you’ve optimized your content using this relevance. Next, rather than an afterthought, you’ll need to create content using those keywords, topics and phrases, and you’ll need to measure and optimize it across channels.
There are three primary ways to look at Converged Applications. The first, Converged UI - What does it LOOK like. The second converged UX – HOW does it work functionally. And most important, convergence based on analytics – At ClickZ and Effectyv Digital, we’ve recently written a report on the topic called Convergence Analytics which features Rio Software as an example of a Convergence Analytic Application. You can download the report by going to the RIO blog. Pete will talk more about how the RIO platform integrates Search, Social and Mobile for the new digital marketer – And James will talk about how one of the world’s leading companies has changed it’s 4ps completely! How and when they do things - the process. Who now does those things, which is quite surprising, and how they optimize them around their purpose. We’ll hear from James in a minute, but to get started we should talk about the Platform, one of the four Ps, that makes this all possible.
We have with us today the VP of Product for Rio software. Pete joined Rio SEO and its sister company Covario many years ago at the company’s creation. Working with companies like P&G and now IBM to help drive the direction of the product offerings, he has helped grow the software arm of the company to what was recently recognized by Forrester Research, in their SEO tools wave, as the only leader in the space. So Pete… over to you.
There is a shift where historical success as a “technical expert” in a marketing department is not enough. no longer enough to take content that’s been created and fix the HTML and increase the keyword density and call it a day. Need to start thinking Pre-production for this. To help with the research around what content needs to be created, what will resonate most with your target audience, and how you can incorporate proven SEO techniques into new channels of business website content development. Getting in the “Pre” (as in pre-production) is also critical because doing this after it goes live is too late. With increasing social signals into search engine algorithms and the need to have things already optimized and easily shared at the time that they launch, all post production work should now be dedicated to content promotion. Content is not king, it is a democracy where content is “voted” into power through social sharing and links. Just making great content is not enough you need to also promote it. Poll Question What do you see as your primary role at your organization? SEO Marketing Research and Analytics
How you can get ahead with proper planning. There are key elements here that should help drive your planning process. Starting with research. What content you need to create or target is the first question. It needs to be timely and interesting to your target audience. That’s where keyword discovery has come into play for so long in the SEO world. You want to be where the searchers are. However, using single keyword suggestions tool like Google keywords may no longer be enough. In a cyclical relationship world of search and social you also want to find concepts that will be shared and discussed through social means. This may not be found through simple search keyword suggestions tools and is where social listening can come into play. How do your users describe your products, how do they define the industry? Are there emerging terms and concepts that will not yet show up in search keyword discovery tools? Videos are a good example. Article by Paul Bruemmer on (SEL??) that talks about how the latest T-Mobile phone through Google keyword tools looks at terms like pricing and specs while YouTube searches focused on “ unboxing videos ” and “ hnds on reviews ” . Knowing how you might create your content can also impact how you research it. Looking at social “voice of the customer” feedback can also help encourage the creation of content that is shared. And as we know, social sharing helps with driving traffic back to your properties and also with search signals.
Keyword Discovery Automation – Use multiple sources to identify top keyword targets and help automated the process of mapping those terms to targeted landing pages. Fully integrated with our Search Analytics software and able to help you start the first phase of planning for your SEO campaigns.
Content promotion needs to replace post-production SEO. Ideally pages should be launched with SEO completed and the focus during this campaign is to promote those pages to help with social sharing and link building efforts tracking changes, building links and establishing a social presence here is key. If you integrate with your social teams, how are they posting and tweeting about this content (earned) how are you enabling industry influencers to understand and perhaps discuss and share your content? What are you doing to help enable your advocates to help sharing this content as well?
Thanks Pete. It gives me great pleasure to introduce James Mathewson. James has been around digital strategy for almost 2 decades, connecting web audiences with relevant content He’s spent seven years as EIC as search lead for IBM– where he’s lead IBM web development teams to create more relevant, high quality, and findable content. So, how does IBM and James measure success? Well, he helped increase IBM's lead revenue from organic visitors by over $2B per year! Pete is the Lead author of "Audience, Relevance, and Search: Targeting Web Audiences with Relevant Content" from IBM Press and is known world wide for his out of the box thinking.
The main problem at IBM is too much content. IBM is the largest commercial publisher in the world. Who is the largest publisher overall? [U.S. Government] We have been publishing content for 100 years, and we need to keep and archive much of it for legal and regulatory reasons And it ’ s not just on the web: Every time we do a product launch or announcement, we create reams of content: Press releases, data sheets, brochures, white papers, demos, videos, blogs, podcasts, infographics, downloadable education… The range of content types is growing over time: 10 years ago, we mostly published press releases, data sheets, and white papers Not just marketing: communications, support pages, documentation, developer communications, partner outreach, learning, sales enablement, internal comms, investor briefings… We have our own publishing company: Redbooks We have our own imprint: IBM Press, published by our partner Pearson Education [Book and video mentions] All these assets need homes on the web, and they need to be promoted in social media We are also growing our audiences: It ’ s not just IT managers and CIOs, it ’ s the whole c-suite, plus layers of governmental officials, plant managers, citizen action leaders… And the most important constituency are the influencers among those audiences: Those who are actively growing their credibility among their peers by blogging, tweeting and building LinkedIn groups So how do we manage all this content in a way that does makes it easier for our audiences to find the content they need to make buying decisions that favor IBM solutions? And how do you make it easy for IBMers to connect with influencers to participate in conversations relevant to their areas of expertise?
How do we go from before to after? We get keyword research into the messaging, which informs the brief, the content strategy, the IA, the copy and design of all assets We use keyword research to analyze audiences, not just by role, but by pain points and stages in the buying cycle We build content plans to address audience needs with all and only the information they need to accomplish their goals at their particular states in the buying cycle We use the keyword research for market research, to understand the conversations our target audiences are participating in and to help IBMers build content that flows into those conversations We use keyword research to help IBMers connect with the top influencers for the major market segments we are trying to own IBMers tell our stories with transparency, honesty, even modesty We embrace iteration in all we do, recognizing that we can design and build highly targeted content, but we still need to adjust it once it goes live
The New Approach with technology Keyword discovery is not just about code, it ’s about content Using our keyword reports, we can find ranking pages for relevant keywords and build complementary content experience Keyword research becomes a source of content collaboration, social listening, and social outreach
Keywords are a natural resource. We can mine this resource for insights that transform our company, perpetually moving us to higher value business relationships When we give all of our employees access to the words clients and prospects use to solve their problems, you enable employees to help clients solve those problems This is not just about content. It ’ s about developing the products our clients and prospects need. It ’ s about learning how these products can be built into solutions for particular client sets or industries. It ’ s about creating excellent customer experiences. And it ’ s about nurturing clients as they encounter problems. If you do all that right, you develop loyal customers who become advocates for your brand. Keywords are the natural resource, the ore that you mine Loyal customers are the products you create with this ore