Using Keyword Research for Product Development

"Unprecedented success." That's what the company is calling a new product launch this January that I discovered as an opportunity in keyword research back in September 2017. Back then I wasn't even TRYING to find the next big product; I was doing some keyword research in Moz Keyword Explorer to optimize a buying guide. Thankfully, buying guides cover a broad range of queries around a product category. I tend to start with a head term and let the "Keyword Opportunities" guide me on long-tail terms that might be a worthwhile ranking opportunity.

While I usually log and analyze keywords that have some search volume aside from "n/a" and a relatively low difficulty and high organic CTR (color scales make this easier for humans to spot in large keyword lists!), this product opportunity was sitting near the top when sorting by largest search volume, with monthly searches ranging from 1701-2900 searches per month (in the pictured March 2019 analysis it was the second listed, now at 2901-4300). When I gave those numbers to the product manager, they didn't need any comparison to know that seemed like a good find. What made it even better was that when I pulled up the SERP to analyze the competition there was almost no competitor actually offering it -- one small niche shop and then the big retail competitors own site search pages with no truly relevant results.

Like organic optimization, new product development can take a lot of time. Sometimes in that time, trends change and interest starts dropping off. You don't want your production time to put you in the downtrend. While Moz Keyword Explorer doesn't show trends, keeping keyword lists, exporting them, and saving them down with the Date Analyzed allows you to create trend graphs. To try to get way ahead of consumer interest, we now do regular reports on social media insights and influencer requests to help identify trends before they've really hit general consumers.

Now I've encouraged (and, of course, trained) the product development team to try to do the same in Keyword Explorer to check against new product ideas they are considering. To understand how these new opportunities measure up, comparing them to a similar term in the category that we are already optimized for helps. Google Ads can bring in some additional insight on those keywords and possibly show a trend if it has remained in an ad group for a while.

Selecting the Right Influencer Campaigns - Part 3 of Influencer Marketing for Brands

Working in an industry where the products offered usually requires a professional installation or at least a very savvy DIYer, my ability to reach out to influencers is limited. While I have ideas to find an influential person that is into entertaining to redo a wet bar or upgrade from a bar cart, without the budget and resources to provide the contracting and installation, I have to wait for the right opportunity to present itself. Unfortunately, a lot of not-so-great opportunities do instead. So it can take a lot to find the best influencer campaign for the brand and understand how to value it when some requests are more than $10k in product due to the high value of the brand's items.

 With budgets tightening and more requests coming in, we need to be selective. So how do you do that with some level of certainty beyond just intuition? When preparing for a meeting with the C-suite I knew the "it depends on the project each time" response wouldn't fly, so I used the process I've applied in prioritizing digital projects in previous roles to create a "vetting system" for our influencer requests. Using this project prioritization matrix guide from the Office of Quality Improvement at University of Wisconsin-Madison , our team that selects influencer campaigns established criteria to rank the project requests. All criteria is based on giving it a 0, 3, 6, or 9 score, which makes structuring your criteria difficult at times. For instance, when deciding if the request includes a priority product of ours, I set up that 0 is not a priority category or product and is something commonly requested (as in we've already done several campaigns around it), 3 is a priority product but is commonly requested, 6 is not a priority product but is not commonly requested, 9 is a priority product and is not commonly requested. Other criteria based around our goals, like image quality to ensure we will have content we will want to reuse and likelihood of getting additional coverage from third-parties (the influencer has a history of doing good PR for themselves, getting back links, etc), and how well we can pull off the project, such as the level of effort going into the project based on timing, scope, etc. We also put engagements and followers into one of the 0,3,6,9 rankings as well, but you will see how these numbers relate to establishing value more so.

 While that all helps to determine which influencer project to prioritize when you can only do a few in a year, how do you know how much value to give them? We took to our own social media accounts to understand the value of a post. While many influencers might go by a $1,000 per 100k followers, we know from our own accounts that not everyone who follows you sees your organic posts, so we got an average percentage of accounts that follow us reached per post, ~30%. Then we analyzed our typical cost per impression (CPM) on boosted posts to assign a dollar value. So if an influencer has 250k followers, while they'd say the should get $2,500 in value, we'd adjust that their organic post would only reach 75k followers and apply our CPM (let's say $5 per 1k) to see what that value equates to - only $375. Then AVERAGE that with the standard influencers use. It doesn't stop there. Because we always ask for imagery to use, we also pad in a typical royalty-free image rights cost for each individual VIGNETTE (not image if they are all the same products/space with just different angles or propping) we'd receive. That'd be the retail value budget we'd give a project that we decided to prioritize.

I had us test this against Kylie Jenner as the last I had heard she was charging $1m per Instagram post when she had 111m followers (her following was over 132m at the time of writing this though). Applying the $1k per 100k followers, she's undervaluing herself slightly because she'd technically be getting $1,110,000 at that following count (whether influencers actually get $1k per 100k is questionable but that's a standard request). However, when accounting that only about 30% of her followers might see a post then we'd say 33,300,000 impressions X $5 per 1k impressions is only $166,500. By then averaging the two, we'd be okay (but not like we would) with valuing a post from her at ~$640,000. I doubt she allows royalty-free use of her images so the extra ~$300 wouldn't be added into that either. 

Note that I titled this selecting the right influencer campaign. While someone might be a great influencer, the project just might not be a fit for the brand at the time. (For us, priority products change as part of our promotional plans, and resources to execute on the campaign for a larger scope or shorter timeline might not be available). As indicated throughout this series, I wish some influencers would understand that a little better when facing rejection. It really isn't personal, and I think this matrix and system for valuing the project helps to take some of that personal bias out of it and provide a tangible way to communicate the process to executives.

Measuring Your Influencer Marketing - Part 2 of Influencer Marketing for Brands

Before we can talk about finding the right influencers, we need to know what we want to accomplish with these types of campaigns and how to measure your accomplishments.

What's your goal for influencer marketing?

Generate awareness, drive sales, build loyalty, create an advantage over your competitors? Here's one that you might not immediately consider, but should be a major key for partaking in influencer marketing - generating content that you otherwise might not be able to due to budget, talent, or limited resources.

And what about product improvement or development? These are people tuned into what is trending, so their feedback can help your product research. A case study presented in Adweek's Sound Influencer Marketing Webinar indicated a company that had a lot of success sharing product information under an NDA (which I'll get to in a future post) before it hit the market to get useful feedback. While I haven't run any specific research, the insights from what influencers are asking for and feedback to products I share that might work for their project but haven't yet hit the market has been very useful to our product development. You don't have to pick just one of these goals, and different influencer campaigns might focus on one goal while others do another.

As for that competitive advantage, you might consider (but not really measure) how by choosing to go with an influencer you have boxed out the opportunity for your competition to be present in that space. Not a great strategy, but a nice added value to consider as you plan campaigns and what products you might push.

How will you measure your goal?

Reach/Impressions

Reach, impressions, and views make for an easy metric to request. Unfortunately, most everyone who has completed my influencer request form confuses hits and impressions with their follower count. Anyone with a social account knows that your individual posts do not reach your entire audience, not even with some advertising dollars behind it. Requesting screenshots (and some of the more professional influencers do this without even asking) could help keep people more honest, but gaming the system is still a problem with these metrics, as mentioned in Tara Hunt's post Impressions, Reach, Views and Clicks are BS Metrics and I touched on back in 2012 specifically tied to some Facebook advertising I was doing. While Tara Hunt speaks to generating leads based on quality instead of quantity, these are universal metrics, as she puts it "everyone is in on the view/click/fraud scandal," that make them easier to measure and benchmark, especially if your goal is awareness. But consider some of the less easy ways you can indicate awareness and even loyalty.

Since starting influencer marketing, predominantly with campaigns on Instagram, our followership grew 340% in a year - that is continued brand awareness potentially leading to loyalty of highly engaged followers we've acquired. But not all of that growth is completely attributed to influencers as social ads and a strategic theme played a role, which makes it a bit tougher to attribute following increases and engagement. It's great though seeing a whole bunch of new followers in your notifications to see shortly before an influencer posted something.

Website Traffic and Conversions

Although traffic can go back to some of that scandal mentioned in the previous metrics,  pairing it with other metrics, like bounce rate and pages per session can help determine quality traffic. However, this isn't as easy to measure as asking for a screenshot of social post insights. While you could rely on digging through your referral traffic, it'd be better to add query parameters to specifically track the clicks as part of an influencer campaign, because (hopefully) your influencer has already talked about you in the past so you want to differentiate that from the sponsored content. As I've found, even some bloggers that have been in the business for some time don't understand query parameters for tracking the links from their site, so it requires coaching here. Try not to dictate how they mention your brand for authenticity, so give them a few links, like your homepage, specific products, or categories with proper link tracking for your analytics tool.

Text link tracking is already established in an affiliate program. If you are able to work with well established industry content publishers through affiliate, like Buzzfeed or industry publications, you'll get much more traffic than a personal blog or social profile. The problem with going more towards an affiliate method to accomplish this is you won't likely get rights to their content for your use beyond sharing. Additionally, the downfall of clicks is that changes in the way cookies are collected, device switching, and omnichannel strategies mean you can easily lose track of a user after their initial visit, especially when the visit is initiated from a mobile app, like Instagram, and if your conversions typically happen on desktop. 

Remember to understand what goal you want to accomplish with each campaign and balance building those quality relationships Tara Hunt talked about with the massive reach of a popular content creator, because building a relationship with an influencer really does both for your brand.

Influencer Marketing for Brands

Over the past year as I've developed an influencer strategy and process for my company, I felt as though the only advice I could find were blog posts coaching potential influencers on how to get started. When I did come across pieces on brands using influencer marketing, they seemed as though they were written by influencers (highly likely as many influencers got their start in blogging). These pieces only explained all the benefits of influencer marketing and made influencers out to be golden children - what a privilege it is for a brand to work with influencers and that the brand should make all sorts of concessions for these opportunities. These types of pieces seem to fuel some entitlement that exists within the community that gives the really good influencers a very bad name. With multiple requests from different influencers per week, its not like there isn't another opportunity for the brand right around the inbox.

While it surely takes a load of confidence to be able to be successful as an influencer, at a company with higher end items and in an industry that is driven by projects that take at least weeks but usually months to plan and complete, the company has so much to lose. I can't treat every opportunity as a golden child, and they definitely aren't all so grand.

The Dreaded Email Blast Template

I imagine many people who work in influencer marketing have been around media relations in one way or another and know the first rule of that is to personalize your emails to the reporter. The same goes for influencer marketing requests (whether influencer to brand or vice versa). Influencers failing to swap out brand's name in their template is a clear indicator they don't know the brand. How can you be a brand advocate in that case? In many instances, the ones that know the least about the brand have been the most persistent. When one who had failed to swap another brand's name in their email kept persisting (three or four somewhat begging emails), I was a bit more blunt in saying it would not be happening versus my usual, kinder "not at this time" response. Maybe should have told them about their failing to simply indicate they even knew who they were actually talking to so they would see the fault was their own and not make that mistake with others. Instead I got one more email back declaring how rude I was and that they'd never be purchasing anything from the company (this time actually using our company name!). Let's be real; they didn't intend to purchase anything anyways. That was one of my first sour responses and a very real look into some of that entitlement that is out there.

Minors

It can be hard to tell who you are talking to sometimes, especially through DMs. After scrolling a feed for quite some time to determine the authenticity, I came across a personal post that revealed the account owner and person requesting product was 14. While my company has decided we wouldn't partner with minors, your company might benefit from that. Keep in mind that negotiating and contracting would require some special treatment in those cases. Consider if that is something you want to do and then watch out for those cases. If you also don't want to go down that path, add a clause in your agreements that the person signing it represents they are of legal age.

The Ridiculous Ask

My first "big girl" job I was exposed to the "your emergency is not my priority" phrase, and it has always stuck with me. Unfortunately, we can't always live that way in our work life, but for those asking for free (again high dollar value items!) product with some outrageous timeline, I definitely take that phrase to heart. Eventually, I put a disclaimer in our partnership inquiry form that any request without a minimum of a month before the influencer needs product will not be considered. Many times our items ship freight, which when shipping across country requires about two weeks for delivery, and that doesn't include the time to review the request, check sources, and then negotiate terms. I do make exceptions for media that requires filming as they clearly have strict deadlines, but sometimes we just can't make those happen either.

The Third-Party Influence

The really good influencers get shares and mentions from publications. You will see that they regularly are selected as a contributor or know how to pitch to the media to get included. The not-so-great influencers will try to bank on a third-party to ramp up their reach numbers. Sometimes this comes in the form of claiming they will be doing a take over of another account that has a larger following, are working with a reporter for this specific project, or are a founder of a company and will be using those company accounts to push their personal project. These COULD be really good opportunities, but you must tread lightly. Have the agreement signed off by any account owners claimed in the accounts posts will be shared. Set terms that you will be happy with if the publication falls through or have a clause for payback of some sort if that were to happen.

Briefly mentioned in all of these points, I note different ways to combat some of these issues in vetting and negotiating. First off, do you have a template for requests to get as many details as possible covered before going too far down a path? Secondly, are you putting together agreements? If not, well hang tight, because my next few posts will cover those topics!

What Has Changed in Digital Marketing the Past 5 Years?

After several years in highly technical roles (development and analytics implementation), I've had a good solid year and half back in the world of digital marketing and at a much greater scale (hello eCommerce with 30k+ SKUs and hundreds of category pages) than when I was doing a similar role for a healthcare system.

With this new experience, it has been quite fun resurrecting my blog and analyzing everything that has happened as predicted, totally changed, or didn't even exist from my previous posts 5 years ago. Let's have a little review.

The Four Vices of Social Media 

Unfortunately, nothing has changed here just even more of it happening and even worse.

The Great Native Advertising Debate 

You guys ... I'm quite certain I invented influencer marketing AND also helped Instagram's monetization strategy (ads started rolling out in November 2013 [my post was in January 2013] ... and I'm still waiting on my checks) all in this post. Since I am basically the founder of influencer marketing, be sure to check back to my blog for a series on just that.

Something that has changed quite a bit in the aspect of "native advertising," a term not really used much anymore (got to love trendy buzzwords everyone wants to optimize on that fall out), is that much of this in the publication space is now handled through affiliate marketing partnerships. Thus, I spun up a top-of-funnel affiliate channel strategy, which has opened up these opportunities for large digital publishers, like Buzzfeed and Clique Brands.

WDF*P*IDF ... WTF?: A lesson in search engine optimization

So much has changed with search rankings, and yet nothing really has. Google is always changing (a lot more on that in the next post analysis), and SEOs  are still always chasing those changes, freaking out over every whisper of an algorithm update. I'll get to the latest updates, but first, the social ranks I touched most on back in this post in 2013. 

Right there at the top was Google+. RIP. Additionally, Google Places for Business, which I recommended keeping updated, is now just Google My Business and has a much improved interface from the old days. Social factors still matter as part of an overall content strategy. Additionally, the keyword density formula referenced in my old post title is now pretty worthless. Don't worry about hammering in certain keywords over and over just make it useful for the user (more of that below and in the next post analysis).

For updates in the world of SEO, a lot has been tied to technical factors around speed, security, mobile accessibility. Most of which came with what was coined as Mobilegeddon. Other updates that focus on the importance of content, quality, and intent that Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird pushed we've seen meet these suggested guidelines from Google:

• E.A.T - expertise, authoritativeness, trust. 
• Y.M.Y.L - Your Money or Your Life. 

SEMRush has a great overview of those. Now let's review what has changed with search engine results pages (SERPs) with the next post review.

Oh Search, It Is A-Changing

I'd like to apologize for a terrible title. Clearly I was at a loss on that one. But yes, Google search was changing then and has changed so much more since then. 

Thanks to digital assistants, which were only starting to launch with Siri back in 2013, voice search has seen astronomical growth, especially as Google started outpacing Amazon earlier this year. With that Google is providing even more answers with its Knowledge Graph, because with voice search there is no SERP to present a bunch of links. The best we can get from a brand perspective is sometimes Google Home will send a link to your Home app to learn more. Where I made it sound so sunny for users that search was getting smarter and more efficient, as a digital marketer, it sucks. Google chooses your site links based on user intent. Google chooses to use meta descriptions or not based on user intent. The latter can be helpful for brands too, if content on your page speaks to a term you didn't optimize for in your meta description and is also why that keyword density formula is now BS. Google finds the best pages and serves up the best content within it. 

Ranking in 1st position means very little as local guides, answer boxes, carousels and other Knowledge Graph widgets trying to steer (and understand) user intent take up most of the SERP and add more links to reduce organic CTRs. 

As I've been weeding through the top ~2500 queries by page from September of last year to this, I'm seeing broad term clicks have completely disappeared. Go ahead and Google "bathtub." On desktop, I don't see any organic links "above the fold," instead see 8 possible ad clicks from PLAs and text ads then a local map and then position 1 which is followed by a "People Also Ask" widget. Broad match terms bring in high dollar ads.

All of this has caused everyone to become a content publisher (so hey, thanks for choosing to read my content!) vying for position 0. What is position 0 exactly? Go ahead and Google "what is a slipper bathtub" (voice search makes it so much more satisfying) and revel in all the position 0 glory. When my company's content is there, which it is at the time of posting, it's always a fun party trick to wow the executives and to keep my SEO responsibilities *wink*.

The Elusive ROI of Social Media

Is it just me or did I oversimplify that? I did. But back then it seemed like everyone struggled to measure social media impact beyond engagement rates, which have just continued to plummet organically on every social platform. It doesn't have to be that hard. 

Make sure you are consistently tagging the links you post with your appropriate tracking parameters. (In an upcoming post, I'll show you how to build an Excel spreadsheet to keep a structure for all your UTM parameters). Keep your paid campaign tracking separate of your organic, but understand that Facebook's product catalog can make this tough sometimes when tagging products in organic posts on Facebook and Instagram. If you have social share icons on your site (who doesn't?), use the UTM parameters to mark those as earned social shares for even more juicy data goodness.

Nowadays, everyone is struggling to measure the impact of influencer marketing. I've learned a lot of hard lessons coming up with an influencer strategy for project-based, high dollar value product campaigns. Save yourself those heartaches. Check back for a series on some standard operating procedures to consider, vetting influencers, negotiating agreements, and how to measure success.

The Elusive ROI of Social Media

Social media ROI doesn't have to be elusive. Seriously.

Google Analytics has recently made it even easier to measure it. I promise.

Rather than seeing traffic sources you can now see "Acquisitions." Upon clicking on that head to "Channels" where your view should default to the default channel grouping. These are your sources such as, organic search, direct traffic and what do you know SOCIAL!

When you click on the social grouping you will see this beautiful table below.

1. Set up your goals
2. Apply a value to each
3. Take your "goal value totals" - "your costs for social media (salary/rates for a community manager maybe, social ads, etc)"/"cost"

VOILA ... you have social media ROI!

Ok, Maybe It Isn't That Easy

Not in a bad way there is another factor that should be taken into account. Social sharing plays hugely into search engine optimization (SEO) [insert plug to post from a couple weeks ago about that exact topic] . From that default channel grouping you can review the same dashboard as above for your Organic Search and see how that also affects your goal values. This isn't to say social completely plays into your Organic Search, but it is a big driver.

AND we also have to think about the fact that someone may already be a customer, reached out on social media, had a pleasant experience and continues coming back (not necessarily through social channels) that can add to your ROI. Again, can't note that through Google Analytics, but I bet it happens. 

Who's with me that we should add an additional 20% to the values indicated above? Just kidding. Don't do that, but do be sure to mention to execs how SEO and brand/reputation building aspects of social media are valuable too!

Oh Search, It is A-Changing

Do you remember a time when you may have put in a search term like "rain bucket" and gotten search results that didn't necessarily speak to a bucket that catches rain but maybe one or the other? So then you try different words, variations on phrases, etc? And how about trying to just find a number to contact someone about buying a rain bucket? Oh how far search has come.

Search is Smarter

With technology like that which built Watson - the computer that defeated some champions at Jeopardy!, the way Google performs has changed too. First came the knowledge graph and just recently announced is Hummingbird. Which according to this piece in the New York Times, the changes made for Hummingbird are because "Google users are asking increasingly long and complex questions and are searching Google more often on mobile phones with voice search."

Thanks to those lovely Apple commercials featuring some of our favorite celebrities and Siri, we expect to ask a question and get an answer. Rather than asking for a specific make and model of car and then finding what looks like a reputable site to find out the MPGs, we simply ask "how many mpgs does [insert make and model] get." (Maybe one day Google will even be able to pull up your actual car if you enter the first search phrase listed in the picture above - creepy but not likely very far off with the amount of data it collects on us).

Google says marketers only need to stick to original, high-quality content for SEO efforts with Hummingbird.

Search is More Efficient (sort of)

With the knowledge graph also came information directly in your search results, such as birth dates of public figures and similar people. Per the statement about the Hummingbird release, users are searching often on mobile phones and finding information directly in the search results can prove much more efficient then browsing to a possibly-not mobile friendly site to find a phone number. 

70% of smartphone users would agree. According to a survey of 3,000 smartphone users, 70% have used the click to call function in Google's mobile search results and 59% of them do it to "quickly" get a response/answer.

Only problem is that Google Places still can pull incorrect information and the click-to-call function just gets really frustrating for users and the business owners. I work in healthcare and this is a huge problem for hospitals with locations inside of locations. More on that, if you'd like.

This change makes it more important to be using Google Places for Locations and keeping Google+ business profiles updated.