The 10 commandments of Growth Hacking

How to use Growth Hacking to get real results

The growth hacking approach (also referred to as 'agile marketing' and 'growth marketing') has generated a lot of excitement as a dynamic approach to boost awareness, lead generation and conversion.

Sean Ellis, a marketer and entrepreneur who has worked for companies such as Dropbox and Eventbrite, devised the term 'Growth Hacking' in 2010. Originating from Silicon Valley, growth hacking has successfully been used to build high-growth companies such as Hotmail, PayPal, Twitter, Airbnb, Instagram and Uber. Ellis says:

“Startups live and die by their ability to drive customer acquisition growth…[they] are under extreme resource constraints and need to figure out how to break through the noise to let their target customers know they have a superior solution for a critical problem…the best growth hacks take advantage of the unique opportunities available in a connected world where digital experiences can spread rapidly.”

Growth hacking is now gaining traction in the UK and has recently been termed 'the next big thing for marketing' by Advertising Age. Even well-established organisations such as The Guardian have recently advertised related job roles, such as 'Head of Growth Hacking', which has further raised its profile.

Although the term 'hacking' has technology connotations, more traditional companies such as Regus and Penguin Books are also using the principles of growth hacking. This indicates that the concept is not just relevant to technology start-ups and this movement has wider implications. Think of it as 'marketing digital disruption' because technology is an enabler for marketers to understand and respond to user behaviour more rapidly.

Core Principles of Growth Hacking

The core principle behind growth hacking is to quickly and cheaply test a marketing idea, use data to analyse the outcomes, and to iterate, optimise, implement or change the experiment. Running A/B tests and checking data with analytical software such as Google Analytics, Mixpanel and Optimizely are essential components to this process.

Despite the high data analysis element of growth hacking, it is an extremely creative process that requires people to “swim against the flow” and spot emerging opportunities before anyone else does. This dichotomy of 'intuition and rigor' and 'art and science' makes it very difficult to find people with the right skill-set; which is why building a growth hacking team is so important (or finding an agency with this type of team already in place).

Although digital marketing is a key element of growth hacking (because of the analytical part of obtaining quantitative user data and gaining insights from it), it is also important to use traditional marketing methods to bridge the gap between the physical and digital world. 

Creating a Growth Hacking Mindset

Growth hacking is an approach, rather than a set of tools.

To illustrate this, we are going to tell you about a brilliant growth hack that has nothing to do with either marketing or business. Instead, it tells the story of a winning mind-set…

In 1996 Britain's cycling team was ranked 17^th in the world and had won just 2 bronze medals at the Atlanta Olympic Games. By 2012 they ranked first in the World and British riders had won 12 medals (8 gold) at the London Olympic Games.

Its success was largely down to the coaching of Sir David Brailsford. His approach was to breakdown everything that went into riding a bike and improve it by 1%. Putting all of the 1% margins together meant that in 2012 British Team Sky had won 70% of the gold medals in cycling at the Olympics.

There wasn't a magic silver bullet but a series of micro, cost effective and human-centred optimisations that could be effectively scaled. This demonstrates what a growth hacking mind set looks like.

To be a good growth hacker:

• Mindset is extremely important – growth hackers focus on accelerated growth on a minimum budget. It's all about users (or an alternative KPI, depending on your business)


• Being curious and creative are key elements. Don't get fixated on spending a particular budget, go back to basics and think about tapping into human behaviour (we're social animals)


• The internal culture is important: the business needs to be open to experimentation – some ideas will fail


• It needs a good (Pi-shaped) team, i.e. marketers with a broad base of knowledge in all areas, but capabilities in both 'left brain' and 'right brain' disciplines. They are both analytical and data-driven, yet understand brands, storytelling and experiential marketing

The team element is very important as one individual person is unlikely to have all of the skills needed for growth-focused marketing.

The 10 Commandments

1. Talk to your customers, identify trends, understand why they need your product or service

• Magic bullets rarely exist; if you spend too long looking for them you'll take your eye off the ball. Focus on the things that matter – serve amazing customer experiences (like Zappos) and product value (like Instagram and Skype)

 2. Understand the landscape you are operating in

• Some products or services are never going to achieve viral growth because of what they are and the market the company operates in


• Try to predict the future needs of your customer – be one step ahead of them. Never fall behind or your competition will get there first. Think about how Instagram offered a more superior photo sharing app than Facebook.

3. Develop the unique rules of growth for your particular organisation

• What are your company's growth metrics or KPIs?


• What's the one metric you need to move, to get to the next stage?


• Be growth focused and use data to make sure you are on track


• Be technical and have a strong market focus

4. Make extensive use of pilots and prototypes

• Build fast, test fast. Start with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and talk to users about it


• Does your product serve a real need? Be honest!

5. Experiment early and often for aggregated marginal gains

• Don't look for a silver bullet, test lots of small things


• Rather than having one web page have a series of web pages and work out which one converts the best

The ResearchXL framework has been produced by Peep Laja. Visit his blog to find out more about each area of the framework.

The information gained from this type of analysis can then be used to test hypotheses' relating to user growth and validate ideas. This process is essential to finding 'non-norm' solutions to achieve growth in a short amount of time.

6. Focus on asking the right questions

• What's going to make the biggest difference to your business? Working out how to get there


• Don't think online or offline. Think: Who am I talking to?


• What am I trying to achieve? What is the best way to get there?

7. Use behavioural quantitative market research and to sharpen selection

This approach is basically using structured testing to improve website effectiveness. Growth optimisation is moving from data, to insight, and then to money. User data analysis is needed throughout this CRO process, so that activity can be prioritised.

• Constantly A/B test – you can only hack something once you start testing an idea and find out what actually works


• Analysis has to be spot on. But there's a difference between analysis and insight, growth hackers understand the difference


• You need to be able to take apart a top-level number…'We had ten million visits today. X of them were in this category and did this and Y were in that category, they might have done that.'

Generally, a company should use a minimum sample size of 250 to test changes for CRO. You also need to think about business cycles - e.g. if your weekend traffic is very different, ending a test by excluding that segment would make your sample unrepresentative.

8. Use qualitative research to improve intuition

• People buy brands and emotion and this is needed whatever your business is, whatever you are working on. Growth hacking isn't just a scientific numbers game.


• Qualitative research is very important. It's about understanding the 'why' and provides you with more of a 3D focus on exactly why things happen.


• Use qualitative data to find out: What are our users interested in? What else are they looking for? What's their experience like? The numbers many be going up but if people are really irritated by something you've pitched to them, you won't be able to capture them again like you did in the beginning.

9. Clearly define and communicate new offers

• Run numerous tests but have a plan for the sort of things that the hypotheses should be, they should be documented somewhere in an Excel file. Track the results. You should re-run the experiments; never assume that if you're doing them in January, the results will be the same in June…products have seasonal customers.


• There's never perfect data but there's a lot more data in the digital space than the offline world. You can serve messages to different people through testing tools like Optimizely and check analytics on email, social media, etc. which allow you to instantaneous get feedback and adapt your approach accordingly.

10. Encourage a culture of creativity and experimentation across teams

• You can't growth hack without the right team. They need to understand what growth hacking is. If they don't understand it, they're going to struggle. And you're all going to be doing a lot more fighting and arguing internally, and you won't get anything done.


• If you're running experiments, or doing things that cause problems for other teams (which they can), you need to be able to negotiate and work them out. You can't just be in a silo.

Operational Elements of Growth Hacking

There are a few essential elements needed to be an effective growth hacker – these can be seen in the diagram below.

Pirate Metrics

Investor Dave McClure of 500 Hats has often spoken about the marketing funnel and start up metrics for Pirates (AAARR). This is a useful tool for all types of organisation.

Download Expert Member resource – Growth Hacking Guide

This guide aims to show how growth hacking concepts can be applied to established medium and large businesses as they seek to develop more agile marketing approaches. Naturally, the checklists in this guide will also be useful for start-up and smaller businesses.

Access the Growth Hacking Guide

SearchCap: Google AdWords hack, SEO ROI & more

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

The post SearchCap: Google AdWords hack, SEO ROI & more appeared first on Search Engine Land.



Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Google App for iOS Gets a Speed Boost by @SouthernSEJ

The Google app for iOS is now faster according to an official announcement from the company. In addition to cutting down loading times the app is been updated with the new features that are designed to help people save time and get information more quickly. Opening the app and conducting a search will be just a bit quicker now than it was before. Google says this incremental boost in speed will save users a collective 6.5 million hours this year. For the first time Google's accelerated mobile pages will now be surfaced in the Google app for iOS. AMP articles […]

The post Google App for iOS Gets a Speed Boost by @SouthernSEJ appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

How to Implement Kinder, Gentler Marketing: 4 All-Natural Truths

I have a love/hate relationship with a soap company.

About five years ago, I stumbled across their products online. They boasted rare and unique scents and naturally-sourced ingredients. They were irresistible (to me, anyway). And their prices seemed reasonable.

So, I placed an order. And that's when my troubles began.

I had to share my email address to complete my transaction. You know, to “receive an order confirmation.”

Within days, I found myself receiving marketing email after marketing email. Coupons. Special sales. New soaps. New scents. Free shipping.

I imagined their marketing department high-fiving one other and saying, “We've got one on the line. Quick! Reel her in!”

And you know what? The products I received were exceptional. They smelled amazing (I'm a sucker for a unique scent). So, I stuck it out for a while. But not forever.

Because I knew how wrong my experience was. I knew there was a better way to market your business. A kinder, gentler way - one that doesn't alienate the very people you want to nurture.

Time went on.

I sent dozens of their catalogs to the landfill - a new one came in the mail every few weeks.

Finally, I gave up. After placing a few orders, I contacted the company and asked them to please - for the Love of All that Is Holy - stop sending me catalogs. I clicked the unsubscribe link in one of their many emails and used the form on their site to let them know why I was unsubscribing.

Then, I stopped hearing from them.

Here we go again: relearning a lesson

A lot has happened in the meantime. Life went on, and I forgot about this company's overzealous marketing efforts.

A few weeks ago, when my husband asked me what I'd like for Mother's Day, I said, “How about a gift certificate to (The Soap Company in Question)?” And my husband - smart man that he is - got me the gift certificate.

And guess what? It started all over again. Within just a couple of weeks, I have received three catalogs.

I take full responsibility for the situation. I got myself back on their radar and now I'm paying the price. I do still love their products, but I wish they understood modern marketing techniques as well as they clearly understand the soap business.

It's obvious to me that they don't read Copyblogger. Because if they did, they'd know the four basic truths of modern content marketing.

Let's review them.

Truth #1: Content pulls; it doesn't push

Rather than blanket prospects in catalogs and crowd their inboxes with sales emails, modern content marketing offers valuable, helpful, and even entertaining information.

The information is so helpful that prospects purposely sign up to receive it. And they stick around when the content they receive is consistently useful.

Read these posts to learn more about creating content that pulls (and doesn't push):

• How to Attract, Nurture, and Grow the Business-Building Audience You Want


• 5 Remarkable Qualities of Effective Online Content


• 5 Ways to Get More of the Online Attention You Crave

Truth #2: Content offers; it doesn't demand

Solid, effective content marketing doesn't stomp its foot and demand in a whiny voice that you pay attention to it.

Instead, it confidently offers a hand - the exact information you need, right when you need it.

One way modern content marketers do this is by using marketing automation.

If my soap company had sent me a little brochure about how to save money on laundry day (and a coupon for their laundry soap), I would have held on to that piece of content. I might have posted it next to my washing machine! It wouldn't have gone to a landfill like all those product catalogs.

Read these posts to learn more about making offers (not demands):

• Landing Pages: Turn Traffic Into Money


• How to Be a Copywriting Genius: The Brilliantly Sneaky Trick You Must Learn


• 6 Proven Ways to Boost the Conversion Rates of Your Call-to-Action Buttons

By the way, our Rainmaker Platform makes marketing automation a snap.

Truth #3: Content entertains; it doesn't annoy

One of the foundational truths about content marketing is that it must serve your audience if you want it to be effective (more on this below).

And one way to do this is to meet your audience - wherever they are - with content that is so compelling they want to consume it.

At Rainmaker Digital, we do just that with our podcast network, Rainmaker FM.

Podcasting isn't a requirement, but it's a great fit for those who are comfortable with audio - who are more comfortable talking than writing.

Read these posts to learn more about creating entertaining (not annoying) content:

• The Art of Being Interesting


• 22 Ways to Create Compelling Content When You Don't Have a Clue [Infographic]


• 58 Ways to Create Persuasive Content Your Audience Will Love

Truth #4: Content is about the consumer, not the producer

Please repeat after me:

“I will resist the urge to constantly write about me, my offers, my company's history, our goals, our mission statement, or our new products. Instead, I'm going to focus on writing about topics that serve my prospects and customers.”

It's tough for traditional marketers to wrap their brains around this one. But your customers' #1 concern isn't you … it's them.

That's why, for example, if the soap company had sent me information about alternate ways to use their soaps (Perfume your pajama drawer! Hang one in your closet! Use it to repel mosquitos!), I would have stayed subscribed.

And an occasional offer woven into the helpful content wouldn't have fazed me one bit.

A highly effective technique for serving your prospects' and customers' ongoing needs is creating a series of cornerstone content pages on your website.

Cornerstone pages serve up foundational information that your prospects and customers need to understand your field of expertise.

Read these posts to learn more about creating cornerstone content pages that serve your audience:

• A Practical Approach to Using Powerful Cornerstone Content on Your Site


• Your Cornerstone Content Blueprint: Answers to 9 Common Questions


• 11 Essential Ingredients Every Cornerstone Content Page Needs [Infographic]

True confession

Here's the painful truth: I spent the first part of my career creating exactly the kind of marketing materials my soap company is annoying me with now. Direct mail postcards. Sales catalogs. Promotional brochures.

But now I know there's a better way. A kinder, gentler way to market your business, serve your prospects and customers, and create marketing that is valued, not sent straight to a landfill.

That's the kind of marketing we teach inside our Authority program. To learn more about it, click the button below.

Learn to create kinder, gentler marketing


inside Authority

The post How to Implement Kinder, Gentler Marketing: 4 All-Natural Truths appeared first on Copyblogger.

Creating your social media content strategy + plan

Social media strategy and planning essentials series

This is part 5 of my Smart Insights 12 part social media series. In the last part we looked at the role of organic and paid social media and touched on the importance of content. In this blog, I discuss a sensible way to approach content planning for your social media channels.

Social media networks support multiple content formats and there has been rapid growth in the use of interactive formats, for example carousel ads on Facebook. This flexibility of format (text, image, multi-image, video, carousel etc.) gives marketers the ability to experiment with different types of content to gauge how best to attract and engage social users.

If people are the heartbeat of social media, content is the blood. It's your content that people see and respond to, and that communicates your values and messages.

But what content works? How do you plan what to talk about, on which platforms and in what formats?

Producing and sharing content is no guarantee of success. Smart content marketers understand the need to align social with other channels to ensure there is a consistent style of communication with customers and the stories they are telling, and that is driven by a clear plan rather than scrabbling each week to find something to share.

(If I ever utter the words “I need something to put in today's Facebook post, any ideas?”, please shoot me).

Why is it important to get your content right for social media?

Social media is most often used for personal reasons to connect with friends and family, or to be part of conversations that align with your personal interests and passions.

If you serve content to people with this mindset that isn't appropriate, relevant or useful, it can have the effect of turning people off and driving them away. Similarly, if you blast people with a constant stream of content, it can be overwhelming and come across like a shouting match.

You need to take the time to learn what people want to read/watch and make it digestible via the formats and channels they find most useful.

Why you need an over arching comms & content plan

Start with a clear comms and content plan that is aligned with business goals. This isn't social specific; it should govern how you communicate with customers across all channels. Social can then inherit this plan and adapt it to suit social networks.

For example, you may have a campaign launching a new detailed guide and social is used to seed snippets from the guide over X weeks with a hook to download the full content. So the overarching plan guides what is being talked about and when, then the social media plan decides how to tell the story to a social audience based on content format, style and execution.

Before you start posting content, you need to answer the following questions:

1. What are we trying to achieve on social media and how does this align with core business goals/objectives/targets?


2. What stories do we want to tell and how can we make them relevant to our social audience?


3. What is our social customer profile and what types of content to they respond best to


4. What's the current state of the market – how do competitors and comparators perform socially and what content works for them?


5. Who needs to be involved in content production and marketing?


6. How will we measure the success of social content?


7. How will we optimise and improve what we're doing?

As you start to answer these questions, you draw up your social content plan that is based on audience needs and market context.

This shouldn't be overly complicated; it needs to provide simple guidelines to help focus social marketers on the what/why/when of content marketing.

“Without a useable comms and content plan it is much harder to gain traction with your audiences. You may achieve siloed spikes in activity through individual campaigns but it is much harder to build momentum around brand awareness and engagement. By having a content plan in place that clearly answers the Why, What, Who and How, you will be able to be more adaptable and reactive with your content.”

Sejal Parekh, Brand and Creative Strategist @holasejal

The Smart Insights content marketing strategy hub page has lots of helpful articles and guides to steer you in the right direction.

Here are two more handy resources to help you create your content strategy and plan:

• How to write a content marketing strategy step-by-step, by Jeffrey Kranz


• Think With Google playbook for content scheduling

Competitor analysis for social content

Imitation is flattery.

By that I don't mean copy what your competitors are doing, but if you are fighting for mindshare amongst a similar audience, it pays to know what content that audience currently consumes and responds to. You can then factor in popular topics and content formats into your social content plan.

By knowing what competitors are doing, you can also quickly identify content gaps:

1. What topics aren't they covering?


2. Which topics are they covering poorly, with low quality content?


3. Which topics are they covering but not comprehensively, so there's an opportunity to establish a niche foothold?

Let's use a real-world example.

I set-up the social media strategy for a crowdfunding startup. We reviewed our competitors' comms and content approach, and realised there was a big gap for 'inspiration'. There was lots of factual information around crowdfunding + stories from people who had successfully funded, but nobody was using content to inspire people to take action. Everything was about how crowdfunding works, not what makes a great idea and what drives success, two critical ingredients to using crowdfunding successfully.

Originality is inspiring.

We decided to create inspiring content through other people. We ran a series of inspirational events featuring speakers who had a success story to tell, to demonstrate that success is unique to each of us and what makes each person successful varies but people who achieve have some things in common e.g. drive and ambition.

This helped generate unique content that drove social engagement:

• Announcements of new free events at our London base (with Eventbrite registration)


• Announcements for new speakers and a profile (amplified by them sharing with their personal networks)


• Live tweeting to share quotes and insights from the speakers, via the hashtag #shedevents


• Post-event write-ups and photos for visual content


• Quotes from the speakers for short social posts


• Post event interviews with some of the speakers around topics related to inspiration.

The results:

1. Increased event attendance by 50%


2. Increased social followers by 110%


3. Increased social engagement (# posts shared, commented etc.) by 65%

Creating a social media content marketing calendar

Keep this simple. Work on a quarterly basis and build out the content plan month-by-month aligned with your overall content calendar.

You should have a set of stories that need to be told, then break down for each month which story components are the focus and the content formats and social channels that will be used to distribute the messages.

There are many ways of doing this. Below is just one approach I've used:

I like to map channel-level content activities back to high-level content stories, so there's a clear link with the overall content plan. It means that each time I'm thinking about what content should be posted, I'm making sure it supports a key story.

That doesn't mean there's no place for ad-hoc; there always is. But you don't plan ad-hoc! Embrace the opportunity to post content that isn't part of the core stories, provided there's a clear reason to do so that's in tune with your content marketing strategy i.e. don't start sharing content that's not consistent with your brand style/voice.

Optimising content for a social audience

Businesses produce a lot of content; don't restrict your social channels to content the social team produces. Think laterally.

For example, customer service teams create a lot of helpful content for users, answering FAQs and enquiries. They often add to the business knowledge base, and this information can be really helpful to social customers e.g. care instructions for a product. However, the content may not always be in a format and style that's suitable for a social audience, so you can take the raw content and repurpose for your social channels.

Let's use the example of care instructions. You could turn this into 'Tip of the day' for Twitter, using short-form, take-away advice that can link to more detailed content on your website.

Creating regular hooks

Find a content format that can be used to create regular posts that encourage people to come back for more.

The example from Twitter below shows @Craft posting weekly roundups from its Flickr pool, so using content from one social channel to create new posts on another.

Hashtags are a good example. If you can establish a #hashtag in customers' social vocabulary, you'll benefit in two key ways:

1. Posts you tag with the # are more likely to be noticed as many will be monitoring the


2. Other users will include the # in posts, building the conversation without needing you to create all the content

Many brands use hashtags to create social conversation threads. Selfridges uses #bodytalk to coordinate social activity off the back of its physical events.

Increasing content reach

You want the biggest reach possible (amongst relevant audiences) so that you optimise your investment. This means finding ways to encourage other social users to share your content with their wider network. Below I look at 3 techniques to enable this:

Scarcity

You've got something but there isn't much left and people have to hurry to get it. Scarcity is often a marketing veil but if used well can drive social activity. A good example is popular events where tickets sell out quickly – publicising the ticket launch date well in advance drums up interest.

In the UK, Brighton SEO is a great example. @kelvinnewman and the team have grown the event to be a leading European SEO event and tickets sell out within minutes of release, but the marketing starts a long time in advance to get people hooked and talking about the event.

Uniqueness

If you offer something that people can't get anywhere else, and it's relevant to them, you stand a good chance of getting their attention and increasing engagement with your social content.

Oreo is a good example. For Halloween they created a series of Vine videos spoofing popular horror films. Unique, funny and shareable.

The brand also uses an 'Open up with Oreo' storyline that posts short messages with images and animated video to bring the brand to life.

Amplification

Find influencers who have their own engaged audience (don't just think 'people with millions of followers', the followers need to actually listen to what they're saying). Come up with a value proposition for them that encourages them to listen to what you're posting and then share your content.

Test, measure and learn

How do you know what content works in social media?

Even without web analytics or social media analytics, you can very quickly look at engagement metrics for individual posts e.g. likes on Facebook, RT on Twitter.

However, to know how content contributes to your digital KPIs and ROI, then you need to ensure you're measuring a much wider set of metrics. A few tips:

• Add campaign tracking to all posted links (using a consistent tracking taxonomy)


• Use social reports in web analytics to monitor social sessions and conversions


• Use referral reports to compare social domains to other domains for referral traffic


• Use landing page reports and then apply social segments to gauge social impact for key content pages

You should also use social network specific analytics to explore the impact of your content. For example, on Twitter you can compare month-on-month for total engagement and drill down into tweets with the most impressions and engagement.

Make sure you define the KPIs you will measure success against and then ensure reports are set-up to provide the data for analysis. Don't go into the analytics tools with no idea what you want to measure – you'll waste a lot of time!

Useful tools

It helps to use a toolkit to coordinate and automate social content marketing. That doesn't mean remove the human element and personalisation, it simply means use tools to help you get your messages out there efficiently, for example queuing Tweets to be sent at times that are most likely to get engagement from your followers.

There are lots of free and paid tools out there. Below is a small list of ones I find really useful:

Hootsuite/Tweetdeck

Social media aggregation platforms to help you coordinate your streams, schedule updates to multiple platforms and monitor keywords/hashtags to see what content other people are posting/responding to.

Buffer

A great queuing system that helps you plan bulk updates and set a publishing schedule for each social network, as well as providing URL shortening and tracking (though you can of course use your own).

Followerwonk/Audiense/Buzzsumo

For identifying key influencers based on topic, location etc., really useful for connecting with people who can amplify your content.

Your thoughts, comments and personal experience

So this is step 5 in the Smart Insights 12 step series on social media strategy and planning.

Did you find it useful?

How important is content to your social media marketing? What tips and techniques can you share to help others?

Please join in the discussion and share your experience in the comments field at the bottom of this page.

Keep an eye out for next month's article, “Aligning and integrating social media with other marketing channels”.

Missed the previous articles? Catch-up here:

1. 6 reasons why you need a social media strategy


2. How to create a social media strategy and plan


3. Using competitor analysis to inform social media plans


4. Understanding the role of organic and paid social media

Thanks

James

Thanks to James Gurd for sharing his advice and opinions in this post. James is an experienced ecommerce and digital marketing consultant with more than 14 years' B2C and B2B digital strategy and transformation experience. He is the Owner and lead consultant at Digital Juggler. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.

Time-waster of the day: Highscore.money

Want to waste 5 minutes and maybe even some money? I've got just the thing for you. Highscore.money is a scoreboard where you pay to be included. The more you pay, the higher your score. That's it. It's almost like the real world, where money will get you the presidency, can keep you out of jail, and can buy you into the olympics. Or am I getting too cynical now? I asked Marc Köhlbrugge (Who I've known for a couple of years and who's also the guy behind BetaList) what the hell he was thinking for launching Highscore.money. His reply:…

This story continues at The Next Web

The 10 Things People Still Get Wrong About Local SEO by @neilpatel

We're still seeing a lot of myth and incorrect information surrounding local SEO. Here are ten myths that you should be aware of.

The post The 10 Things People Still Get Wrong About Local SEO by @neilpatel appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

A Day to Be With Family and Remember

“At the grave of a hero we end, not with sorrow at the inevitable loss, but with the contagion of his courage; and with a kind of desperate joy we go back to the fight.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. fought in the Civil War, enlisting with the Massachusetts militia during his senior year of college. He suffered numerous wounds and nearly died of dysentery.

After three years, in 1864, Holmes was able to walk away from military service. He would go on to live another 71 years, ultimately becoming one of the best-known and most oft-cited U.S. Supreme Court Justices in history. (He defined “clear and present danger,” for example.)

Holmes would serve all the way until just a couple of months before his 91st birthday. His was a full and vibrant life.

Unfortunately, so many of the men Holmes fought with and against in the Civil War did not make it home. Nor have so many of the men and women who have fought in the wars that have occurred since. So much life unlived. So much potential unable to be fulfilled.

Today, those of us in the U.S. pause to honor these men and women - those whose lives ended, as Holmes wrote, “at the grave of a hero.”

As Ronald Reagan said, “It's a day to be with the family and remember.”

We'll be back tomorrow with our usual content schedule.

*****

By the way, if you're interested in learning the history of Memorial Day - did you know it was originally called “Decoration Day” or that a national moment of remembrance takes place at 3:00 p.m. local time? - here is a short video and article from the History Channel.

Flickr Creative Commons Image via A Nowak.

The post A Day to Be With Family and Remember appeared first on Copyblogger.

7 essential Google Analytics reports every marketer must know

You may be using Google Analytics, but are you using it to its full potential? Contributor Khalid Saleh lays out 7 key reports with which every marketer should be familiar.

The post 7 essential Google Analytics reports every marketer must know appeared first on Search Engine Land.



Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Will Intelligent Personal Assistants Replace Websites?

Posted by Tom-Anthony

[Estimated read time: 8 minutes]

Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs) are capable of radically disrupting the way we search for and consume information on the Internet. The convergence of several trends and technologies has resulted in a new interface through which people will be able to interact with your business. This will have a dramatic impact - if your long-term marketing/business plan doesn't account for IPAs, you may be in the same boat as those people who said they didn't need a website in the early 2000s.

Your website is an API to your business

If we look to pre/early Internet, then the primary interface to most businesses was the humble phone. Over the phone you could speak to a business and find out what they had in stock, when they'd be open, whether they had space for your reservation, etc., and then you could go on to order products, ask for directions, or place reservations. The phone was an interface to your business, and your phone line and receptionist were your "API" - the way people interacted with your business.

As the Internet matured and the web gained more traction, it increasingly became the case that your website empowered users to do lots of those same things that they previously did via the phone. They could get information and give you money, and your website became the new "API" for your business, allowing users to interact with it. Notice this didn't necessitate the death of the phone, but lots of the requests that previously came via phone now came via the web, and there was also a reduction in friction for people wanting to interact with your business (they didn't have to wait for the phone line to be free, or speak to an actual human!).

Since then, the web has improved as technologies and availability have improved, but fundamentally the concept has stayed the same. Until now.

The 5 tech giants have all built an intelligent personal assistant

Intelligent Personal Assistants apps such as Google Now, Siri, Cortana, and Facebook M - as well as the newer appliances such as Amazon Echo, the new Google Home, and the rumored Apple Siri hardware - are going to have a profound effect on the way people search, the types of search they do, and the way they consume and act upon the results of those searches.

New entries, such as Hound and Viv, show that intelligent personal assistants are growing beyond just something phone makers are adding as a feature, and are becoming a core focus.

In the last couple of years we've discussed a variety of new technologies and their impact on search; a number of these are all feeding into the rise of these personal assistants.

Trend 1: More complex searches

The days of searches just being a keyword are long since over. The great improvements of natural language processing, driven by improvements in machine learning, have meant that conversational search has become a thing and we have seen Hummingbird and RankBrain becoming building blocks of how Google understands and handles queries.

Furthermore, implicit signals have also seen the rise of anticipatory queries with Google Now leading the way in delivering you search results based off of your context without you needing to ask.

Contributing technologies & trends:

• Implicit Signals


• Natural Language


• Conversational Search


• Hummingbird & RankBrain

Watch this video of Will Critchlow speak about these trends to hear more.

Trend 2: More complex results

Search results have moved on from 10 blue links to include the Knowledge Graph, with entities and direct answers being a familiar part of any search result. This has also meant that, since the original Siri, we've seen a search interface that doesn't even do a web search for many queries but instead gives data-driven answers right there in the app. The earliest examples were queries for things like weather, which would turn up a card right there in the app.

Finally, the rise of conversational search has made possible complex compound queries, where queries can be revised and extended to allow the sorting, filtering, and refining of searches in a back and forth fashion. This phase of searching used to be something you did by reviewing the search results manually and sifting through them, but now search engines understand (rather than just index) the content they discover and can do this step for you.

Contributing technologies & trends:

• Entities / Direct Answers


• Faceted search


• Data driven answers

You may like Distilled's Searchscape which has information and videos on these various trends.

Trend 3: Bots, conversational UI, and on-demand UIs

More recently, with the increased interest in bots (especially since Facebook's F8 announcement), we can see a rise in the number of companies investing in various forms of conversational UI (see this article and this one).

Bots and conversational UI provide a new interface which lends itself to all of the benefits provided by natural language processing and ways of presenting data-driven answers.

Note that a conversational UI isn't limited to purely a spoken or natural language interface, but can also provide an "on demand" UI for certain situations (see this example screenshot from Facebook, or the Siri/Fandango cinema ticket example below).

Contributing technologies & trends:

• Conversational UI


• Bots


• On-demand UIs within the IPA interface

Trend 4: 3rd-party integration

Going back to the first versions of Siri or Google Now, there were no options for 3rd-party developers to integrate. They could only do a limited set of actions based on what Apple or Google had explicitly programmed in.

However, over time, the platforms have opened up more and more, such that apps can now provide functionality within the intelligent personal assistant on the same app.

Google Now, Amazon Echo, Cortana, and Siri (not quite - but rumored to be coming in June) all provide SDKs (software development kits), allowing 3rd-party developers to integrate into these platforms.

This is an opportunity for all of us integrate directly into the next generation search interface.

What's the impact of all this?

More searches as friction reduces

Google published an (under-reported) paper on some of the research and work that went into Google Now, which when combined with their daily information needs study indicates how hard they're trying to encourage and enable users to do searches that previously have not been possible.

The ability of intelligent personal assistants to fulfil more complex search queries (and of "always listening" search appliances like Amazon Echo and Google Home) to remove the friction of doing searches that were previously "too much work" means we'll see a rise in search queries that simply wouldn't have happened previously. So rather than cannibalizing web-based searches that came before, a large segment of the queries to IPAs will be wholly new types of searches.

Web rankings get bypassed, go straight to the top

As more and more people search via personal assistants, and with personal assistants trying to deliver answers directly in their interface, we'll see an increasing number of searches that completely bypass web search rankings. As 3rd-party integration becomes more widespread, there will be an increasing number of dynamic queries that personal assistants can handle directly (e.g. "where can I buy The Martian?," "flights to Berlin," or "order a pepperoni pizza").

This is a massive opportunity - it does not matter how many links and how much great content your competitor has to help them in "classical SEO" if you've integrated straight into the search interface and no web search is ever shown to the user. You can be the only search result shown.

The classic funnel gets compressed; checking out via IPAs

This part is probably the most exciting, from my perspective, and I believe is the most important from the impact it'll have on users and businesses. People have modeled "the funnel" in a variety of different ways over time, but one common way to look at it is:

The search is separate to the browsing/checkout process, and that checkout process happens via a website. Apps have had some impact on this classic picture, but so far it hasn't been a big part.

However, conversational search/UI combined with the ability for developers to integrate directly into IPAs opens up a huge opportunity to merge the interfaces for the search step and the steps previously fulfilled by the website (browsing and checking out). There are already examples of the funnel being compressed:

In this example, using Siri, you can see I was able to search for movies playing nearby, pick a particular movie and cinema, then pick a particular showing and, finally, I can click to buy, which takes me to the Fandango app. I am most of the way through the checkout process before I leave the intelligent personal assistant app interface. How long until I can do that final step and actually check out inside the personal assistant?

Integrating with intelligent personal assistant apps currently normally happens via the app model (i.e. you build an app that provides some functionality to the assistant), but how long until we see the possibility to integrate without needing to build an app yourself - the intelligent personal assistant will provide the framework and primary interface.

Summary

Intelligent Personal Assistants bring together all the recent developments in search technology, and as integration options improve, we will see an increasing number of queries/transactions go end-to-end entirely inside the personal assistant itself.

People will conduct searches, review data, and make purchases entirely inside that one interface, completely bypassing web search (already happening) and even checking out inside the personal assistant (within the next 12 months) and thus bypassing websites.

IPAs represent an absolutely massive opportunity, and it would be easy to underestimate the impact they will have (in the same way many people underestimated mobile initially). If you've been on the fence about building an app, you should re-evaluate that decision, with a focus on apps being the way they can integrate into intelligent personal assistants.

What do you think? I'd love to have a discussion in the comments about how everyone thinks this will play out and how it might change the landscape of search.

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