How an Inbound Marketing Inquiry led to Irrationality
Like all inbound marketers Sherlock Holmes is no stranger to juggling many different talents simultaneously to get results. He’s also no stranger to navigating project management chaos to end up with strong results. However Sherlock might be more fantastic than his marketing counterparts because he can walk into anyone’s house smoking a pipe in a deerstalker hat without any repercussions.
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"You know my methods, Watson”.
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The Truth about Relativity
User based Segmentation can work on a broad scale however Sherlock Holmes knows what happens when he advertises his services to the masses!
Customers may potentially use search engines to find a “detective” and or “Investigator” however this completed search is ambiguous and the common customer might not be interested in a Private detective.
As a result Holmes may spend more hours than needed speaking to the wrong people. Search queries become even more ambiguous through translation overseas. Therefore Content Marketers need to organise there content universally to be accessible and useful to target customers.
Some ways which we can organise and group our online content is through the use of search, whereas groups of keywords or phrase types used are matched to "Informational, Transactional or Navigation" based keyword or phrase types.
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| "By heavens, Holmes, I believe that they are really after us." |
1. Setting the Expectation
Until our world starts to look more like something that George Lucas and Rupert Murdock would have collaborated on, there’s no way for us to know exactly what every user is thinking when they search or come to a site.
There are a vast amount of Social tools that can be used to tap into the existing conversation and understand common phrases and keywords. You can also use mechanisms on Facebook such as Facebook insights. Additionally use page post ads to learn more on what phrase types or keywords achieve greater results .
In most cases it’s good enough to just pop your keyword into a Twitter with a # and sift through how people or personas are talking about it.
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| "Now Said Holmes to Watson, the fair sex is your department" |
Personas usually are groups of individuals who suit a particular target group for content marketing purposes. Depending on how in-depth you would like to go, it is possible to create personas based on personality identify, place, ethnicity, frequency of website visits or lack there of, in the event you’d just like to rewards users if you like.
The purpose of a persona is actually to identify a target audience and rely on them as a reference point to communicate marketing activity.
Personas are typically employed by usability tests but as you may imagine their implications are more granular when applied to Search.
There are plenty of tools that give you demographic persona data like Neilsen, ComScore, Hitwise and Google Ad Planner but in most cases social listening by itself is better because this activity provides real time insights into conversation from selected audiences.
3. Understanding the Bounce
Once you have identified keywords that fall into multiple need states you then have something worth A/B testing. In this case we have contextual elements to test which we can easily accomplish with an A/B test.
A/B testing can be used for multilingual and mobile websites, creative messaging and display. Context detection can then be configured to ensure that the appropriate content is delivered to users depending on, for example, their device and location.
Marketers need to understand how consumers use different types of search terms as shown in the table below. The search matrix graph illustrates the repeated use of different types or phrase types used of search terms for a single customer during his or her customer journey (other digital channels such as affiliates are ignored here).
The keywords and phrase type group matching selected personas in the above matrix can also be clarified in an A/B test. This type of approach can help with optimising your website with clean URLs, Title Tags, Meta Descriptions and Body copy to a certain extent towards your target personas.
The keywords and phrase type group matching selected personas in the above matrix can also be clarified in an A/B test. This type of approach can help with optimising your website with clean URLs, Title Tags, Meta Descriptions and Body copy to a certain extent towards your target personas.
That is to say the landing page with the lower bounce rate, higher time on site and highest number of pageviews is the owner of that keyword or phrase type selected for your Organic Search campaign.
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The Story of a Content Marketer...
Once you have identified keywords that fall into multiple need states you then have something worth A/B testing. In this case we have contextual elements to test which we can easily accomplish with an A/B test.
4. Know your Target Personas, Know your Target Keywords
Marketers need to understand how consumers use different types of search terms as shown in the table below. The search matrix graph illustrates the repeated use of different types or phrase types used of search terms for a single customer during his or her customer journey (other digital channels such as affiliates are ignored here).
The above graph is an example of keyword or phrase type weighted allocation from the same customer using various keyword searches and key phrases across branded search and generic to find useful and accessible content.
An additional way to visualise this across a rage of keywords or phrase types is to classify them as generic, long-tail (complex 4+ keywords) or brand. This can give you a similar type graph once mapped out.
5. Optimise to Win in each Market!
The keywords and phrase type group matching selected personas in the above matrix can also be clarified in an A/B test. This type of approach can help with optimising your website with clean URLs, Title Tags, Meta Descriptions and Body copy to a certain extent towards your target personas.
The keywords and phrase type group matching selected personas in the above matrix can also be clarified in an A/B test. This type of approach can help with optimising your website with clean URLs, Title Tags, Meta Descriptions and Body copy to a certain extent towards your target personas.
That is to say the landing page with the lower bounce rate, higher time on site and highest number of pageviews is the owner of that keyword or phrase type selected for your Organic Search campaign.
In Conclusion
“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, it must be the truth?” - Sherlock Holmes
