The Content Marketing Weekly digs up all the newsworthy insights you need to get that holiday bonus this year. This week’s edition features SEO tips, B2B trends in 2018 and innovative ways to enhance your web ads.
You can’t say we didn’t try.
11 Ways to Prove the Value of SEO to Your Boss
A hot topic of late, SEO ROI can be a perplexing thing to explain to bosses, especially for smaller teams with less marketing experience. So much so, we wrote an eBook on it (right here).
And as Search Engine Journal corroborates, SEO has a number of key benefits – it’s just a matter of convincing superiors of such.
Need to convince possible clients on why they should invest in #SEO? Check this out: https://t.co/x8HWRfQ4H1 pic.twitter.com/iOOVbVvscs
— SearchEngineJournal® (@sejournal) December 1, 2017
SEO value lies in:
Avoiding penalties: Your rankings will plummet, traffic will swerve and web leads will tank otherwise.
- Beating competitors in search: What business doesn’t love leaving the competition in the dust?
- Owning your buyer funnel: SEO gets leads and pushes them through the sales process.
- Growth over time: SEO wins are exponential, meaning there are no limits to traffic, leads, brand awareness, etc.
For more ways to support your SEO pitch, click here.
5 B2B Non-predictions for 2018
There are so many predictions for 2018, it’s hard to keep track of them all. But isn’t a “non-prediction” still a prediction?
Peter Isaacson explores what won’t happen in 2018 in this post for MarTech Today.
First and foremost, marketers should know that AI is not going away anytime soon, like, not ever. So planning marketing initiatives and devoting resources to specific objectives without even discussing AI’s potential for your brand may not be the best route. Though adoption of AI in content creation is still limited to large news organizations, B2B marketers may very well be the next torchbearers of the technology.
On a larger scale, investment in martech won’t curtail in 2018, either. Which may impact global companies that operate in the EU. By May 2018, businesses will be legally obligated to protect personal citizens’ data under the new General Data Protection Regulation. Outsourced martech could potentially increase the risk for security gaps and theft of vendor data, putting companies in violation of the law should private data be stolen.
The last two non-predictions are: account-based marketing is not just for mature businesses (it’s now mainstream), and marketers won’t be getting bigger seats in the boardroom (bigger budgets but not more influence over core business decisions).
Find out why Isaacson believes as much.
The State of Interactive Advertising: New Formats Are Infusing Digital Ads with Creativity that Gets Results
At this point in human evolution, we’re pretty much all afflicted with ad fatigue. Decades of pop-ups, disruptive interstitials and oversized web banners created a very real UX problem: ad blindness.
Ads are inherently salesy, often pushy and sometimes downright ugly.
But as this article from Marketing Land explores, the ad game is changing.
UX is becoming a more prominent ranking signal, and marketers and advertisers have already adjusted their ad display strategies to feature native, immersive experiences. In other words, ads are interspersed into content more carefully and with an eye for interactivity.
Nowadays, ads aren’t something to be endured but experienced, as evidenced by Yorkshire Tea’s partnership with LoopMe, a mobile video platform.
Yorkshire Tea ran an ad that resembled a coloring book and gave site visitors a palate of colors to paint with on their touchscreens. The company’s test results showed brand awareness was 97 percent higher for consumers who viewed the coloring ad, and the number of people who rated Yorkshire Tea as “environmentally friendly” (its goal) jumped 39 percent.
Check out how other big brands like Mountain Dew, DSW and Disney are utilizing similar ad technology, including AR/VR, to reshape their consumers’ digital experiences.
SEO Automation: 4 Ways to Get Boring Tasks Done Quickly
Love your job but hate getting stuck in the weeds of day-to-day tasks?
Automation platforms can take the more tedious and boring functions of your job off your plate so you can focus on high-level strategy.
Search Engine Journal walks through a few tools that can automate SEO work:
- SEO analysis: Seoptimer, Yoast SEO
- Influencer outreach: BuzzSumo, SentiOne
- Social sharing: Buffer, IFTTT
- Keyword + backlink monitoring: SE Ranking
These tools are starting points and may be useful to beginners looking for help, which, when looking to dig out of a pile of work, any help is a godsend.
Let us know what tools work for you, and be sure to check out our next #BraftonBuzz Twitter chat Dec. 13 at 2 p.m. EST!
