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Venngage is a free infographic maker that has catered to more than 21,000 businesses. In this article, we explore how they grew their organic traffic from about 275,000 visitors per month in November 2017 to about 900,000 today — more than tripling in 17 months.

I spoke with Nadya Khoja, Chief Growth Officer at Venngage, about their process.

Venngage gets most of their leads from content and organic search. The percentage varies from month to month in the range of 58% to 65%.

In Nov 2017, Venngage enjoyed 275,000 visitors a month from organic search traffic. Today (16 months later) it’s 900,000. Nadya Khoja (their Chief Growth Officer) extrapolated from their current trend that by December of 2019 (in nine months) they will enjoy three million organic search visitors per month.

In 2015, when Nadya started with Venngage, they saw 300 to 400 registrations a week. By March of 2018, this was up to 25,000 a week. Today it’s 45,000.

While Nadya had the advantage of not starting from zero, that is impressive growth per any reasonable metric. How did they do it?

Recipe

There are a lot of pieces to this puzzle. I’ll do my best to explain them, and how they tie together. There is no correct order to things per se, so what is below is my perspective on how best to tell this story.

The single most important ingredient: Hypothesize, test, analyze, adjust

This critical ingredient is surprisingly not an ingredient, but rather a methodology. I’m tempted to call it “the scientific method”, as that’s an accurate description, but perhaps it’s more accurate to call it the methodology written up in the books “The Lean Startup” (which Nadya has read) and “Running Lean” (which Nadya has not read).

This single most important ingredient is the methodology of the hypothesize, test, analyze, and adjust.

What got them to this methodology was a desire to de-risk SEO.

The growth in traffic and leads was managed through a series of small and quick iterations, each one of which either passed or failed. Ones that passed were done more. Ones that failed were abandoned.

This concept of hypothesizing, testing, analyzing, and adjusting is used both for SEO changes and for changes to their products.

The second most important ingredient

This ingredient is shared knowledge. Venngage marketing developed “The Playbook”, which everyone in marketing contributes to. “The Playbook” was created both as a reference with which to bring new team members up to speed quickly, as well as a running history of what has been tested and how it went.

The importance of these first two ingredients cannot be overstated. From here on, I am revealing things they learned through trial and error. You have the advantage to learn from their successes and failures. They figured this stuff out the hard way. One hypothesis and one test at a time.

Their north star metrics

They have two north star metrics. The first one seems fairly obvious. “How many infographics are completed within a given time period?” The second one occurred to them later and is as important, if not more so. It is “how long does it take to complete an infographic?”

The first metric, of course, tells them how attractive their product is. The second tells them how easy (or hard) their product is to use.

Together these are the primary metrics that drive everything Venngage does.

The 50/50 focus split

As a result of both the company and the marketing department having a focus on customer acquisition and customer retention, every person in marketing spends half their time working on improving the first north star metric, and the other half spend their time working on improving the second.

Marketing driving product design

Those north star metrics have led to Venngage developing what I call marketing driven product design. Everywhere I ever worked has claimed they did this. The way Venngage does this exceeds anything ever done at a company I’ve worked for.

“How do I be good?”

This part of Nadya’s story reminds me of the start of a promo video I once saw for MasterClass.com. It’s such a good segue to this part of the story that I cropped out all but the good part to include in this article.

When Steve Martin shed light on an important marketing question

I’ve encountered a number of companies through the years who thought of marketing as “generating leads” and “selling it”, rather than “how do we learn what our customers want?”, or “how do we make our product easier to use?”

Squads

The company is structured into cross-functional squads, a cross-functional squad being people from various departments within Venngage, all working to improve a company-wide metric.

For example, one of the aspects of their infographic product is templates. A template is a starting point for building an infographic.

As templates are their largest customer acquisition channel, they created a “Template Squad”, whose job is to work on their two north star metrics for their templates.

The squad consists of developers, designers, UI/UX people, and the squad leader, who is someone in marketing. Personally, I love this marketing focus, as it de-focuses marketing and causes marketing to be something that permeates everything the company does.

There is another squad devoted to internationalization, which as you can infer, is responsible to improve their two north star metrics with users in countries around the world.

Iterative development

Each template squad member is tasked with improving their two north star metrics.

Ideas on how to do this come from squad members with various backgrounds and ideas.

Each idea is translated into a testable hypothesis. Modifications are done weekly. As you can image, Venngage is heavy into analytics, as without detailed and sophisticated analytics, they don’t know which experiments worked and which didn’t.

Examples of ideas that worked are:

• Break up the templates page into a series of pages, which contain either category of templates or single templates.
• Ensure each template page contains SEO keywords specific for the appropriate industry or audience segment. This is described in more detail further in this document.
• Undo the forced backlink each of the embedded templates used to contain.
  • This allowed them to get initial traction, but it later resulted in a Google penalty.
  • This is a prime example of an SEO tactic that worked until it didn’t.
• Create an SEO checklist for all template pages with a focus on technical SEO.
  • This eliminated human error from the process.
• Eliminate “React headers” Google was not indexing.
• Determine what infographic templates and features people don’t use and eliminate them.

Measuring inputs

I personally think this is really important. To obtain outputs, they measured inputs. When the goal was to increase registrations, they identified the things they had to do to increase registrations, then measured how much of that they did every week.

Everyone does SEO

In the same way that marketing is something that does not stand alone, but rather permeates everything Venngage does, SEO does not stand alone. It permeates everything marketing does. Since organic search traffic is the number one source of leads, they ensure everyone in marketing knows the basics of technical SEO and understands the importance of this never being neglected.

Beliefs and values

While I understand the importance of beliefs and values in human psychology, it was refreshing to see this being proactively addressed within an organization in the context of improving their north star metrics.

They win and lose together

Winning and losing together is a core belief at Venngage. Nadya states it minimizes blame and finger-pointing. When they win, they all win. When they lose, they all lose. It doesn’t matter who played what part. To use a sports analogy, a good assist helps to score a goal. A bad assist, well, that’s an opportunity to learn.

SEO is a team effort

While it is technically possible for a single person to do SEO, the volume of tasks required these days makes it impractical. SEO requires quality content, technical SEO, and building of backlinks through content promotion, guest posting, and the others. Venngage is a great example of effectively distributing SEO responsibilities through the marketing department.

To illustrate the importance of the various pieces fitting together, consider that while content is king, technical SEO is what gets content found, but when people find crappy content, it doesn’t convert.

You can’t manage what you don’t measure

This requires no elaboration.

But what you measure matters

This probably does justify some elaboration. We’ve all been in organizations that measured stupid stuff. By narrowing down to their two north star metrics, then focusing their efforts to improving those metrics, they’ve aligned everyone’s activity towards things that matter.

The magic of incremental improvements

This is the Japanese concept of Kaizen put into play for the development and marketing of a software product.

Done slightly differently, this concept helped Britain dominate competitive cycling at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

Customer acquisition is not enough

Venngage developed their second north star metric after deciding that acquiring new customers was not, in and of itself, any form of the Holy Grail. They realized that if their product was hard to use, fewer people would use it.

They decided a good general metric of how easy the product is to use was to measure how long people take to build an infographic. If people took “too long”, they spoke to them about why.

This led them to change the product in ways to make it easier to use.

Link building is relationship building

As a reader of Search Engine Watch, you know link building is critical and central to SEO. In the same way that everyone in Venngage marketing must know the basics of technical SEO, everyone in Venngage marketing must build links.

They do so via outreach to promote their content. As people earn links from the content promotion outreach, they record those links in a shared spreadsheet.

While this next bit is related to link building, everyone in Venngage marketing has traffic goals as well.

This too is tracked in a simple and reasonable way. Various marketers own different “areas” or “channels”. These channels are broken down into specific traffic acquisition metrics.

As new hires get more familiar with how things work at Venngage, they are guided into traffic acquisition channels which they want to work on.

Learning experience, over time

My attempt here is to provide a chronology of what they learned in what order. It may help you avoid some of the mistakes they made.

Cheating works until it doesn’t

Understanding the importance of links to search ranking, they thought it would be a good idea to implement their infographics with embedded backlinks. Each implemented infographic contained a forced backlink to the Venngage website.

They identified a set of anchor text they thought would be beneficial to them and rotated through them for these forced backlinks.

And it worked, for a while. Until they realized they had invited a Google penalty. This took a bit to clean up.

The lessons learned:

• The quality of your backlinks matter.
• To attract quality backlinks, publish quality content.

Blog posts brought in users who activated

At some point, their analytics helped them realize that users who activated from blog posts where ideal users for them. So they set a goal to increase activations from blog posts, which led to the decision to test if breaking up templates into categories and individual pages with only one template made sense. It did.

Website design matters

Changing the website from one big template page to thousands of smaller ones helped, and not just because it greatly increased the number of URLs indexed by Google. It also greatly improved the user experience. It made it easier for their audience to find templates relevant to them, without having to look at templates that weren’t.

Lesson learned: UI/UX matters for both users and SEO.

Hybrid content attracts

Hybrid content is where an article talks about two main things. For example, talking about Hogwarts houses sorting within the context of an infographic. This type of content brings in some number of Harry Potter fans, some of whom have an interest in creating infographics. The key to success is tying these two different topics together well.

Content is tuneable

By converting one huge templates page into thousands of small template pages, they realized that a template or set of templates that appeal to one audience segment would not necessarily appeal to others. This caused them to start to tune templates towards audience segments in pursuit of more long tail organic search traffic.

How did they figure out what users wanted in terms of better content? They used a combination of keyword research and talking with users and prospects.

Some content doesn’t make the cut

After they caught onto the benefits of tuning content to attract different audience segments, they looked for content on their site that no one seemed to care about. They deleted it. While it decreased the amount of content on their site, it increased their overall content quality.

Traffic spikes are not always good news

When they initially started creating forced backlinks in their infographics, they could see their traffic increase. They saw some spikes. Their general thought was more traffic is good.

When they experienced the Google penalty, they realized how wrong they were. Some traffic spikes are bad news. Others are good news.

When your website traffic shows a sudden change, even if you’re experiencing a spike in organic search traffic, you must dig into the details and find out the root cause.

Lesson learned: There is a thing as bad traffic. Some traffic warns you of a problem.

Links from product embeds aren’t all bad

They just needed to make the embedded links optional. To allow the customer to decide if they do or do not deserve a backlink. While this did not cause any change to their levels of organic search traffic, it was necessary to resolve the Google penalty.

Boring works

Incremental continuous improvement seems repetitive and boring. A one percent tweak here, a two percent tweak there, but over time, you’ve tripled your organic search traffic and your lead flow.

It’s necessarily fun, but it delivers results.

Lesson learned: What I’ll call “infrastructure” is boring, and it matters. Both for your product and your SEO.

Figure out what to measure

The idea of measuring the amount of time required to complete an infographic did not occur to them on day one. This idea came up when they were looking for a metric to indicate to them how easy (or difficult) their product was to use.

Once they decided this metric possibly made sense, they determined their baseline, then through an iterative process, making improvements to the product to make this a little faster.

As they did so, the feedback from the users was positive, so they doubled down on this effort.

Lesson learned: What you measure matters.

Teach your coworkers well

They created “The Playbook”, which is a compendium of the combined knowledge they’ve accumulated over time. The playbook is written by them, for them.

Marketing employees are required to add chapters to the playbook as they learn new skills and methods.

Its primary purpose is to bring new team members up to speed quickly, and it also serves as a historical record of what did and did not work.

One important aspect of continuous improvement is for new people to avoid suggesting experiments that previously failed.

Additionally (and I love this), every month everyone in marketing gives Nadya an outline of what they’re learning and what they’re improving on.

Their marketing stack

While their marketing stack is not essential to understanding their processes, I find it useful to understand what software tools a marketing organization uses, and for what. So here is theirs. This is not a list of what they’ve used and abandoned over time, but rather a list of what they use now.

• Analytics: Google Analytics and Mixpanel
• Customer communications: Intercom
• Link analysis and building: Ahrefs
• Link building outreach: Mailshake
• Project management: Trello
• General purpose: G Suite

In closing

To me, what Nadya has done at Venngage is a case study in how to do SEO right, and most of doing it right are not technical SEO work.

• Help senior management understand that some things that are not typically thought of as SEO (website design for example) can have serious SEO implications.
• Get senior management buy in to include these non-SEO functions in your SEO efforts.
• Understand what very few basic metrics matter for your company, and how you measure them.
• Distribute required SEO work through as many people as reasonably possible. Include people whose job functions are not necessarily SEO related (writers, designers, UI/UX, and more).
• Test and measure everything.
• Win big through a continuous stream of small incremental improvements.

Venngage has surely lead by example and all the guidelines and pointers shared above can surely help your organization implement its search for increased sales.

Kevin Carney is the Founder and CEO of the boutique link building agency Organic Growth. 

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IAB Europe, in partnership with IAB Tech Lab, announced Thursday new technical specifications for its second iteration of the Transparency & Consent Framework (TCF v2.0), designed to facilitate GDPR and ePrivacy Directive compliance for ad tech vendors.

The new specifications are currently available for public comment over the next 30 days.

Why we should care

IAB Europe’s TCF offers companies a framework with which companies can manage GDPR-approved consent collection from users and site visitors. The new version takes into account feedback from publishers for more granular controls among the requests. With more explicit terms and practices outlined in TCF v2.0, publishers and vendors have access to deeper knowledge and control when collecting and managing personal data. The framework provides more intuitive solutions and resources so that publishers, tech vendors and advertisers can more easily meet the transparency and consent requirements of GDPR.

Google, which has not signed on to the initial TCF, has that it would officially integrate this next version of the framework as a recognized TCF vendor after the release. The parties said they have been collaborating on the revision.

“Google is actively contributing to the different TCF work-tracks, both on the IAB Europe and the IAB Tech Lab sides, and have said they will announce the timing of their integration once Version 2.0 of the TCF is out in the market,” Townsend Feehan, CEO of IAB Europe, told MarTech Today in February.

We have reached out to Google for an update. In January, Google was hit with a 50 million euro penalty ($56.8 million) for not being transparent enough about the use of personal information and for not obtaining specific consent for ad-targeting purposes under GDPR.

Key changes in TCF v2.0

The updated framework is intended to provide consumers and publishers with more transparency and control over consenting to and collecting personal data, IAB Europe said. Key changes include:

• Extending the original purposes for processing personal data from five to twelve to provide more in-depth context.
• Users’ ability to expressly indicate the “right to object” to a vendor collecting and processing their data.
• Increased control in consenting to data processing, and how the vendors might use the data (including precise geolocation data).

This story first appeared on MarTech Today. For more on marketing technology, click here.

https://martechtoday.com/iab-europe-releases-new-gdpr-consent-framework-for-comment-233134

About The Author

Taylor Peterson is Third Door Media’s Deputy Editor, managing industry-leading coverage that informs and inspires marketers. Based in New York, Taylor brings marketing expertise grounded in creative production and agency advertising for global brands. Taylor’s editorial focus blends digital marketing and creative strategy with topics like campaign management, emerging formats, and display advertising.

DuckDuckGo could be your new default search engine if you want to focus on privacy and security. What it’s like using it nowadays?

You might have heard of DuckDuckGo in the past. Our first long post about it was back in 2016 with Rebecca Sentance trying out the new search engine for a week.

Three years later, many things have changed. More users are losing trust in big tech companies and privacy and security are more important than ever. How does DuckDuckGo fit in this change?

And how is the experience of switching into a new search engine nowadays?

DuckDuckGo in numbers

Over the last few months, DuckDuckGo has seen increased media coverage. Its growing stats among a growing conversation around online privacy make it more relevant than ever.

There are more than 30 million searches happening on DuckDuckGo every day. Its data indicates a constant growth. It’s currently the fourth largest search engine in the U.S. counting more than 1 billion searches every month all over the world.

Google is holding the reins of the market share with 88.5% of it, Bing is following with 6.12%, Yahoo! is third with 4.11% and DuckDuckGo is forthwith 0.99% of the market share.

It clearly has a long way to go to stand out as a serious competitor in the market share. However, it has already paved the way in a new kind of search engine that is serious about security and privacy. In fact, its mission is to set a new standard of trust online.

The search engine that doesn’t track you

One of the first things you notice when visiting DuckDuckGo, except for the search box, is the subheading “the search engine that doesn’t track you”.

DuckDuckGo was built as an alternative to Google and the big search engines that use tracking data to improve personalization. DuckDuckGo reassures its users that they don’t store their personal information. They don’t collect or share personal data. They are not storing your search history, which means that they are not able to sell this data to advertisers. Moreover, there’s no tracking in the private browsing mode, which sounds encouraging for everyone who is interested in a search engine that won’t track every single search.

What’s interesting is that DuckDuckGo wants to prove that they take privacy seriously. A click on their menu button at the homepage on ‘privacy simplified’ allows you to:

• Protect your data on every device
• Subscribe to their Privacy Crash Course to improve your understanding of online privacy
• Protect your devices by reading privacy guides
• Find out more about the importance of reduced tracking

Just recently, Google announced an expanded number of default search engines for users including DuckDuckGo for the first time. This was certainly a small win for the DuckDuckGo and also for people who want to focus on private searches.

It’s not surprising that more users are interested in learning more about their online privacy.

[Screenshot from DuckDuckGo’s traffic page.]

A closer look at DuckDuckGo’s stats indicates this growing interest in security and privacy. DuckDuckGo reached 10 million searches in one day back in 2015. It managed to reach 20 million searches in October 2018. In April 2019 it counts 38 million searches.

Making the most of DuckDuckGo

I’ve decided to try out DuckDuckGo after many years of using Google. The focus on online privacy along with the growing number of people switching to DuckDuckGo made it an intriguing choice.

The first impression seemed familiar. Simplicity and a minimal interface made the transition easy.

The fact that your searches are not personalized means that everyone can access the same results in a similar search. This seems to be a relief in the common pattern of the online filter bubbles that we’re used to be part of.

Another relief was the lack of endless ads before the actual search results. I’ve been used to the series of ads before the actual search results and the science of PPC from a professional perspective, but it was still a nice experience to find the direct results of my query. There was only one ad at the top of the search results, which I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing a similar limit to my Google results.

In addition to these, you can also save time from your searches by making the most of DuckDuckGo’s bangs. Bangs are shortcuts that allow you to search results on other sites. If you want to search for “SEO” on Search Engine Watch and you’re actually on DuckDuckGo’s homepage, all you need to do is to type ‘!searchenginewatch seo’

There are currently more than 12k bangs so you can search any of the big sites without visiting them in a different tab.

Finding the best search results — not everything is perfect

I must admit that the lack of personalization has its pros and cons. It is obviously reassuring to feel that you’re in control of your own data. However, you should also be prepared for the additional queries you might need to find the best results.

Forget queries like “cinemas near me” and “what’s playing”

The search results will be the same for everyone all over the world without detailed queries that could possibly help you get more personalized results.

Moreover, the actual search cannot compete with Google’s sophisticated search. After years of serving as the biggest search engine, there is a learning of semantics that leads to way better results compared to all other search engines.

This shouldn’t be a surprise and it should be clear when you’re jumping into DuckDuckGo that not everything will be the same.

There will also be an initial phase of learning the ropes of a new search experience, which is expected in every new tool and site.

Are these reasons enough to abandon DuckDuckGo? Not yet. It’s good to understand that it won’t replace Google anytime soon but this doesn’t mean that it doesn’t deserve a chance, especially if you’re serious about your online privacy when searching. I’ll personally give it a go knowing that if I can’t find a specific result, I can still use Google. I also enjoy their curated stories around privacy on their Twitter feed so it was an easy decision to follow them and stay up-to-date.

The choice is yours

The online world is changing. And we’re facing with numerous dilemmas when it comes to staying loyal to the big tech companies. As more data breaches and scandals show up, it’s up to us to decide whether we want to keep personalization or not.

There’s no right or wrong answer.

Google is certainly enjoying the success of the big search giant with a large index and search features that keep us hooked with along the numerous services we use on a daily basis. However, it’s refreshing to feel that we still have alternative options. Whether we use them or not, it’s up to us.

What’s important is to be conscious of your decision and your online privacy. The more informed we are, the better our online experience.

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A recent survey found that while 76% of marketers said brand awareness is a KPI for them, only 9% will focus on Digital PR in 2019.

IAB Tech Lab has begun the process of replacing VPAID (Video Player Ad Interface Definition) with SIMID (Secure Interactive Media Interface Definition) specifications to support interactive video ads and give publishers more control over their video ads offerings.

Why we should care

The new SIMID specifications will enable a “player-centric” model that gives playback control to the player itself — providing publishers more control over the user experience and the videos that run on their pages. With server-side ad insertion (SSAI) support, SIMID will apply to all platforms including mobile and OTT.

Before SIMID, publishers were reliant on VPAID, an outdated specification that was originally designed for creating interactive ads but had been adapted for other use cases that were outside of its intended purpose. “This gave rise to significant problems with trust, transparency and creative freedom — all of which SIMID will resolve,” said IAB Tech Lab.

“SIMID meets the needs of a number of our publisher partners to support an interactive ad format that offers more control, while providing a flexible framework for building innovative ad creatives,” said Google group product manager Peentoo Patel.

More on the news

• IAB Tech Lab is accepting public comments on the new SIMID specifications until May 24.
• Along with the roll-out of SIMID, IAB Tech Lab is releasing an updated VAST 4.2 template that will support SIMID.
• When used together with OMID and VAST, SIMID will offer ad verification vendors more insight into how video ads perform.

This story first appeared on MarTech Today. For more on marketing technology, click here.

About The Author

Amy Gesenhues is Third Door Media’s General Assignment Reporter, covering the latest news and updates for Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs.com, SoftwareCEO.com, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy’s articles.

Tough competition on the ecommerce market makes retailers continuously search for new ideas to improve web stores’ UX. Optimizing the product page is one of the key areas in this quest for enhancements.

We reviewed the best practices of ecommerce leaders and success stories of smaller merchants, and came up with three hacks that make any product page convert more visitors into customers.

1. Optimize product descriptions

A good product description is a top factor influencing customers’ desire to purchase. The problem is customers want to get answers to their questions, but they don’t want to read a lot. Average web-surfers give a web page no more than 15 seconds to capture their attention. If a product description fails to meet this deadline, it fails to convert.

Customers think about different aspects of a product: Some are interested in materials, some are more concerned about durability. To make a product page convert well, you have to strike a balance between being informative and brief. Here are the best practices in product description derived from the success of market leaders:

• Start with a unique value proposition: A brief product description that welcomes a potential shopper must clearly explain what is so special about this item. A selling product page doesn’t speak about features, it shows what particular benefits customers get when they buy the item.
• Avoid visual overload: Structure key information using headers and collapsible sections to save space on the page. This makes product pages more transparent and interactive, as well as minimizes the time required to get the key ideas.

The screenshot below shows how Oliver implements these principles on their product pages. They hide the detailed information about product features, materials and delivery options in expandable sections.

Mulberry went a step further and combined tabs for Description, Details, Material, and Size Charts with pop-ups for Delivery and Returns. The result? All types of customers get excessive information about the product without reloads and scrolling.

The case of The Sims 3 manufacturers also proved that clarity and order drive conversion. They tested six versions of the “game launcher,” all of which had particular benefits, simpler design, and lesser information. As a result, conversion increased up to 128%.

2. Give people more images to describe items

Human beings are very good at processing visual information, much better than at reading. This means pictures and colors on product pages create the first impression of items and thus are even more important than descriptions.

• Size matters: A product image is the only way for a customer to feel the product. So make sure that shoppers can zoom in to examine the product in detail (its fabric and tiny parts). These are not just words. Larger images helped Skinner Auctions by 63%. Skinner Auctions scaled their catalog images from 250 pixels to 350 pixels. And what’s even better? The amount of bidding visitors who actually filled out all the online forms required to place a bid rose to a huge 329%.
• Angles matter as well: Surprisingly, it is a common mistake to show the product only facing forward. Customers want to see the interior pockets of a purse, the back of a dress, and the outsole of a shoe. A well-selling page features the product from different angles or even provides a video showing how it looks in motion. Look at ASOS, they allow you both to inspect the skirt’s texture and buttons and to watch a short video clip.

• Customers want to try on items: Online shoppers are concerned about how items will suit real them rather than professional models. Many successful web stores show their products on people with different body shapes. This helps customers imagine themselves with items and make purchase decisions easier and faster.
• We believe people more than models: Amazon and ModCloth ask their customers to share personal photos in the product reviews. Such a gallery is included in the product description to show customers how items look in everyday life and make the product page more trustworthy.

3. Dialog with customers

Do online retailers have fewer opportunities to talk to their customers than brick-and-mortar do? Not really. Though communication between web stores and shoppers doesn’t happen face to face, merchants can still say everything customers want to hear and ask for everything they need to know.

Add an FAQ and tips to the description to clarify any doubts. An FAQ has several benefits as it:

• Answers the questions of the customers that are already on the page.
• Attracts new visitors to product pages from the browser’s search results.
• Helps keep product descriptions short.

Apart from a full-fledged FAQ, you can try short tips as RollerSkateNation.com did. Their sincere advice was not oriented on increasing sales directly. In fact, it showed customers how to replace roller states for kids less frequently by buying larger items and wearing double socks. Customers felt taken care of and increased purchases by 69%.

The position of the tips and the FAQ section is also important. In the above case study, RollerSkateNation managed to further boost revenue by 99% by placing their hint below the product description. Customers had enough time to process key details and then got really useful advice as a surprise.

Use reviews to build trust. When it comes to making a purchase decision, reviews are almost as important as product descriptions and prices. Most shoppers look for reviews and, at best, they can read credible feedback right on the product page. This way customers don’t have to leave the web store and are less likely to choose another vendor. The case study of Express Watches proves that a well-designed Reviews section can increase conversion by 59%.What does this “well-designed” mean? The product page should let shoppers sort and rate reviews, add images and stars. To show even more credibility, you can pick some reviews and put them forward as testimonials.

And for sure be careful with negative reviews. Try to express your professionalism and care. In fact, a well-processed negative review can be even more convincing than a dozen positive ones.

Ask customers how to improve conversion. Small details, like words and button colors, influence the success of product pages. Though A/B tests make attempts to polish the web store less risky, don’t be shy to ask customers directly about their impression. For example, Amazon introduced a new feedback feature that shows how shoppers rate the size of the item.

By the way, this is a great CX feature per se that allows customers to quickly understand which size to take without exploring the size guide. But now pay extra attention to their poll about the utility of the feature. Why not ask customers if you can do it?

What’s next?

However good best practices are, they work well nine times out of ten. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that your case isn’t the tenth one. Trust seals normally improve conversion as they make the website look trustworthy. But Icouponblog managed to increase their conversion by 400% by removing a security badge. What does this mean for you? The theory is worth reading, but real results appear only after you test and try. Devote enough time to validate your ideas, and you will definitely find the way to a high-converting product page.

Maria Marinina is a Digital Marketing Manager at Iflexion.

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“This year will be all about AI.” “And don’t forget podcasts!” “And blockchain, live video and social commerce.” Every marketer has been a part of this meeting of roundtable buzzword BINGO. Everyone around the table suggests investing in a different arena of the market’s most buzzworthy tech. All you have to do now is buy all these industry-leading technologies, give them all your “big data,” and you’ll immediately set your brand apart to lock in that sweet raise when the revenue comes rolling in. Easy.

In reality, you leave the meeting with more ideas than executable options, a list of technologies to invest in (which may not fit your marketing budget), and a mild case of “what the heck just happened.” Lucky for you, you’re not alone.

During his session at MarTech West in San Jose, Jason Mestrits, senior manager of data science and analytics at Nordstrom, shed light on the challenges facing marketers looking to follow a data-driven strategy. While tactics like nano-influencers and social commerce sound great to stakeholders (who love buzzwords), it’s important to remember these tactics are nothing but fluff without diagnosing data and creating a methodical data-driven strategy to back them up.

Mestrits outlined a few key steps marketers can move toward to ensure an effective data-driven operation is in place.

Define use-case data strategy and technology that scales

The best data-driven marketers follow a use-case-based strategy that takes data, analytics, insights, integrations, and puts them on top of the corporate policies in-house. This means marketing needs to ensure platforms/partners they are investing in are ready to scale. It’s tempting to select the least expensive platform or one that supports only the current need, but considering the resources required to implement a platform, it’s often more cost-effective to select a long-term, cross-team solution.

Select the right data resource platforms

Mestrits recommends a customer data platform (CDP) over a data management platform (DMP). While a DMP simply collects, categorizes and segments data for marketers to target customers, CDPs go further by gathering data from across sources to help marketers create customized content.

Segment and target your audiences

Third-party data tends to be easiest to obtain because marketers can simply purchase it. Meanwhile, first-party data holds the most value because it comes directly from the customers themselves. Marketers should overlay both sets, starting with first-party behavioral data, to develop the most effective strategies.

Maintain high-quality data

Data-driven marketing is only as effective as the quality of the data used, underlining the importance of good data hygiene. Quality control measures, such as alerts for outdated lists and ongoing checks for duplicate customers are some easy, proactive steps to ensure good data practices. It’s also important to avoid silos and practice centralized data hygiene across marketing teams to prevent conflicting records.

Track the right metrics

To ensure a data-driven marketing strategy is effective, measure it at multiple levels not just at the channel or product. This is where a cross-team solution can prove its worth, showing that it can meet the specific needs and objectives of multiple departments. Start by deciding what outcomes to measure, and how to drive the measurement conversation throughout the organization. Marketers sometimes feel that they need to track every metric, but it’s better to do so selectively. Focus on KPIs that incentivize target behaviors, engagement, conversion, loyalty or another goal like efficiency.

Long story short, the buzzwords aren’t going away anytime soon so marketers who champion a methodical data-driven marketing strategy will own conversations and limit playing buzzword bingo in their marketing planning sessions.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Kyle Henderick is Senior Director of Client Services at Yes Marketing, a single solution provider who delivers relevant communications across all channels for mid and enterprise-sized companies. Kyle is responsible for helping major clients implement new programs, processes, and data-driven strategies to create campaigns that truly drive revenue. With a passion for technology implementation and a background in database, email, web, and social media marketing, Kyle turns his real-world experience into executable tactics to help clients see an incremental lift in revenue, subscriber engagement, and customer retention. A lover of all things Chicago, when Kyle is not reading up on latest marketing practices or focusing on improving client programs, he can be found enjoying the city’s great restaurants or wearing his heart on his sleeve while rooting for all Chicago-based sports teams. A curious individual willing to try any and every food that does not include raw onions, he is always looking for exciting dining options and new adventures around the city.

If content is queen, and the critical role SEO plays a role of bridging the two to drive growth, then there’s no question as to whether or not keyword research is important.

However, connecting the dots to create content that ranks well can be difficult. What makes it so difficult? How do you go from a target keyword phrase and write an article that is unique, comprehensive, encompasses all the major on-page SEO elements, touches the reader, and isn’t structured like the “oh-so-familiar” generic SEO template?

There’s no one size fits all approach! However, there is a simple way to support any member of your editorial, creative writing, or content team in shaping up what they need in order to write SEO-friendly content, and that’s an SEO content brief.

Key benefits of a content brief:

• Productivity and efficiency – A content brief clearly outlines expectation for the writer resulting in reduced revisions
• Alignment – Writers understand the intent and goals of the content
• Quality – Reduces garbage in, garbage out.

So the rest of this article will cover how we actually get there & we’ll use this very article as an example:

• Keyword research
• Topical expansion
• Content/SERP (search engine results page) analysis
• Content brief development
• Template and tools

Any good editor will tell you great content comes from having a solid content calendar with topics planned in advance for review and release at a regular cadence. To support topical analysis and themes as SEOs we need to start with keyword research.

Start with keyword research: Topic, audience, and objectives

The purpose of this guide isn’t to teach you how to do keyword research. It’s to set you up for success in taking the step beyond that and developing it into a content brief. Your primary keywords serve as your topic themes, but they are also the beginning makings of your content brief, so try to ensure you:

• Spend time understanding your target audience and aligning their goals to your keywords. Many call this keyword intent mapping. Rohan Ayyr provides an excellent guide to matching keywords to intent in his article, ‘How to move from keyword research to intent research’.
• Do the keyword research in advance, it will allow writers and editors the freedom to move things around and line it up with trending topics.

How does all this help in supporting a content brief?

You and your team can get answers to the key questions mentioned below.

• What will they write about? Primary keywords serve as the topic in your content brief.
• Who is the intended audience? Keyword intent helps unearth what problem the user is trying to solve, helping us understand who they are, and what they need.

Now with keywords as our guide to overall topical themes, we can focus on the next step, topical expansion.

Topical expansion: Define key points and gather questions

Writers need more than keywords, they require insight into the pain points of the reader, key areas of the topic to address and most of all, what questions the content should answer. This too will go into your content brief.

We’re in luck as SEOs because there is no shortage of tools that allow us to gather this information around a topic.

For example, let’s say this article focuses on “SEO writing”. There are a number of ways to expand on this topic.

• Using a tool like SEMRush’s topic research tool, you can take your primary keyword (topic), and get expanded/related topics, a SERP snapshot and questions in a single view. I like this because it covers what many other tools do separately. Ultimately it supports both content expansion & SERP analysis at the same time.

• Use keyword suggestion tools like KeywordTool.io or Ubersuggest to expand the terms combined with Google search results to quickly view potential topics.

• Use Answerthepublic.com to get expanded terms and inspirational visuals.

You’ve taken note of what to write about, and how to cover the topic fully. But how do we begin to determine what type of content and how in-depth it should be?

Content and SERP analysis: Specifying content type and format

Okay, so we’re almost done. We can’t tell writers to write unique content if we can’t specify what makes it unique. Reviewing the competition and what’s being displayed consistently in the SERP is a quick way to assess what’s likely to work. You’ll want to look at the top ten results for your primary topic and collect the following:

• Content type – Are the results skewed towards a specific type of content? (For example, in-depth articles, infographics, videos, or blog posts)
• Format – Is the information formatted as a guide? A how-to? Maybe a list?
• Differentiation points – What stands out about the top three results compared to the rest?

Content brief development: Let’s make beautiful content together

Now you’re ready to prepare your SEO content brief which should include the following:

• Topic and objective – Your topic is your primary keyword phrase. Your objective is what this content supposed to accomplish.
• Audience and objective – Based on your keyword intent mapping, describe who the article is meant to reach.
• Topical coverage – Top three related keyword phrases from your topical expansion.
• Questions to answer – Top three to five from topical expansion findings. Ensure they support your related keyword phrases as well.
• Voice, style, tone – Use an existing content/brand style guide.
• Content type and format – Based on your SERP analysis.
• Content length – Based on SERP Analysis. Ensure you’re meeting the average across the top three results based on content type.
• Deadline – This is only pertinent if you are working solo, otherwise, consult/lean on your creative team lead.

[Note: If/when using internally, consider making part of the content request process, or a template for the editorial staff. When using externally be sure to include where the content will be displayed, format/output, specialty editorial guidance.]

Template and tools

Want to take a shortcut? Feel free to download and copy my SEO content brief template, it’s a Google doc.

Other content brief templates/resources:

If you want to streamline the process as a whole, MarketMuse provides a platform that manages the keyword research, topic expansion, provides the questions, and manages the entire workflow. It even allows you to request a brief, all in one place.

I only suggest this for larger organizations looking to scale as there is an investment involved. You’d likely also have to do some work to integrate into your existing processes.

Jori Ford is Sr. Director of Content & SEO at G2Crowd. She can also be found on Twitter .

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In the summer of 1956, 10 scientists and mathematicians gathered at New Hampshire’s Dartmouth College to brainstorm a new concept assistant professor John McCarthy called “artificial intelligence.” According to the original proposal for the research project, McCarthy — along with fellow organizers from Harvard, Bell Labs, and IBM — wanted to explore the idea of programming machines to use language and solve problems for humans while improving over time.

It would be years before these lofty objectives were met, but the summer workshop is credited with launching the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Sixty years later, cognitive scientists, data analysts, UX designers, and countless others are doing everything those pioneering scientists hoped for — and more. With deep learning, companies can make extraordinary progress in industries ranging from cybersecurity to marketing. It’s just a matter of knowing where to start.

Think of AI as a machine-powered version of mankind’s cognitive skills. These machines have the ability to interact with humans in a way that feels natural, and just like humans they can grasp complex concepts and extract insights from the information they’re given. Artificial intelligence can understand, learn, interpret, and reason. The difference is that AI can do all of these things faster and on a much bigger scale.

“In the era of big data, we have the need to mine all of that information, and humans can no longer do it alone,” says Mark Simpson, VP of offering management at IBM Watson Marketing. “AI has the capacity to create richer, more personalized digital experiences for consumers, and meet customers’ increasingly high brand expectations.”

The knowledge companies stand to gain by using AI seems to have no bounds. In healthcare, medical professionals are applying it to analyze patient data, explain lab results, and support busy physicians. In the security industry, AI helps firms detect potential threats like malicious software in real time. Marketers, meanwhile, can use AI to synthesize data and identify key audience and performance insights, thus freeing them up to be more strategic and creative with their campaigns.

There’s something else AI is very good at, and that’s improving the relationship between companies and consumers. “Even in its earliest iteration, AI helped companies better understand how to be human,” says Brian Solis, author and principal analyst at Altimeter, the digital analyst group at brand and marketing consultancy Prophet. “The irony is that it took this very advanced technology to make them think differently about how they should communicate with their customers.”

Over the past 50 years, Solis says, advances like speech technology, automated attendants, virtual assistants, and websites have opened a chasm between companies and customer engagement while also multiplying consumer touchpoints. But AI has the potential to close that gap.

By helping marketers collect data, identify new customer segments, and create a more unified marketing and analytics system, AI can scale customer personalization and precision in ways that didn’t exist before. Connecting customer data from sources like websites and social media enables companies to craft marketing messages that are more relevant to consumers’ current needs. AI can deliver an ad experience that is more personalized for each user, shapes the customer journey, influences purchasing decisions, and builds brand loyalty.

IBM’s Watson Marketing is leading the charge with a platform that capitalizes on all that AI has to offer. Products like Customer Experience Analytics lets marketers visualize the customer journey and identify areas where consumers might be experiencing friction. Companies get a more complete view of the customer journey, which they can then optimize to improve customer engagement and conversion rates. Since it’s delivered through a single, unified interface, IBM Watson Customer Experience Analytics makes gaining actionable intelligence a seamless process for brands.

According to market research firm TechNavio, the AI market in the US is expected to grow at a compound actual growth rate of about 50% through 2021. In its 2017 report Artificial Intelligence: The Next Digital Frontier? the McKinsey Global Institute urges companies not to delay “advancing their digital journeys” — especially when it comes to leveraging AI. “It’s those who understand how to use AI in new ways, to create new mindsets and paradigms, that will instill a competitive advantage that wasn’t there before,” Solis says.

We’ve entered the age of deep learning, and with human guidance AI is finally reaching its true potential. Today, the technology McCarthy and his colleagues dreamed about in 1956 takes the form of AI platforms like Watson Marketing. And now is the right time to truly harness the power of AI and put it to work for business success.

Find out more about how Watson Marketing can uncover insights to help you better understand your customers. Read the guide.

About The Author

IBM Watson Marketing provides cognitive recommendations designed to help marketers understand and anticipate customer behaviors. Uncover actionable insights and deliver personalized experiences that customers want and value. Build relationships that drive engagement seamlessly across all channels. Make every touchpoint an opportunity to engage customers as individuals. Insider Studios is the branded content studio for Insider Inc., the parent company of INSIDER and Business Insider.