November 20, 2018

Paid Search, Display & SEO Seminar Roundup: 15 November 2018

Last Thursday, Figaro Digital hosted a Paid Search, Display & SEO Seminar at The Hospital Club, Covent Garden. Our speakers gave important tips on how to maximise the content you already have and how to defend your brand in a competitive market. Filling editorial gaps, protecting your brand, and optimising new and existing content were common themes throughout the afternoon. The presentations offer practical advice and invaluable takeaways for search and display marketers.

Making Your Content Marketing/Digital PR Campaign Work Harder

Massive advertising budgets do not always guarantee the success of a campaign, which is a common misconception amongst marketers. Pepsi proved this last year with their ad campaign starring Kendall Jenner. Despite their budget of $100 million, the TV advert sparked outrage and was widely considered a flop. Laura Crimmons, Founder of Silverthorn, reveals how you can amplify the impact of your content without spending large amounts of money. She urges marketers to focus on spending less and delivering more. For many this may seem like a daunting request, as success is most frequently associated with spending big. Laura breaks down the best approach to savvy content marketing and digital PR in easy to follow steps.

Her first tip may seem obvious, but she reminds marketers that the audience should always be at the centre of campaigns. This means that both the end audience (the customer) and the middle audience (journalists and influencers) are important in guaranteeing the success of your marketing campaign. It is key to appeal to both sets of audiences as journalists are more likely to cover your campaign if it’s something that interests them. Incorporating a strong narrative is essential for making your campaign work harder. Laura suggests the “Pub Test” to decide whether your content is captivating enough to prompt discussion. Another important way for marketers to ensure that they are getting the most from their campaign is to have several angles and releases for one piece of content. This way you can target multiple media sources and broaden your appeal. Revisiting and refreshing old campaigns is a good way of making content stretch further with little extra cost. In her presentation, Laura discusses how to implement her strategy of spending less and delivering more.

View Laura’s presentation here.

Protect Your Brand: The Best Brand Offence Is A Good Defence

For many companies, maintaining the image and reputation of their brand is of upmost importance. Therefore, it’s not surprising that 80 per cent of CMOs are worried about brand safety. It ranks second place on their list of priorities, just below transparency. Ashley Fletcher, VP of Marketing for Adthena, believes that the best way to protect your brand is to have a good offensive strategy. He proposes that AI and machine learning are the most foolproof ways of monitoring brand bidding in real time, and at scale. AI has becoming increasingly more effective at understanding context and semantics, so it is a very beneficial tool for search marketers to have in their repertoire.

In his presentation, Ashley outlines the dangers posed by brand bidding and shows how AI can offer a solution. He delivers some startling statistics that help drive home how widespread the issue is. On average 19 per cent of searches per day have trademark infringements, 1 in 3 searches are brand bidding related, and in some sectors there’s a potential for a 63 per cent loss in brand revenue. Adthena believe that implementing AI will protect your brand on an unrivaled scale and Ashley explains how their company’s technology can achieve this. He demonstrates why defining and automating daily workflow and understanding the patterns of brand bidding are key offensive positions to take. Ashley ends his presentation with four important points to remember. To learn more about his essential takeaways, you can watch his presentation in full on our website.

View Ashley’s presentation here.

The Essential Frameworks For Digital Marketing Glory

Simon Douglass, Founder of Curated, explains that many marketers are not gaining “digital marketing glory” as they are failing to set proper goals. Instead, they are asking for vague and general help on PPC and SEO, without really specifying what they hope to achieve in the long run. He encourages companies to adopt the “Prioritisation Matrix”. Marketers should start by creating a list of their key products, or services, and allocate an opportunity score for each. Simon also suggests selecting five business criteria to concentrate on, eg revenue from Google Analytics or organic keyword visibility. By collating this information, it will become clear what your priorities should be.

Gap Analysis is another essential framework to consider. Marketers need to pinpoint keywords and manually research their results. These results need to be analysed to see where there is poor, or missing content. Once you have identified the editorial gaps relating to the chosen keywords, you need to define new themes which cover these areas. As well as Gap Analysis and the Prioritisation Matrix, Simon offers seven helpful steps to make your digital marketing strategy even better. He explains that the Google Keywords tool is not the only way to research keywords and experimenting with different ones could give you a wider scope. Utilising ad extensions and pushing USPs are some simple ways to make your website stand out on SERPs. Additionally, consistent testing, tracking and reporting are Simon’s top tips to gain glory in digital marketing. This will help you to keep up to date with the patterns of your customer and competitors. Watch Simon’s presentation for more information on how you can implement these frameworks to improve your strategy.

View Simon’s presentation here.

Life, Death And Lessons Learned In 2018

Google’s August 2018 Core Algorithm Update, nicknamed The Medic, caused mass confusion amongst search marketers. It earned its nickname as a result of the sites it hit the hardest; low quality blogs or sites that offered professional and medical advice saw their rankings significantly drop. The update targeted those who claimed to be experts and had the potential to harm people by offering amateur advice. Sam Roberts, Digital Marketing Consultant at Liberty Marketing, offers his insight on how to beat this latest update.

The purpose of The Medic update is to encourage sites to become more trustworthy and authoritative. Websites need to make it clear that their content is written by experts, featuring clear authority signals on both a page and site wide level. Your whole website is being checked, so you need to check back through old content and make sure it’s not negatively impacting your rankings. However, this is not a reason to mass delete all past articles that may be problematic. You can use this as an opportunity to revisit your old content, improving or removing as relevant. Auditing is key and you should use data to inform your decisions.  Next, you should catalogue your content, taking into account small ranking jumps and seasonality. You can optimise and recycle old content by updating previous images and layouts. Additionally, you can improve internal links and update keyword research to boost the overall rankings of your site. Watch Sam’s presentation for more inspiration on how to refresh your website and beat The Medic update.

 

View Sam’s presentation here.

If you missed out on last week’s seminar, why not join us for our Email Marketing & CRM: Seminar on Wednesday 21 November. For more information you can view the full agenda here.