In these uncertain times businesses of all sizes have been impacted and the pandemic is industry agnostic. We don’t know how long this crisis will last. Social distancing has become the new buzzword and Work From Home (WFH) has suddenly become the new normal.

So how do we as marketers react to this crisis? It certainly isn’t the time to run the same campaigns we were running prior to the Covid-19 onslaught. But that doesn’t mean that we should stop all campaigns & wait for the crisis to tide over either.

In Australia and globally the business environment has shifted radically in the space of a few weeks. All conferences and events have been banned by the government and since WFH is the new normal, this means there is very little traffic on the road. Think about this, if your company was spending money on outdoor advertising/transit media such as airports/stations, with people reducing travel and staying indoors, isn’t it time to shuffle the spend and take advantage of the digital medium.

In certain industries like travel/tourism/events/entertainment/hotels/airlines/retail/restaurants/car dealerships/sports/movies, sales have collapsed and therefore their marketing departments have hit the pause button.

Even if sales have fallen off the cliff, you can still use content marketing to connect with your audience and keep your brand in front of your target market. Right now, when a lot of people are sitting at home and have the bandwidth to consume content, it is the right time to create appropriate content. This will help your brand rebound quickly once the crisis is over, and over it will be for sure. A vaccine will be developed & the economy will rebound.

Competitive Advantage

Brands across the board have cut back staff and marketing. This is the right time to multiply your content marketing activities and leapfrog your competition.

Experiment With Online

This is an ideal time for some businesses that have focussed on offline events like Conferences, Seminars, Training, Round tables etc to reinvent themselves. AMI is a perfect example of an organisation that is doing this pivot during these uncertain times. Here is a recent announcement they made in view of the covid-19 impact:

“For this reason, we have made the decision to reformat all live events and AMI Professional Development as online events via virtual classroom until further notice.”

Here are some of the online content marketing activities that can be practiced/implemented or enhanced due to the Coronavirus scenario.

Content Rich Website – Ensure your website is up to date with all the latest info about your brand. Have a content first strategy & ensure you create landing pages on your site that address topics your target audience is looking for. A content rich site will pay long term dividends. At the Forward Marketing Summit that I recently attended in Sydney, I was pleased to hear Natalie Miller from Business Australia talk about their Content First approach for their website. This has resulted in 700 articles answering commonly asked questions about Business in Australia and a huge increase in visibility on Google & organic traffic to the website.

Blog – Have a blog as part of your website where you write thought leadership articles. Additionally, tips, case studies and white papers also work really well. Make sure you host your blog on your website as this has significant SEO benefits.

Social Media Posts – There are a myriad social media channels out there, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook Instagram, Pinterest & more. When you are starting out it is important that you select the right channel for your brand. For example, if you are a B2B brand, LinkedIn probably makes much more sense than Facebook.

Webinars – I believe this is going to be a huge competitive advantage for those brands that can quickly adapt their marketing strategy to include this medium. Turn face-to-face events into a digital experience via a webinar. Make the webinars available “on demand” because most people are busy during the day to rock up to live webinars. Make the webinar experience interactive and let the audience join the conversation: use polls, videos, Q&A etc.

Influencer Marketing – Using micro influencers & celebrities has become hugely popular with the exponential growth of social media. Right now, is a good time for you to tap into this segment as a number of these micro influencers are looking for work & have time on their hands. Remember, if you go down this path, you must disclose the collaboration.  

Video Content – Today everyone has access to video cameras via their mobile phone. It is very easy for your brand to create video content. Don’t let the idea that the video needs to be high quality or have a big budget stop you from experimenting with this medium. Product reviews, how-to and unboxing videos are the most popular types of videos on YouTube.

A travel portal, ixigo has used this medium very successfully and their videos have had over 28 Million views on YouTube alone. I just checked out their channel and noticed they have already made content appropriate for the covid-19 crisis & their brand. Here is a video on “How to Make A Mask At Home”.

SEO – What is the first thing customers do when they need to buy a house, car, mobile phone, go on vacation, dine out at a restaurant or even look for a job? They do a Google Search. Therefore, use this time to ramp up your SEO program.

Marketing Breadcrumb Strategy

We know that your brand’s story is unfolding across multiple customer touch points and it takes 7 touches to turn a buyer into a customer. We also know that this journey differs from customer to customer. As marketers we need to know where our customers are looking for information and ensure our brand is present at these pit stops.

I believe right now is the perfect time to connect these dots within your customer’ journey. Write thought leadership articles in your industry, create video content, engage with your customers via social media posts so that when potential customers search for information, your brand pops up in these searches. Your intent should be to create useful information that increases your brands relevance and when the potential customer is ready to take the plunge you are their number 1 destination!

I call this the “breadcrumb strategy”. Drop enough breadcrumbs in your niche that your target audience automatically finds their way to your door!

“As marketers and brand custodians, we are like Hansel and Gretel, and it is our job to leave enough breadcrumbs in our customer’s digital journey so that they find their way to our brand!”
-Sid Lal

When will this crisis get over? I don’t know and my Tasseography is weak. So, If I were you, I would take this opportunity to ramp up content marketing.

On a more general note, use this time to learn new skills or enrol your team in online training. If you can, I would also encourage you to donate your time/resources to other small businesses & help them in their time of need. Karma is a big leveller & this good deed will repay you many times over in the future.

Note: This post was originally published in the Australian Marketing Institute website:

https://marketingvoice.ami.org.au/content-marketing-in-the-age-of-coronavirus/

Siddharth Lal: E-Commerce sites tend to have 100 of pages of product listing for a particular product. Would you recommend pagination versus an all product page or lazy loading? What method would you use?

Gary Illyes: I would most likely not use lazy loading because most search engines are not well fitted to load lazy loading, including Google. We are well aware of that. We are trying to figure out a solution to that. But we’re definitely not there yet. There are hacks for lazy loading so for example creating individual URLs and then when someone clicks on that URL, you scroll to that position on the page with JavaScript but they may not be perfect solutions.

Showing everything on the page is probably not feasible because if you think about 10,000 products. Let’s say you have flipkart, you can’t show every single piece of electronics that you have in store. Each time you will have like 1000s of products, it will slow down the page and it will be a nightmare for the user to navigate it. Pagination… that’s the way to do it. It works for pretty much every e-Commerce site.

Siddharth: But then if we use pagination. Let’s assume flipkart black shoes. So if it’s black shoes and they’ve got say 700 black shoes and they’ve got 100 products per page. Page 1,2,3,4,5,6,7, but in effect they’re not unique pages from the perspective how do you change the Titles since all of them are black shoes? So do you have 7 or 50 pages all saying black shoes… how do you make sure they’re unique?

Gary: One thing is that it’s very likely that you don’t want to get every one of those pages indexed. So have one master page, implement the rel=previous & rel=next, and canonical to whichever page makes more sense…  Usually it’s the first page but sometimes it’s not, so I would do that. It gets more complicated when you have faceted navigation and you allow users to filter on shoe colour. Actually the same thing applies… basically you pick one page that represents what the consumer is looking for and then… and basically you get that page indexed. Usually it wouldn’t even work for you to get every page indexed because the differences between the pages are so tiny usually that search engines just count them as duplicate sometimes. Just the search engines will pick one and that’s supposedly suboptimal because sometimes search engines might pick the wrong one. So with rel=canonical and rel=previous & rel=next you actually have control over which page should show up on search.

Siddharth: But then the main reason you would have this is because your products are listed there? So then that would be the discovery process of the search engines to get to that particular shoe model. There’s no other way to get to that. So you still have to show Google they’re not all the same page.

Gary: You want to show Google that they are different pages but in the same cluster.

Siddharth: Correct, but then as soon as you add the canonical to the first page.

Gary: Then you just say that’s the leading page.

Siddharth: Correct, but then does that mean that Google, even though I have some products which are great products but they’re on page 3. And if I’ve just told Google with a rel canonical page one is the main page and with canonical in effect, it says all the other pages are duplicates of this. Then will that mean that the product which is on page 3 does not now get any kind of… The search spider doesn’t go there because it says forget it, it’s not important.

Gary: So Googlebot will go to the other pages, it will most definitely go through the pages because we want to clarify that you can actually didn’t make a mistake. So we are going to visit them but the rel=previous/next will help us cluster them and basically the signals that come from the other pages will funnel to the leading page.

Siddharth: My concern is more around the product which is on page 3, page 2. Will Google then devalue that product saying that these products are not on the main page? Link juice that passes through for example. The Home page which has got the maximum page value… authority.

Gary: Most of the time, the home page doesn’t have the most value. It’s true for very big sites, but for small sites, very often a leaf page might be the most valuable not the home page.

Siddharth: Ya but they leave aside small sites because if they’re e-Commerce that’s why you get into a “previous”, “next” rel.

Gary: Yes, so rel “prev”, “next” will help us with passing link juice from the parent page which has the canonical. The link juice in the cluster will pass normally as it would be without the rel canonical. It will also enable us to do discovery. So basically, we are going to visit those pages, we are going to extract the links, we are going to try to crawl those pages. That’s sitemap is still the way to go for the listings because we will never guarantee that we are actually going to go through the 10^th page or the 12^th page. There is a very good chance because we have enough crawling capacity. If we have enough crawling capacity then we are going to go to the 11^th page but there is no guarantee, but there is a chance that we are not going to crawl.

Siddharth: Correct! So the XML sitemap makes sense for that. And would this information also hold true if it was not an e-Commerce site but just an entertainment site or information site so same thing (Gary says yes). So even if its songs and all instead of having (inaudible) So users have rel previous and have all the songs.

Gary: It’s pretty much the same thing for any site. Basically if you have similar structure as an e-commerce site then you would do rel “prev” “next”

NOTE: Google has discontinued indexing rel-next/prev tags (announced via a tweet in March 2019). Leaving the tags in place will not harm your SEO in any way. While Google has stopped indexing rel=next/prev, Bing continues to index the tags

Siddharth: Social signals specifically, I’ll divide this into two. One is social signal from something like Facebook, which is generally behind login credential so my information is private. However, all these people who keep saying “hey you must invest in social media. You must have a Facebook page. You must do all of this. How would Google take into account all the shares, likes etc. because they’re all hidden behind a login password.

Gary: The easy answer is that we don’t.

Siddharth: Correct, because it’s a dark web kind of thing

Gary: Aha, but not because things are hidden between the login. So for example if I search for a site facebook.com. And, there would be plenty plenty of posts from Facebook. Let me restart. Basically, we don’t do social signals. These sites are treated pretty much as a normal site, like any other site. We do this consciously, this was a choice that we made. Because if we started to rely on likes for example. If someone at Facebook wakes up one day and they decide to put up a robots.txt block on the likes URL then we’re screwed. Basically we created the signal almost relying on the third party and then our users will get perhaps less relevance. That’s the main reason why we can’t do this. Login that complicates things a bit but for most social networks there is a sizeable number of pages that are public.

Siddharth: So what you’re saying basically is that Social Signals will not matter?

Gary: No, social signals will not matter. Those sites are treated as normal sites. There’s nothing special about them.

 Siddharth: So Brand mentions on a social site. You will not take it as a normal site or you will take it as a normal site?

Gary: We would take it as a normal site. So basically just because someone mentioned you on twitter it won’t be more valuable than when someone mentions you on a normal site.

Siddharth: So therefore then, whether its Facebook or whether it’s a YouTube, Quora it does not matter. It’s the same thing since you’re valuing it exactly the same.

2^nd Audio

Siddharth: So content that’s only visible when the user clicks to expand or has to click to click on a tab to make that content visible. We’ve heard conflicting information and I think from various Google analysts, like from John who will come out and say something versus you etc. My own belief… that’s me personally, is that content that requires clicking to reveal itself should not be counted or should be devalued versus the content that’s visible. Is there any Google policy about it? And what would be your advice to webmasters for this?

Gary: I think the reason for the conflict in information out there is that things changed. So, when we started moving towards having more and more mobile content in our index, then at one point we realized that there is tons and tons of content that is hidden behind tabs/accordions & until that point we were demoting this content. So basically if you have a piece of content visible on the page, on page load, then that piece of content would rank much better than content that is only shown when the user clicks the accordion to expand the content. We changed that approach. Right now it doesn’t matter if you have some content behind a tab/accordion. It will do just as fine as content that is visible without clicking. There is a caveat, the content must be already on the page. (Siddharth clarifying: So it should not be dynamically pulled at the point of clicking.) So basically if you click something and then initiate an AJAX call, pulling from the server a piece of content, that’ll not work. We are not even going to see it, let alone it ranking. So I believe that’s where the confusion is coming from. Information that we put out will change because we are changing search every single day. We fix things that we believe that are not optimal and this was one of those things.

Siddharth: Fair enough! You’ve actually answered my second part because I said for the above let’s take an example of mobile instead of Desktop where the screen dynamics are different. And for example, Wikipedia if you open it, requires pretty much everything to be clear for the content to be visible.  So what you’re saying, even though today Desktop indexing is still prevalent, you’re still taking into account content which is hidden behind the accordion. So it matters equally.

Gary: But then, as you know that when you’re on mobile phone, it’s actually because you have much less real estate. It makes perfect sense to hide things behind the accordion like Wikipedia. But that shouldn’t mean basically that you want to funnel your users and match up to that main piece of information. So for example if I search for Gandhi, then if I go to Wikipedia, they will throw in my face a first paragraph that gives a brief information about Gandhi’s life and achievements. Then I will have the table which contains tabular data, like what were his prominent names or prominent achievements in short and where he was born and when he died, what’s he famous for…stuff like that and rest of the page is hidden behind accordions. Basically if I wanted the user to dwell in the topic deeper. Then I would start including those important links.

Siddharth: In India, local languages, how do we figure out searches for them? Like we’ve got the keyword planner tool, which helps with English but if people are searching in Hindi, Gujarati etc. Is there a way to track them?

Gary: Not really, Right now the those keyword planners kind of suck because you have to pay for it

Siddharth: Ya but those are English because they are typed in English but if you typed in another script like Gurumukhi, it wouldn’t come.

Gary: With these languages, it’s pretty much safe to assume that there is no good content out there. And, that would work for the foreseeable future.  Basically you can assume that if you’re looking for, e.g. “how to do something” related content, there will not be good content for that in Hindi. So right now I think there should be and I don’t understand why is there not a boom in content creation in Hindi, Punjabi. Telugu etc., because there is literally no content to rank.

Siddharth: Yes, I totally agree. For example, I was talking to you the other day about saavn, the music streaming site. Currently they’re in English. And another thing I was also talking to them about, why don’t we take this and make this into Hindi? And not only Hindi, we can then make it into Marathi or all of them and that will immediately give us a very big advantage. You know? Gurumukhi, Punjabi, all of that and that would be a good way to do things and that’s something I’ve been talking to a lot of my clients about. 

Gary: The only thing is that when you translate these sites, you have to pay lots of attention to actually correctly translating the sites, not just using Google translate and you have instantly got a new site. While machine translation has evolved a lot over the years but it’s still not perfect. 

Siddharth: And would we then use hreflang in this because Like IN… Hindi I think Hindi there’s one but I don’t think we have it for the sub languages like Marathi and Punjabi.

Gary: This is a good example I think. “Yeh Junoon”. Basically, if I click on this site, which was automatically translated by Google. Even the translation is not accurate, basically I can’t read it (because it is in Hindi), but this would be the correct way to start

Siddharth: What are the results that come through? So if someone had done it in Hindi, that would’ve come up on top?

Third person: Hinglish websites are coming up in results but Hindi are low.

Gary: Yes, like for example this is in Hinglish. But, the funny thing is that if you had a content that is in Hindi script (Devnagri or Sanskrit)

Gary: Sanskrit, let’s say. I wouldn’t say they are low quality results but low relevancy results. So, if you have content for Yeh Junoon on this page then you would most likely be somewhere here or even here.

Third Person: In future, is it better to write in Hindi than of Hinglish?

Gary: Well, Hinglish is also good. We understand that people are writing in Hinglish here so we rank similarly. Like for example when I switch back (unintelligible) What?

Siddharth: But what happens when you voice search? Right now because you can’t type with it but, as soon as voice search starts exploding, then people will talk in the language. So then the language will come in effect. Right?

Gary: But see. We would be able to on our sides to translate this into this or this into this. So if it’s technically possible to use this interchangeable Hinglish…

Siddharth: I have another thought on that. So instead of going and creating content on a different page for that, what if on the same page, you start a Hindi translation? So the URLs still remains the same. Now you have a problem of the href language kicking in but, Google will see both the pieces of information.

Gary: I would go back to ask you, weather that’s what your users would like

Siddharth: True, they don’t know. You would have to do a test and see.

Third Person: I think most Indian people are using English.

Siddharth: Yes, like you could have a tab I’m thinking you know where someone clicks it, and now it’s in Hindi versus the tab which says English, but the URL then remains constant.

Gary: I would probably separate them. I know why I would separate them. So we tried to offer results for the users in the language that they are comfortable with. So for example if we see that the browser is set to accept language English, Hindi, Hinglish, then we would try to offer them results that are in Hindi and for that you probably want to have Hindi content separate from the English one because if you mix the two together then our language detection algorithms will freak out. They will not be able to distinguish.

Siddharth: Is there a way to track voice search queries right now?

Gary: You can assume. So basically the search analytics does tell us about voice queries as well. You know how voice grids typically look like. Basically they are longer form because no one is going to type out on the phone or whatever the longer sentence. And, basically if you go through search console keyboard data, supporting data, then you would probably be able to find these very long tail queries. Better thing is that these keywords will not have many impressions. So basically, there will be many variations for the same things and they would only have one or two or three impressions.

Siddharth: So what I’m trying to figure out by what you just said. Search consoles, the search queries it’s sort of already taking into account the voice search but it’s just not segregating them out. And the way for us to look at it logically is anything say which is long tail. There’s a high chance that if it’s a long tail, it could be voice search.

Gary: Well, it also matters how it’s phrased. Because long tail could mean that I’ve picked something from I don’t know Kamasutra a piece of text and pasted it in.

Siddharth: Very interesting example you’re giving here. Okay, okay. Go ahead. I like it.

Gary: Just took a piece of text and pasted it in. I don’t think I know what language is it written in. So I probably would not know what I’m pasting but I would take a sentence or one line, let’s see and paste it in the search box and then see what results come up. That’s a long tail thing because it’s part of a sentence that I copied from a page. The reason I picked Kamasutra is that I don’t know any other book, off the top of my head anyway. And then, that should strike you as a webmaster, as a non-voice query. Because it will be perhaps, obviously either a full sentence or a broken sentence. But then when people ask voice queries than they would ask phrases similarly as they would ask their friend or whoever else like “Ok Google! Why is the Sky blue?”. It’s a question. If you go through search results and see something like this. Then, you as a webmaster can quiet safely assume that there was no one typing why is the sky blue in the search box. Perhaps there would be some users, but my point is that the voice queries are more similar to the natural language than the keyword based searches that we used to do on Desktop.

Third Person: We can’t track keyword queries in Google Analytics as it shows up as not provided. Is that going to change?

Gary: That’s not going to change. So in search console you can definitely see those queries. So that’s why basically we recognize that Google analytics is good for tracking these things but it was giving way too tabular data and our privacy policy is very straight on what kind of data we will give out. But, search console on the other hand can give this data because it strips away pretty much every single data that would allow you to identify single users. That’s why you would track traffic from search in search console and other source of traffic in Google analytics.

Siddharth: Image Optimization. With Image optimization, three main factors that we’re generally talking about is the file name, it’s the content around the image and the alt tag and compression of the image so it shouldn’t be too big. These are generally the four main things right? Out of these four, which do you believe is the main factor that would affect image optimization? In your opinion for webmasters.

Gary: I’ll be throwing one more, that is image schema. I would also throw in image sitemaps. What is the most important? I don’t want to create the illusion that we have we have a rank for these ranking signals. Depending what other results your picture is showing up with in the results, the ranking signals might have different weights. That’s why I’m quite mad that we said that Rank Brain is the third most important because probably you can twist it in a way, it would look like it’s the third most important because it triggers for so many queries. But then in the best majority of the cases, it perhaps will not do pretty much anything for the results. It looks at them, yes, this looks about right to me and it doesn’t change the word. But if triggered, it looks like it we apparently count it as active so it’s counted as the third most important ranking signal  I don’t like that, that’s why I wouldn’t make or create them an order of importance for image searches.

Siddharth: But all of them. Are they important?

Gary: All are important. Typically the more signals you provide the better. I would focus mostly on-page things. So for example. Have your content close to the content because that helps us enormously associate the image with something that we can rank for. For example, if you’re writing about pond, but the image of the pond is next to a content for cats for Old Delhi or whatever, then you might just associate Old Delhi with an image of a pond. That’s not necessarily what users wants so you put your image next to the piece of content where you write about it. Captions are good for these sort of things.

Siddharth: So that’s the title of the image.

Gary: Going further, let’s say that you have an image and right below the image you have caption of the image. File name is also important to some extent. I think we started giving less weight to that because everyone can name their image like cat or whatever and then they expect it will show up for cat) but it still has some weight. Alt attribute value that’s supposed to taken into account. Title is taken into account. Nowadays even the title of the page is taken into account

Third Person: Content of the article is also taken into account

Gary: The problem is that, we got those reports a lot but we keep getting them from sales people, from our own sales people. And, search will not fix anything for sales. Basically the sky can fall and we would just sit there and if the sales reported the sky is falling to us, we would say “sorry, you are sales”

Third Person: Actually it is coming from content, from BBC news. It is coming from content people. Same thing there has been written there.

Gary: I will write down again

Third Person: I think it is important right?

Gary: I like that guy over there a lot

Siddharth: Ya this one, Narendra Modi. How’s it coming for most criminal person in the world. And he’s in Google image search. Someone has I think Google bombed it. It’s taken care of now, Google bomb?

Third person: In text, it’s okay. But in images it is not fine.

Gary: So the thing with Google bomb is that, we believe that we kind of can handle it well or well enough. Basically if you see a spike of something for example, to the same image or same page. All of them saying that criminal or “Obama Criminal” or whatever then it will work unfortunately quite well, or at least it used to work quite well. Now-a-days we believe that we took care of that to the biggest extent and we can still be surprised. I mean our algorithms can still be surprised by very ingenious spammers or scammers who can find new ways to exploit this, loop holes. But, honestly I don’t remember looking into any Google Bomb for many months.

Siddharth: So just coming back to that image search thing. Would you really differentiate the title of the image versus the alt text of the image because what would the difference be because let’s say it’s an image of this diary, I could have both exactly the same right? I’ve always struggled when people say that should be the title and this should be the alt tag.

Gary: I would also not care. Well, from accessibility point of view I would care because I think that the screen readers look for one of them not both, so I would pay more attention to that. And browser if you hover over, that will display the title.

Siddharth: But they can be the same thing? I think they should be the same thing.

Gary: It doesn’t matter I think. I would also argue that it is fine if you only fill out one of them.

Siddharth: So talking about the alt text. People tend to generally, most people they think it’s a place to put keywords whereas the reality of it. Let’s assume it’s this diary that we’re looking at. It is a yahoo diary purple colour. But they were talking about, the page was about shirts. Even though this image is of a diary, they’ll put shirts – blue shirts, green shirts. Right? That I believe is totally wrong and rather it should be. This is a purple color yahoo diary is how this should be called. So does Google therefore really look into this and devalue the thing because people are constantly just doing this. Pretty much nearly every SEO I talk to hasn’t reached a certain level, just thinks of it as keywords “let me put some keywords” into the alt attributes.

Third person: We should write natural name i.e. about diary. And it should be Diary, further name Yahoo Diary. But we don’t need to do keyword stuffing.

Gary: So I believe, if the keywords are not stuffed, they are just purple, diary, yahoo – I can’t come up with any others – that is kind of also fine. It’s not like we’re going to penalize them for that

Siddharth: Ya purple diary yahoo is absolutely fine or yahoo purple diary. That’s all fine. As long as you don’t go and say blue shirt because we’re writing…

Gary: We can differentiate between typical and off topic things, I’m going to tell you how. We can drop those things easily.

Siddharth: And a lot of e-commerce sites tend to because there are 1000s of images on their site and suddenly you go and tell them that “Oh you’re missing an alt attribute here and you need to put for each one”. They look at us and say that’s a massive project. Why would you want to do that? But we believe it’s important right? Every image should have an alt tag. Because that will also add value to the page.

Gary: So basically, if we don’t have enough information on the page or information which can be associated with the image. Then that image will not rank at all or it will rank weakly. And that’s why you want to provide more data similar to for example structured data.

Siddharth: What’s your favorite ranking signal.

Gary: PageRank (backlinks – votes from other sites). I like it because it’s a signal that was created over 20 years ago. And, in a sense, we’re still using the same signal that we used 20 years ago. And I think that something that lasts 20 years, on the internet, that’s worth admiring. I can’t think of any other ranking signal that lasted that long. Basically, we came up with lots of things over the years and basically, we learned something and 2,3,4,5 years later we unlaunched them. I personally unlaunched a dozen ranking signals over the years because they were not relevant anymore or because they were doing the same thing that some other ranking signal indirectly did.

Siddharth: Talking about EAT – Expert Authority and Trust. What exactly is the difference between authority, expertness and trust? Or are they all just the same thing?

Gary: They are pretty much the same thing. I think, if you’re in either one of those, you’re in good category, that’s one thing. If you like more in-depth description then it’s in the latest guidelines.

Siddharth: Yup that’s from Feb 27. I got that of your tweet only at one point.

Gary: So these examples that you see here, these are the rating pages. This is for…. In this case this is, your money your life topic. The page shows characteristics of a low authority sites. No contact information, no indication of, who wrote the content, no evidence of medical expertise, no authority and heavy monetization from ads. Therefore, this page is not trustworthy. So basically, if we know the… ok I will simplify it, if we know the author, and we would be very sure that the author is a doctor and the site is publishing consistently high- quality content. Hence the author of that content are doctors, then that’s basically something that we would trust more because this EAT, this matters a lot in your money your life – topics, keywords where if you get wrong information, then you can actually loose your money or your house or even die.

Siddharth: But so essentially they are the same thing, weather if someone refers to expert means of communication.

Gary: See even there we were using a slash between expertise and authority which means that we are kind of thinking that it’s kind of the same thing. I would say that it’s more that, it’s a description of a bucket so people or sites, pages that are verifiably provide accurate good information.

Siddharth: I’m still getting the feeling that, they’re sort of all very integral to each other, all directly linked. Because if you’re an expert, then you’re trustworthy right? If you’re an authority, you’re trustworthy.

Gary: So you’re an SEO, you know how many experts are in your fieldwork who are not necessarily trustworthy.

Siddharth: But then therefore, they’re not experts. If they were real experts…

Gary: But they’ve made a reputation for themselves that they are experts. I know quite a few of these people who created the image that they’re experts. Basically people trust them, they’re trustworthy. But then they’re preaching non-sense. So yeah I think they’re roughly the same bucket and that they relate to each other.

Change to meet consumer demand is one of the constants when it comes to FMCG growth. Amazon, of course is leading the way in online sales for the FMCG realm, but Woolworths, Bunnings and many more are adapting their sales and delivery methods to meet the demand for online and immediate purchasing. Woolworths, Coles, Officeworks, MYER, Autobarn, JB Hi-Fi and many, many more Australian companies have embraced Click and Collect as well as online shopping and delivery, allowing customers to both purchase and pick up items at their convenience.

According to Christopher Hatfield, Head of ebusiness at Nestle, the world’s largest food and beverage company is maximizing their ecommerce impact by being present in a huge number of channels, from brick and mortar establishments offering online shopping and click and collect, online only delivery services like Amazon and eBay, and direct to consumer avenues like nespresso.com.

One of the driving factors behind this diversification, is that outside of specific products like Nespresso capsules, consumers buy Nestle products as part of a broader basket – items that are added during other shopping rather than products specifically. Another factor is the low average unit value of a number of Nestle items. Having items such as Maggi noodles – $3.95 for a five pack – available from a number of vendors offers a larger consumer base that selling them form a single store front or vendor.

A final key factor in Nestle’s strategy or diversification of ecommerce channels comes down to the fact that FCMG products have traditionally not owned the customer relationship. The retailers themselves hold the relationship with the consumer – Coles or Woolworths shoppers are fairly loyal to their chosen retailer, a habit reinforced by the retail giants through loyalty programs rewarding repeat shoppers. Rather than building a brand identity and purpose like you would if brand marketing, Nestle has instead opted to identify the avenues of sale that already have that customer base and trust.

This, of course, hasn’t stopped Nestle from innovating in their online marketing approach for certain iconic products. In addition to the nespresso.com online store enabling consumers to buy coffee pods, accessories and machines direct, they have also launched the Kit Kat Chocolatory, an online portal for all things Kit Kat, including the option to create your own personalised chocolate bar or box.

Personalisation is a key trend across a number of markets, not just chocolates. The beauty industry is one of the fastest growing ecommerce sectors in Australia, with a massive 36% year on year sales growth in 2019. In 2020 the beauty industry is expected to net around $6.5 billion in the Australian market, and around $532 billion globally. Beauty product sales make up around 11% of total online sales. Why this rapid growth into a shopping avenue that seems on the surface rather incompatible with the products being sold? It comes down to the acceptance and embrace of new technologies and marketing techniques.

L’Oreal acquired the Canadian augmented reality company, Modiface in 2018 and has integrated the AR technology into an avenue for both allowing customers to virtually experiment with products before buying them, as well as a tool for creating personalized beauty regimens. Modiface allows users to upload a picture of themselves to experiment with how different cosmetics and hair colours might look on them, not only giving consumers a chance to try before they buy from the comfort of their home, but also maximizing the time that customers are spending on the site increasing the chance they will buy something.

In addition to virtually testing makeup, L’Oreal also uses the same technology, combined with advanced AI to diagnose signs of skin aging in women. The technology launched in 2019, Vichy SkinConsult^AI uses AI technology to analyse uploaded customer photos to identify seven signs of skin aging, such as under-eye wrinkles and lack of radiance before creating a personalised product regime to deal with their specific skincare needs as part of a subscription service.

Subscription models are becoming more and more prevalent in nearly every market, from beauty to pet care with everything in between. Subscription boxes, such as Bellabox, a cosmetics and skin care package and Dollar Shave Club, a service delivering razors, shave gel, balm and toiletries, add convenience and a sense of value to a purchase, and especially in the case of beauty products, novelty can play a large role in the appeal of such a service, with many boxes including a number of samples or trials of interesting or new products.

The beauty industry hasn’t just embraced new technology, it has also strongly embraced new media when it comes to marketing.  57% of fashion and beauty companies engage in influencer marketing. It’s no wonder, according to a 2019 Influencer Marketing Hub survey, businesses are making $5.20 for every $1 they spend on influencer marketing.

Due both to convenience and ubiquity, it’s no surprise that the number of people ordering on a mobile platform is growing at a massive rate. As of 2019, 26% of orders were placed from a mobile, and that rate is increasing at a rate of 29% YoY, in stark contrast to a decline in desktop and laptop ordering. One of the key factors driving this increase in ordering is apps like Menulog and UberEats, and better mobile optimisation of websites and the massive saturation of handheld devices in Australia. According to a 2019 Deloitte study, mobile penetration in Australia is a staggering 91%, making us one of the most mobile-centric countries of the world. With such penetration, it’s no wonder that more and more Australian are using their mobile devices for browsing and purchasing.

Ensuring that your site is adaptive and mobile friendly is a key step to securing your place in the ecommerce future. There are many steps you can take to properly optimise your site, but one of the first should be compressing images so they don’t take up too much bandwidth and slow down the site. One of Google’s indexing criteria is site speed, so you don’t want to hamstring yourself due to sluggish performance.

Over the two days I attended a number of seminars and panels on a number of marketing topics, but for ease of purpose I’ve split the information from the summit into three distinct categories; Marketing Technology and Innovation, Brand Marketing and Ecommerce. I have also added my own thoughts around topics to give each topic more substance. 

AD BLOCKERS

Did you know that in Australia around 46% of people browsing the Internet use an ad blocker? While it’s hard to accurately judge due to browsing styles, mobile devices and bandwidth limitations, it’s estimated that globally in 2019, around 30% of all Internet users had an ad blocker. The demand is so strong that Google released its own Chrome ad blocker in July 2019. The main takeaway from this must be that we can’t simply rely on traditional advertisements for digital marketing, as a large number of end users will never see our efforts.

As you can see, without an ad blocker, ads are clearly visible on the Daily Telegraph page. In fact, they take up the majority of screen real estate.

The same landing page with an ad blocker activated shows much more content as well as empty screen space.

Many sites require advertising revenue to operate and have taken the step of blocking people from accessing a site with an active ad blocker.

The Impact of Ad Blocking on Marketing and Advertisers

So what digital marketing strategies can we use going forward to adapt and thrive in this new digital marketing landscape? To combat this rise in ad blockers, social media marketing and related spend has increased quite a bit, as the consumers are there and the channel still works for digital marketing as there is no technology in place to block digital marketing posts as yet. That said, the most valuable thing brands can do is invest in search marketing. When a user is going to Google and doing a search they are telling a brand exactly what they are looking for. If a brands ad appears at this time they are not interrupting the user’s journey but are instead enhancing it. 75% of customers say that paid search ads made it easier to find what they were after, and 63% of Internet users have clicked on a Google ad, making it a cost effective and powerful way to develop leads and make sales.

The Google Chrome ad blocker is an interesting development as it hints at what we need to do in order for traditional advertising to be a viable digital marketing strategy again. Rather than blocking all ads, the Chrome ad blocker instead targets ads that breach the Better Ads Standards. This service has already been rolled out as part of Chrome in North America and most of Europe and will be released globally at a later date. The Standards look at the least preferred desktop and mobile advertising experiences, such as full screen scrollovers, popups with a countdown and autoplay videos with sound and set the base standard around blocking the type of ads users dislike most. This may seem rather disheartening, but it also shows that there are ads that end users actually find useful and engaging. Sticking to those types of ads could circumvent s good deal of blocking and help build a brand identity free of any ill will from aggravating ads.

CHAT BOTS

Another idea that was raised at the Summit is that responsiveness is one of the key factors in converting an inquiry into a sale. According to one of the speakers, Jethro Grainger Marsh of Alsco, 10 years ago a fast response was same day, now we expect a response same hour. At small scale it may be possible for people to respond to queries in a timely manner, but when it comes to creating a conversion strategy based around customer experience, a chat bot can be an indispensable tool for rapid response to easy queries, and with training and sufficient AI can answer more complex inquiries in a timely manner.

The simple fact is that between 35% and 50% of B2B sales go to the vendor that responds to inquiries first and the statistics for B2C sales skew even higher. Early in my career I started and ran a small inbound marketing call centre in the telco marketplace. We were very successful, but even back then, quick turnaround was key to sales conversions. Due to the small team and the nature of the work, the sales team was constantly making or taking calls so wouldn’t be able to take all incoming inquiries instantly. We responded to calls as quickly as possible, but often it wasn’t fast enough for the customer. What we discovered was that when we called the customer back, even an hour later we often found that they had already signed with another telco, or that we could not reach then when we attempted to call back and thereby lost the sale.

Given that being able to respond to a lead or an inquiry in a timely manner is key for sales conversion, what can we do to speed up the process? Kat Warboys, Head of Marketing for HubSpot suggests using live chat across key sales pages on your website and the use of chat bots to automate easy inquiries, such as answering FAQs, surface articles from the knowledge base (such as stock availability and location, opening and closing times and basic queries about products or services), assigning more complex queries to a live chat agent and pre-screening customers so the live agent can best serve them. 64% of Internet users say that 24-hour service is the best feature of chat bots, and given that online shops are always open, so taking advantage of an automated assistant that never needs sleep seems like a logical next step in any digital marketing plan.

Rather than trying to hide the fact that you’re using a chat bot by giving it a name, Kat Warboys suggests that you embrace the fact that it is a bot and let that fact be known to avoid any confusion and frustration from customers.

Offsite chat – communication not facilitated through the website directly – should also be prioritised in your digital marketing strategy. Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Slack and Email all play a vital role in converting leads to sales. While email allows for more personalisation in messages, creativity in design and depth of communication, messenger services such as Facebook and Whatsapp allow for fast communication turnaround through chat bots, capable of answering simple enquiries and redirecting more complex inquiries to a live agent, much like their website based counterparts. Facebook Messenger is the most widely used chat platform in the world at the moment, with around 2.5 billion users as of Q4 2019, and Whatsapp closing in fast with 2 billion users, so leveraging this massive user base into your marketing strategy can be an important step forward. Messenger can boast a massive open and clickthrough rate from both live and chat bot generated messages, eclipsing those of email.

Caroline Hugall of IAG suggests one leading approach is to embed the brand’s purpose and identity in the marketing. Examples of brand purpose we were given show the importance of keeping the purpose and identity simple, such as Patagonia (the environment), Cadbury’s (joy) and Nike (inspiration).

I’ve done my own research into some of these brands to see how they have developed their branding. Taking Patagonia as an example, the environmental brand identity is visible from the outset in the website, with a video of outdoor adventure and the second link on the site being to the company’s environmental activism efforts. In 2017, Patagonia released its first ever television ad and rather than focussing on a new line of apparel, a sale or the like, it instead focussed on the importance of protecting American public lands.  In the lead up to the Black Friday sales in 2019, Patagonia released an ad telling customers not to buy a Patagonia jacket, unless they really need it. On top of that, the company devoted all sales on Black Friday to environmental causes.

According to the Accenture Strategy Global Consumer Pulse survey 2018, 62% of consumers believe companies should stand up for issues they are passionate about and 66% highly value transparency in branding. The Don’t Buy This Jacket campaign clearly shows a brand identity strongly aligned with sustainability, recycling, and care for the environment. Giving Black Friday proceeds to environmental causes could also help people self-justify spending money on items they may not need.  With this campaign, Patagonia has effectively marketed a lifestyle and ethos seemingly at the expense of their own brand, but has strengthened their brand identity with both new and established consumers. Keeping the brand identity simple and focussed in one area (or a few closely related areas) can help in both brand building and creating a relationship with the consumer.

Being authentic with the branding and identity is extremely important when it comes to maintaining the trust of customers. Trust is hard to gain but extremely easy to lose, especially in an era of heightened consumer expectations. Building trust can be achieved in a number of different ways but authenticity, consistency and transparency form the basis of a good trust building approach. Authenticity should permeate every level of your company, not just the marketing, as saying one thing but practicing another is a sure way to lose trust. Say, for example, a company markets itself as being devoted to equality (perhaps to coincide with Pride or another celebration of diversity) but has a history of overlooking women for promotion or discriminating against LGBTQI employees. This is a sure way to lose trust from a consumer base. If the company, however, practiced what they preached, then trust could be built with the customers.

Consistency and transparency are the other two pillars on which trust can be build when building a brand identity. Being on message in all content, like the overall environmental bent in the case of Patagonia, or being consistent when it comes to customer experience can all aid in consumers developing trust in a brand. Being transparent not only means showing the ethos of the brand, but owning up to mistakes and responding to complaints.

INFLUENCER MARKETING

Influencer culture has become more and more prevalent with the exponential growth of Youtube, and to a lesser extent, Twitch, Influencer marketing has become more and more prevalent. How influencers are utilized can grossly effect trust in a brand. Oporto utilized influencer marketing when launching a vegan burger. Knowing they would most likely get some flack for launching a vegan burger in a chicken focused fast food chain, the chain chose to invite some of the most vocal haters to come in and eat the new burger. Before serving the burgers, they were first laser branded with the negative comments.

Influencers exist all across social media, but Instagram is a major centre of Influencer marketing, with beauty, travel and lifestyle being the focal point of a great deal of the marketing pushes. While clever influencer marketing, such as the Eat Your Words campaign can be effective, this relatively new avenue for marketing has its share of problems. Sponsored posts on social media and streaming/video services are required to carry a disclaimer that content is sponsored as well as any other codes or indicators as required by law. Many influencers have failed to do this on posts. Influencer marketing company, CollectivEdge found that in 2018, only 38% of brand sponsored posts were disclosed as ads or paid for collaborations.  The lack of disclosure can and will damage the reputation and brand authenticity of both the sponsoring brand and influencer, as well as legal problems.

Similarly, tying a brand to an influencer can also tie a brand identity to that of the influencer. While this can undoubtedly have positive effects, it can also have repercussions if the influencer acts in an inappropriate way. Take for example the immensely popular social media mogul and influencer, Kendall Jenner. Jenner boasts over 120 million Instagram followers and pulls in around $16 million USD a year in sponsored posts. Her reach is obviously very attractive to a number of brands, but this has backfired a number of times. Pepsi chose the very recognizable Kendall Jenner as the face of a 2017 advertising campaign but came under fire for trivializing Black Lives Matter, whitewashing an act of defiance by an African American woman, and pretending that one of the richest celebrities in the world has a grass roots social conscience. Pepsi quickly pulled the campaign.

Also in 2017 Jenner became one of the public faces of the disastrous Fyre Festival. Jenner and a number of other model/influencers including Bella Hadid and Emily Ratajkowski were paid up to $250,000 USD per post to advertise the upcoming music festival. Jenner did this with a single post garnering almost 6 million views before it was deleted. The post touted the music lineup at the festival, hinted that Jenner’s brother-in-law Kanye West might be a performer and offered a discount code for tickets. Not only was the event a disaster, Jenner also neglected to disclose that the post was sponsored, leading to a subpoena as well as the organisers and influencers being sued for “negligent misrepresentation, fraud, breach of contract for failing to ‘provide the festival experience as promised’ as well as ‘misrepresentations’ that caused people to purchase tickets.”

CONTENT FIRST APPROACH

It’s no wonder that some brands are gun-shy about influencer marketing. During a panel on the subject, both Penny Parkinson, CMO of Vet Matters and Natalie Miller, Head of Brand and Communications at the NSW Business Chamber (formerly the NSW Chamber of Commerce) have avoided influencer marketing. Instead, Miller has adopted a web first marketing strategy based around heavily searched content. While she never explicitly used the term SEO during her panel, the NSW Business Chamber approach is SEO through and through. The content rich site currently contains around 700 articles answering commonly asked questions or search terms, such as, “how much should I pay an intern?” or “workplace advice line”.

In my experience, the first step to both establishing an authentic brand identity and effectively marketing that brand is to understand your customer. This is especially true when optimising SEO. In a panel on B2B Brand Awareness Strategy, one of the panellists, Robin Marchant, Head of marketing, APAXC for Shopify Plus used the example of trying to market software to medical practises. The assumption was made that people would be searching for “health software” but that didn’t work as the target market were those managing the clinics, so they were searching for “practise management software”.

People are always hungry for content. People are looking for tips. Listicles work well, case studies, whitepapers. You should put together content that will make your customers look good, but should always consider the target audience or market. By using SEO techniques, knowing the market and researching what that market will be searching for, I have managed to raise and keep my 2018 Digital Marketing Ted talk to the top of Google.

For more Forward Marketing Summit 2020 posts, check out Technology and Innovation and Ecommerce.