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Why Humans Should Attend Conferences — Like Adobe Summit 2017

You’re seated 20 rows back from a massive stage. The lights dim, the music swells, and 38 coordinated projectors light up the backdrop with engaging motion graphics and video. Amazing presenters and thought leaders position themselves centerstage and deliver presentations that make you rethink the ways in which you are managing your business. You keep thinking of all the people who should be here with you, listening to all this great advice. The whole experience is overwhelming. It’s not only an inspiring experience, but also emotionally engaging — you can feel it.

If you’ve ever experienced this, you understand why being physically present at an amazing conference is so powerful. Sure, you could spend some extra time browsing the Internet, searching for interesting topics and articles. You tell yourself that you’ll keep up with the news and trends or strike up conversations with a few peers in the industry. But the truth is, you never do it.

And that’s why you should attend a conference as big and as amazing as Adobe Summit — it forces you to grow.

Adobe Summit — The Experience
Adobe Summit brings together hundreds of speakers, thought leaders, and experts who feed you all the latest trends and inspiration you can digest — all while you sit back in your seat and soak it all in. Plus, you’re surrounded by marketing peers who share their experiences with you, helping you feel more confident about how to improve your company’s digital marketing.

It’s an experience that provides vision, confidence, and real-world expertise — an emotional experience that you can’t always achieve just by watching a few videos online or reading a single article. The combined inspiration and impact far outweighs the time or cost it takes to attend the conference. It’s all about the experience.

Adobe Summit’s Revamped Marketing Innovations Track
Adobe Summit is an experience you can’t afford to miss. And, when it comes to inspiration, we’ve made some improvements this year that are certain to sweeten the deal.

This year, we’re excited to announce a reimagined Marketing Innovations track at Summit. We’ve expanded the track to include three times the number of sessions, and we’ve elevated the type of content and insights to better help companies not only understand, but also thrive in the new digital landscape.

The new Marketing Innovations track will focus on two types of inspiration — innovation of thought and innovation of action. For innovation of thought, we’re hosting a variety of speakers, best-selling authors, and thought leaders who will inspire you with big ideas, trends, and guidance on digital transformation. For innovation of action, we’re inviting a variety of brands, CMOs, and entrepreneurs who will share insights as well as examples of how they are using technology to push the limits of digital marketing with their companies.

In addition to numerous outside experts who will be joining us in the Marketing Innovations track, we have several experts from Adobe who will provide deep insights on topics such as future digital trends, the value of design in business ROI, and the role of technology in digitally transforming your company.

The idea is to expand the inspiration you typically find on mainstage presentations and make it available through a variety of topics and at times that will fit your conference schedule. The sessions in the Marketing Innovations track are available to everyone at Adobe Summit — from CEOs to practitioners. Simply visit Summit.Adobe.com to view our session catalog and read more details about all our sessions in the Marketing Innovations track.

Final Thoughts — The Importance of Experience
Today, the brand experience is what differentiates the leaders from the followers. The customer experience is everything. It’s the collective emotions and associations we give to a company. It’s how we, as humans, connect with brands.

If you are a marketer or leader who is trying to better understand how you can create the right experiences for your brand, then attending Adobe Summit is essential. It not only offers a real-world example of an amazing brand experience, but also gives you the tools and knowledge you need to build experiences for your brand that are just as powerful.

In short, it will inspire you beyond your own efforts to keep up with the constant change in digital marketing. So, check out this year’s sessions and tracks and join us for Adobe Summit 2017 on March 21–23 in Las Vegas — and prepare yourself for a truly inspiring experience.

The post Why Humans Should Attend Conferences — Like Adobe Summit 2017 appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/digital-marketing/humans-attend-conferences-like-adobe-summit-2017/

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Eight Steps to Creating Extraordinary Content

From networking equipment to retail goods, the purchasing process across products and industries has changed — consumers have taken control. Now, when a young family goes to pick out their first vehicle, they don’t head to the showroom floor. Instead, they connect with brands online and build their dream digital vehicle, choosing every detail from engine model to seat fabric. Only then do they head to a local dealership with their custom product specifications already in hand.

In response, nearly every company today practices content marketing as a core strategy. Because brands from every industry are catching on to the importance of their content as part of a valuable customer experience, they are dedicating more resources to finding their secret sauce for standing out in this crowded space.

As a result, they are discovering that creating truly useful content to meet customers where and when they will find it most valuable is an organization-wide endeavor. To meet the demand, many brands are shifting their strategies to create a culture of content that permeates every internal department and team.

These Eight Changes Can Help You Build a Culture of Content in Your Company.
Here are eight changes we’re seeing in content marketing and how brands can — and are — taking advantage of those changes to effectively create an internal culture of content.

1. Customer Experience Is NOW a Part of Company Culture.
The writing’s on the wall: in the next 10 years, Business Insider projects that 40 percent of companies will cease to exist after failing to meet changing customer needs. Yet, while brands know the need is there, making the shift from a product-focused business to a customer-first company can be challenging and takes time. Rely on data to obtain leadership buy-in and make it a strategic imperative. Strive to include the entire organization — a company-wide commitment to being customer obsessed. And remember, a company transformation takes time, so expect at least a five-year commitment to the process. To keep commitment high along the way, celebrate even the smallest wins.

2. Brands Are Getting Serious About Defining Their Content Strategies.
In 2017, according to Curata, 51 percent of companies will have an appointed executive — a chief content officer or VP of content, for example — whose work is dedicated solely to the brand’s content marketing strategy. In addition, 75 percent of brands are increasing their content marketing investments. This means that, to stand out, brands are treating their content as a strategic asset.

Defining your content marketing strategy can help you better understand where you need to go with your content, what you need to get there, and how to measure success once you arrive. A written, documented strategy justifies the budget, helping you meet the needs of your target audience while adding value to your organization. Begin with outlining the need for content marketing by creating a business case. Define audience personas and develop your brand’s story. Finally, create a channel plan to determine the best placement for your content.

3. Companies Are Shifting Audience Preferences to a Front-and-Center Position.
At this point, buyers expect you to deliver relevant, meaningful content whenever and however they want it. And, they won’t take “no” for an answer. A full 43 percent of consumers say they ignore companies that deliver irrelevant content, and according to a survey by Gigya, 32 percent will go as far as to boycott brands’ sites and apps for the same reason. So, brands are taking time to understand the interests, goals, and aspirations of the people whom they want to motivate to interact with their brand and are extending their reach to be where their customers are.

When millennial Trevor Noah took over the host position for Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, viewers began searching for Noah’s marital and relationship status online. The brand saw an opportunity to engage and created hidden videos of the host responding to these and other popular fan queries. The videos, which could only be found when searching promoted terms on Google, were a hit with fans and demonstrated Comedy Central’s reach beyond the television screen.

To respond to customers’ demands for relevancy, begin by gathering all customer data under one umbrella — regardless of device or channel — to create a single view of your customers. Then, take inventory of audience behaviors and learn how your audience members react with your brand so you can offer personalized messaging wherever they are.

4. Following the Customer Journey Is Now an Official Job — Complete With a Title.
As much as 78 percent of consumers will not engage with brand offers if they’re irrelevant to them based on their previous engagements with the brand. For content to drive results, it’s critical to optimize it according to its position along the customer journey. And, while 65 percent of companies have not appointed a central authority responsible for overseeing the customer journey, some brands are catching on to the need and are dedicating whole teams to the endeavor.

The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) created an exclusive team of superstars — called “Superstar DJs” — whose sole purpose is to manage the customer journey and their content’s place in it. Take a page from their playbook and assemble a team to look at your brand’s customer journey holistically rather than focusing only on individual touchpoints. Look at how your customers interact with your content at each stage of the journey. Test and troubleshoot to deliver highly relevant content exactly when the customer needs it. Then, empower your team to deliver streamlined customer experiences by enabling them to create, test, publish, and analyze content without having to rely on other business units. Lastly, don’t forget to make it a fun experience for the team. As a result of these efforts, RBS’s Superstar DJs cut the rollout of streamlined customer experiences from months down to weeks.

5. Marketing Collaboration Is Taking on New Meaning. Collaboration Is Cross-Functional.
RBS’s Superstar DJs use a real-time dashboard to track sudden changes and collaborate to act in the interest of their customers. In addition, they share this dashboard across all areas of the company and even bring in “Guest DJs” from other departments — their call-centers, HR, and legal departments — to share relevant insights and perspectives they’ve gleaned about customers’ needs and wants. These insights are all used in strategies that shape the brands’ winning customer experience.

For content strategy to make a difference in the customer experience, all parts of your organization need to work together, efficiently exchanging information and sharing insights to create a complete strategy. Knock down organizational silos by providing a real-time environment for coordinating project schedules and details. Give teams access to a shared dashboard with metrics and goals and ensure everyone knows which part of the journey they are accountable for.

6. Content Is Being Delivered at Lightning Speed.
With so many choices, enticing people to consume and engage with brand content is more difficult than ever before. Seventy-one percent of marketers say they have to create 10 times as many assets to support their different channels, and 85 percent say they’re under pressure to create assets more quickly. As a result, brands are putting processes and systems in place that allow creative teams to produce high volumes of assets quickly and empower marketers to publish and update without having to wait for approvals.

Essilor of America struggled to keep up with the content demand of their four distinct brands — all requiring television and digital campaigns and all with unique identities. They used standardized templates and digital assets that they could quickly customize to align with each brand identity. In only six months, they launched their new site and had three new sites poised to launch within 10 weeks.

You can see these types of results, too. Create powerful content by developing a process that’s agile, ensuring brand consistency across channels and leaning on data to deliver relevance at scale.

7. Brands Are Aligning Business Goals With Customer Experiences.
By 2020, customer experience will surpass both price and product as differentiators. And brands are preparing for this shift. One-third of companies are going the extra mile to ensure great customer experiences by tying employee incentives to customer-experience metrics. To do so, they’re updating their metrics to measure the customer experience. For example, interaction metrics measure how deeply content is resonating with consumers, and engagement metrics — percentage of content consumed, for example — measure the quality of brand content.

Translate your vision for customer centricity by identifying which areas are most relevant to teams and developing appropriate metrics for employees to work toward. Then, use refined reporting to allow your team to see what’s working and what’s not at every customer touchpoint — not just the last click — so they can optimize for best results every step of the way.

8. Employees Organization-Wide Are Being Rewarded for Customer-First Performances.
To ensure their employees go above and beyond to create exceptional customer experiences, RBS induced internal competition with a billboard that displays how each of their DJs are performing around their customer-centric metrics on a weekly basis. Then, they extended this recognition to guest DJs — executive board members and managers from across the organization. Lastly, they rewarded qualifying DJs with a shiny new pair of Diamante headphones. In doing so, they sent a message across the organization that customer-centric employees will be noticed, appreciated, and rewarded.

Find innovative ways to show employees that what they do contributes to the overall goals of the company to create engaged, motivated, and productive teams. A happy workforce leads to higher profits, increased productivity, and greater customer engagement — the path to happy customers and better experiences. Encourage customer-centric behaviors in your employees by empowering them to do whatever is needed to improve the customer experience and arming them with the training and tools to do the job well.

Final Thoughts: How Brands Can Stay on Track for the Long Haul.
Without strong content processes in place, your content marketing efforts — and, by extension, customer experiences — will never be more than mediocre. Becoming a customer-centric organization that delivers the experiences your customers demand in 2017 is challenging — but not impossible. Once you’re on your way to a culture of content, make it worth your while by keeping the momentum going and on track with these final tips:

• Let strategy be your guide in developing processes around content that moves your brand forward in the most efficient and agile way.
• Identify your contributors for fresh perspectives and unique ideas.
• Establish controls and be clear about who can do what with channel and brand guidelines.
• Know the ‘why?’ behind every piece of content, ensuring customers move smoothly through the journey.
• Plan your calendar with content scheduled in advance.
• Test, optimize, analyze, and repeat.

For a more comprehensive overview of creating a culture of content, download our whitepaper, “The Culture of Content — Nine Steps to Content Marketing Excellence.”

The post Eight Steps to Creating Extraordinary Content appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/web-experience/eight-steps-creating-extraordinary-content/

Even Better Strategies for Measuring Mobile App Success

When Facebook first rolled out to the public back in September 2006, it was pretty green — in fact, we were all a little green. Yet, success was instantaneous, and the platform’s user base grew exponentially practically overnight. Analysts used the growing number of people active on the platform as a measure to guide strategy and future success.

But failing to properly align your strategy with the right insight — not using the right metrics, measures, and key performance indicators (KPIs) — can have a negative impact. Facebook quickly learned that, despite a staggering user base, misaligned metrics were demonstrating a false positive. Analysts knew how many people were using the platform, but they didn’t know the actual value of each user, which mattered — quite a bit, actually — as lack of insight at this level meant they were unable to monetize properly. Eventually, they discovered they were ineffectively targeting mobile, but no one knew it.

In the developing world, where many potential users only had connectivity via their mobile devices, the platform was earning a measly 32 cents per user in 2012. With an almost saturated market elsewhere, it was critical for Facebook to focus on this segment. When analysts learned that one of their KPIs was making money through mobile, they shifted focus, and the metrics started to make business sense. With this information, Facebook was able to begin optimizing to boost key mobile metrics and effectively quadrupled this segment’s value within a span of three years.

Four Strategies for Measuring Mobile App Success
Let’s assume that you’re not just doing mobile simply because everyone else is, but that you realize it’s a strategic business enabler. What now? It’s time to dig deep to develop your mobile app strategy, understand its place and value in reaching your business goals, and design KPIs that are aligned with those imperatives. Facebook’s ‘strategy conundrum’ isn’t rare, but it can be avoided. Here are four strategies for measuring mobile app success in relation to your business goals.

1. Think More Broadly About KPIs.
Every mobile app campaign is unique, and KPIs vary significantly not only by industry, but also by the stage of the customer journey in which you want to drive insight and action. Traditional metrics have their place, but it makes sense to think more broadly about KPIs in terms of how they roll into your overall marketing strategy or strategic imperative and then create more granular KPIs to reach those imperatives.

Decide which broad KPIs to target based on your business goals. For example, if your goal is to increase revenue, look at how your mobile app is driving net new revenue. What growth opportunities are available? Are there new markets or customer segments that could help drive that revenue growth? If brand building is the goal, think awareness or loyalty. Are the right audiences using your products?

Then, look at how these broad goals can be broken down into more specific and tangible KPIs to measure their success. Lifetime value is a KPI associated with the goal of obtaining new revenue growth. Intention as a KPI addresses brand loyalty. Other KPIs include average revenue per user, daily active users, and monthly active users, among others. The key is to think broadly — to understand the context of KPIs within the framework of strategic imperatives and then match specific KPIs accordingly.

But, be careful that you test to understand whether these KPIs are effectively giving you the insights you need. For instance, on your website, average time spent onsite could indicate deeper engagement and content relevancy; however, a longer average time spent on your mobile app could indicate that your user is stuck and, thus, frustrated. If your customers are consistently lingering on a specific app task, it may indicate a problem.

2. For Accurate Insights, Take Your Mobile App Strategy out of the Silo.
It’s important to track success across the entire mobile app lifecycle — acquisition, engagement, monetization, and retention. But, it’s just as important to understand, analyze, and drive insight from your customers’ end-to-end multichannel journeys. More than the mobile app lifecycle, your strategy needs to look at mobile in its entirety and within the context of a much larger, multichannel approach that includes traditional mobile web, desktop, and even the Internet of Things, when applicable. Take your mobile app strategy out of the silo and obtain a more reliable, big-picture view.

For example, without looking at a specific customer’s or segment’s entire journey with your brand, it may seem that an in-app message announcing a new item isn’t receiving engagement and, therefore, isn’t resonating with your audience to drive revenue. The reality may be that those same users have already received a similar promotional email and perhaps even purchased the product as a result. By looking at the entire customer journey across channels and devices, you can better measure what’s working and what’s not to drive revenue and achieve your business goals.

3. Create Custom Metrics to Better Serve Your Needs.
Mobile apps and their usage are extremely contextual, making it easy to create some pretty specific KPIs that align with business objectives. For example, it’s easy to determine whether an app was downloaded but never opened or if a cart was abandoned. But remember, KPIs are assessment tools to measure how well your mobile app is helping to progress your business goals. So, when developing KPIs, always start with your business goals and create your KPIs around them. Custom KPIs can be derived from or calculated by combining simple metrics into a unique, standalone formula.

In this process, there’s one important distinction to keep in mind: all KPIs are metrics, but not all metrics are KPIs. Metrics measure the health of your marketing activities, but KPIs are directly aligned to your business goals, informing you if you’re moving the ball in the right direction relative to your strategic imperatives. In Facebook’s case, their initial metric was number of users, but their business goal was to monetize their efforts, not to show how popular the platform was. So, the true indicator of success was not number of users, but rather, their metrics surrounding mobile, as this was where they could determine whether they were properly monetizing the platform. By tying their metrics to their business goals, they created KPIs that truly indicated whether the platform was successful from a business perspective.

With the right tools and capabilities, it’s possible to reach fairly granular levels of customization and segmentation that can provide even more insight into which metrics are true indicators of business success and how you can optimize your app to boost those numbers.

4. Focus on Your Customer to Build Long-Term Value.
Is it possible to measure how effectively your app is meeting customer expectations? Are you designing your app to deliver the best experience possible by reducing fields or making rewards easier to use? Take advantage of great mobile and omnichannel analytics solutions to help answer these questions. Simple, intuitive insights into customer touchpoints along the journey can help you measure customer experience and attribution. Understanding dissatisfaction, and then taking marketing action, places the focus on the customer, improving customer experience and building long-term value.

Here’s a great example. National Australia Bank is recognized as a leader in digital strategy with a robust, multichannel marketing group that includes mobile. Through customer-journey analysis, they noticed an abrupt drop-off at a certain stage for users who were trying to navigate the application process for loan approval. Once they identified where the fall-off was happening, they were able to attribute it to a small glitch in a smartphone platform. By placing the focus on the customer, they identified and fixed the problem, improving the customer journey, streamlining the loan-approval process, and increasing revenue potential via the mobile app channel by nearly 600%!

Final Thoughts
Driven by a misinformed, misaligned strategy, mobile app metrics can become nothing more than vanity, creating false positives and leading to inaccurate conclusions about where your strategy is headed. Establish thoughtful KPIs that are aligned to your business objectives and identify metrics that will best represent those KPIs. Take the time to better align your mobile app strategy with insight, think broadly, get out of the silo, and drive the end-to-end multichannel insight necessary to achieve your higher level corporate and strategic imperatives.

The post Even Better Strategies for Measuring Mobile App Success appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/mobile/even-better-strategies-measuring-mobile-app-success/

How to prepare for voice search

Point of Sale: Retail & Travel Weekly

This week’s articles look at how incomplete web content could lead to a loss in sales, the organizational shakeup that could be coming to the retail industry, the aspects of a website that consumers expect to be personalized, and more!

• Why incomplete website content leads to lost sales [Internet Retailer]: A staggering majority of shoppers have decided against purchasing from a site due to missing or incomplete content.
• For Retail, the Next Big Shakeup Is Organizational [eMarketer]: The traditional retail structure may be a thing of the past, as technology advances change the landscape.
• Consumers Want These E-Commerce Website Elements Personalized [MarketingProfs]: Coupons and shipping information top the results from a recent study on personalization.
• Sam’s Club challenges Amazon Go with Scan & Go app [Mobile Commerce Daily]: Sam’s Club’s expansion of its Scan & Go app and the recently touted Amazon Go technology is causing retailers to rethink the in-store shopping experience.
• Does Cart Abandonment Really Come Down to Cost? [eMarketer]: The cost of shipping and the overall cost of the order were the two most-cited reasons for customers abandoning their shopping carts in Q4.
• Best marketers in multichannel space pay attention to lifetime value: Google exec [Mobile Marketer]: Some marketers are shifting their attention to the measure of customer-lifetime value.
• Retail Shoppers, What Frustrates You Most About the Physical Store? [eMarketer]: In the growing world of e-commerce, consumers cite several annoyances with shopping in brick-and-mortar stores.

The post Point of Sale: Retail & Travel Weekly appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/news-and-resources/point-sale-retail-travel-weekly-33/

Creative’s Role in Performance Marketing

The post Creative’s Role in Performance Marketing appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/digital-marketing/creatives-role-performance-marketing/

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Sneaks — A Sneak Peek into the Future of the Experience Business at Adobe Summit 2017

It’s coming up quickly — Adobe Summit is right around the corner, and we’re busy preparing the content for everything from the keynote demos to the incredibly fun ‘Sneaks’ session. I’m fortunate to be in a position to work with all the technology teams across Adobe to identify the technologies and product messages for the event. We start this process early and work with hundreds of people to get it dialed in. Right now, we’re in the final stages of selecting the concepts and prototypes that we want to share during the Sneaks session. It’s an exciting — and stressful — build up to the big show and an incredible amount of fun. I’ll share a little about what goes into the Sneaks session and what you can expect.

What Goes Into the Sneaks Session
Sneaks is the closing keynote at Adobe Summit. After two days packed with great content, this session is designed to wrap it all up with entertainment, fun, snacks, drinks, and a glimpse into the future of the Experience Business. We kick off the session by bringing in a celebrity host to join me on stage — and every year, I am star-struck. In the past, we’ve had Carrie Brownstein, Eric Stonestreet, Wayne Brady, Davina McCall, and Thomas Middleditch. This year, we are incredibly honored to have Kate McKinnon, from Saturday Night Live and Ghostbusters, join us. It’s a bit intimidating to share the stage with someone like Kate, but it also makes it so incredibly fun. Having a comedian like Kate join us also adds a layer of unpredictability, keeping us on our toes. If you can’t tell, I’m thrilled to be able to host the session with her.

The session format is rapid-fire demos of prototypes and concepts — each lasting about four minutes — straight from the labs and presented by the engineers who built them. I introduce the demos and their intended purposes, and then Kate will weigh in, asking questions that she has or that she thinks the audience might have. On top of that, the audience can participate by providing feedback and asking questions through Twitter. Basically, it’s always one step away from a potential train wreck. Prototype demos could fail, or conversations could go anywhere — but, that’s how we like it. Since the demos are just prototypes, we keep the whole session light and enjoyable. If one breaks, we all laugh and move on. If it wows, we cheer and move on. That’s the nature of Sneaks — casual, unscripted, and lots of fun. The audience loves it!

What You Can Expect From Sneaks This Year
As I noted, we’re right in the middle of the selection process for Sneaks. My teams are working with the engineering and product teams to review their ideas and help them prepare for mainstage presentations. The ideas we’ve seen so far are amazing! There is so much innovation across Adobe — from creative to marketing to experience business, we’re seeing new and compelling ideas left and right. Some of the categories for Sneaks are starting to shape up and include the automation of content for personalization, the integration of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) into marketing and customer experiences, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, and new tools to connect your business to emerging business channels.

See You in Las Vegas!
We’re seeing some great things come together as we get closer and closer to the event. I will try to send out a few more updates as the big date approaches. We look forward to seeing you in Vegas with Kate McKinnon and our product teams for the incredibly fun Sneaks session!

Learn more about Sneaks in my Facebook Live interview.

The post Sneaks — A Sneak Peek into the Future of the Experience Business at Adobe Summit 2017 appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/digital-marketing/sneaks-sneak-peek-future-experience-business-adobe-summit-2017/

My bullets are green, but my post doesn’t rank?!

Having a Leading Web CMS is Now Table Stakes

Since 2011, much has changed in the way the web — and, in a broader sense, digital experiences — has shaped not only how businesses compete, but also our expectations as individuals. I’m honored to share that Adobe has been recognized as a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Web Content Management Systems, Q1 2017.

Having a Leading Web Content Management System (CMS) Is Now Table Stakes.
Today, it’s table stakes for global brands to have a leading web content management system as the backbone of their overall digital-transformation strategy. The fast-paced challenge of delivering uniquely compelling experiences that incite engagement and drive business growth is too demanding. After extensive research, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee — the authors of The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies — noted the pace of digitization will continue to accelerate exponentially. The last thing a business can afford to do is make the mistake of choosing a web CMS that is “good enough” only to realize later, it is not. Having to pause to swap out your CMS because it doesn’t support your business goals or your customers’ expectations can be fatal.

In a world of connected consumers, and a projected 6.4 billion connected “things,” the ability to source the best content, manage it in a way that is both agile and aligned with the brand, deliver it to consumers at the moments that matter most, and continuously optimize this process better than others is a matter of survival.

And, the disruption is not isolated to any one industry. Expectations formed from our most recent experiences with retailers or stays at hotels influence our expectations of all the brands with which we do business. How many times have we all wondered, “Why can’t I apply for a mortgage or renew my driver’s license as easily as I can book my vacation during the holidays?”

While technological categories like “web CMS” help provide guidance on a set of needed capabilities, they also place blinders on crucial components needed to deliver great experiences. So, if having a leading web CMS is only the foundation, what else is critical to consider?

Content Is Still King, and Its Domain Is Expanding.
Regardless of what business you are in, or what device you have in your hand, the experience is only as compelling as the content. We recognized this critical need. Many of the innovations in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) focus on helping to source the best content to fuel the management part of a web-content management system.

Features such as a template editor make it easier for more people within an organization to compose experiences and share the compositions that are working across regions and brands. We’ve also dedicated a significant amount of time to making it easier to build engaging web mobile web/responsive web as de facto with prebuilt, responsive-design templates and drag-and-drop capabilities. The acquisition of Livefyre in 2016 — now part of Adobe Experience Manager — has made it possible for marketers who need to power content-hungry connections to source user-generated content. For example, Craftsman was able to gather incredible user-generated content comprising do-it-yourself (DIY) projects and inspiration sources from across the web, leading to visitors spending six times longer onsite as well as a 190-percent increase in digital memberships.

It’s not just limited to marketing content either. What began as a need in marketing is now seeping into other customer-facing departments. For example, AEM now supports technical-communication content, which is critical to any business — such as manufacturing and high-tech companies — with complex products requiring post-sales support and knowledge. We have also made it easier to mobilize this content for both consumers and customer-facing employees. Mirum’s store-associate app, for instance, enables communications between headquarters and employees at retail-store locations to provide real-time training and merchandising information that is consistent across online and in-store shopping experiences.

Data: How Does the Network Effect Impact Customer Insights?
As we get better at creating and sourcing the most compelling content, we also must ensure that we understand what people want at each moment of interaction. In AEM, we have made essential analytics and targeting capabilities part of AEM’s core cloud services.

These capabilities are exposed within the AEM user interface, allowing brands to start off simply and quickly in the areas of listening and personalization. When they are ready to extend to richer capabilities, they can expand to the market-leading capabilities of Adobe Analytics — such as Analysis Workspace — and Adobe Target without missing a beat.

But, it’s not only about drawing insights from one’s own brand data. Since Adobe Marketing Cloud now processes over 51-trillion transactions a year, we can harness the collective trends to benchmark what’s happening across industries, helping brands make better decisions regarding where to invest next in their digital-transformation journeys.

Using online shopping as a benchmark, mobile peaked at 26 percent — $1.93 billion — of online sales on Black Friday during the 2013 holiday season. Overall, Thanksgiving Day online sales grew 18 percent, year-over-year, to hit $1.06 billion. We started to see early signs demonstrating the importance of omnichannel marketing, with traditional brick-and-click retailers outselling their online-only competitors at nearly a three-to-one ratio. Average cart spend was holding steady at $139 per completed sale. (Source: Adobe Digital Insights)

Fast-forward to this past holiday season. Black Friday drew in $3.34 billion in sales, while online sales hit $1.93 billion on Thanksgiving Day, and Cyber Monday hit a new record with the largest online sales date ever at $3.39 billion (Source: Adobe Digital Insights). We also began providing our customers and the industry more broadly with the Adobe Digital Price Index (DPI).

Adobe Applies Advanced Science in the Chemistry of Great Experiences.
What’s even more interesting about the prior data is that the team here at Adobe was able to not only report actual results one day later, but also have amazingly accurate predictive models ahead of the holiday shopping season.

The sheer volume of content and data demands the help of machines to process and draw out the best recommended insights or actions to take. Adobe has been quietly innovating in the area of machine learning for some time, and this past November, we introduced Adobe Sensei — advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning focused on tackling the most complex digital-experience challenges. It taps into Adobe’s heritage in creativity, documents, and marketing and takes advantage of trillions of content and data points. For example, smart tags in AEM are already powered by Adobe Sensei.

You and Your Organization Are the Final Elements.
No digital-transformation milestone was ever reached without the vision, imagination, and perseverance of individuals who saw digital as the new frontier. There are many ways to learn more about AEM and engage with the community of brands around the world to learn how they’re driving successful customer experiences using AEM.

Adobe Summit will kick off in Las Vegas (North America) and London (Europe, Middle-East, and Africa) in the beginning of 2017. Adobe Symposium will be coming to India and Australia. The second-annual virtual AEM developer conference, IMMERSE, will be held May 15–19 across three time zones.

Your organization can also enroll in training classes from our Adobe Digital Learning Services or get the All Access Learning Pass.

If you want to get started and need more guidance, we are fortunate to have a great community of partners — around the world and in your neighborhood — to help you.

Many of our partners, while they have worked several years with marquee brands on optimizing a mature digital-transformation effort, have also learned and are making it easier to get started quickly with AEM. Following are a few of our partners that have specific offerings to help you get started quickly with Adobe Experience Manager:

• 3 | SHARE SWIFT for AEM Sites is everything you need in your phase-one deployment of Adobe Experience Manager, delivering a full implementation of your unique site on AEM in 12 to 16 weeks.
• Accenture has ready-to-use accelerators and connectors to enable faster results and achieve goals.
• Axis 41’s experienced team of AEM-certified architects, developers, and designers works closely together at every crucial point in the implementation process
• INM AEM Foundation reduces the gap to get your AEM project up and running within budget and on solid technology.
• Valtech StarterKit is an Adobe Experience Manager accelerator that will streamline AEM implementations and significantly reduce cost, effort, and duration.
• XumaK Xpress is a service that provides you with a guaranteed price and project timeline, allowing you to launch your digital-experience platform with little to no risk.

Download “The Forrester Wave™: Web CMS, Q1 2017” report to learn more.

Here’s to an exciting 2017 and our collective success in delivering digital experiences that delight and drive business growth! See you at Adobe Summit where we will share the latest innovations in Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Marketing Cloud.

The post Having a Leading Web CMS is Now Table Stakes appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/web-experience/having-a-leading-web-cms-is-now-table-stakes/

How to cloak your affiliate links

2017: The Year of the Rooster Influencer

As I reflect on a year that brought us Pokémon GO, the NES Classic, a World Series win for the Cubs, and another year for Betty White, I can’t help but wonder what 2017 will bring. The holidays are over, and a new year is upon us — and with it comes resolutions. According to a study conducted by the Statistic Brain Research Institute, 41 percent of Americans have made resolutions pertaining to everything from weight loss and life improvements to better financial decisions (the top three from the study). But what resolutions has your company made for 2017? If you are wondering which marketing trends should — and which ones should not — influence your marketing spend, here are three emerging marketing trends to keep an eye on this year.

1. Influencer Marketing
In recent posts, I discussed the power of influencers during the holidays, and according to a survey conducted by Variety, 8 out of 10 teen consumers surveyed named these ‘social stars’ over celebrities as being most influential.

Chelsea Krost is one of those influencers and is recognized as the go-to person for millennial insights. She had this to say about influencer marketing and its appeal in an interview I conducted with her in 2017:

As the world has shifted to social media, millennial consumers look to their peers or fellow influencers to inform their purchasing decisions. Younger generations today cherish user-generated content (UGC) — content created by consumers to learn more about products, experiences, and brands. UGC videos on YouTube get 10x more views than content created and uploaded by the actual brand itself. I believe that social media has really become effective “digital word of mouth.” Millennials crave authentic brand messaging and believe that their peers are more likely to share an honest review of a product. Consumers today want a brand to talk with them rather than at them. They expect brands to engage and entertain them rather than sell them. This is why it is so important for a brand to tap like-minded influencers to curate UGC that speaks to the influencer’s social audience — all while amplifying the brand’s key messaging. I see influencer marketing as a win-win for both brand and consumer! (Chelsea Krost, interview by Joe Martin)

According to SocialPRChat, 74 percent of marketers planned to use influencer marketing last year — and that will likely increase in 2017, because marketers are seeing a $6.85 ROI for every dollar spent on influencer marketing.

2. Psychographics Over Demographics
Sometimes generational targeting is most appropriate, but let’s investigate the value in psychographic targeting. I mentioned in a previous post that, according to eMarketer, only 18 percent of Americans are without a smartphone. When you pair that with the fact that 68 percent of Americans are on Facebook — the largest social network — one might conclude that marketing to the technology rather than the generation is more appropriate.

Marsha Collier (@marshacollier), a Forbes top-ten futurist, had this to say in a recent interview with me:

Psychographics of your customer are, specifically, their behaviors and interests. What is it that they do? What do they like? If you only market to the interests that come up on stock demographics, you won’t reach people one bit. Just because someone is 18 doesn’t mean they are tech savvy. Breaking down their behavior, the psychographics of your customer can be much more effective than demographics. Reaching them on an interest level can broaden how and where you connect with your customer. The psychographic data now available to companies — and the ability to target ads based on attitude, need, preference, and tech affinity — make it much more of an option to marketers than ever before. (Marsha Collier, interview by Joe Martin)

3. SoMoVid (Social, Mobile, Video)
All three have been exploding on their own for a while, but in the last two years, Facebook Live, Snapchat, Periscope, Instagram Video, YouTube Connect, and other SoMoVid-combined mediums have led to more than 8 billion video views for Facebook video alone.

The king of social and video, Brian Fanzo (@BrianFanzo), had this to say about SoMoVid:

We are living in a mobile-on-demand world today, where the mobile device has become the primary place for content consumption; but now, it’s becoming the primary place for content creation. I believe the rapid growth of SoMoVid has resulted in the elimination or shrinking of barriers between brands/businesses and their consumer communities. To truly leverage all the power of SoMoVid, you must embrace the fact that perfection is a fairytale and control an illusion, allowing the consumer community to get to know the people and vulnerabilities that make the brand great. The future of content creation empowered by technology like virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) is extremely exciting, but I believe every brand must first embrace SoMoVid as the mindset and experience required to be successful, as it will become the stepping stone to the creation of content in new realities. (Brian Fanzo, interview by Joe Martin)

The inclusion of VR and AR will also be something to keep an eye on with SoMoVid. As we saw with the Pokémon GO explosion last year, there is an appetite for new technology that integrates within our smartphones.

Looking Ahead
2017 will be a year full of change. In marketing, keep an eye on how the rise of influencers, psychographic targeting, and SoMoVid will — and should — change your business. AND, one more final prediction: I bet it will be 10x easier to find an influencer to do a sponsored periscope piece than it will be to keep your weight-loss resolution. I, for one, am still holding out hope for both an Atari and a Golden Girls spinoff.

The post 2017: The Year of the Rooster Influencer appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/digital-marketing/2017-year-rooster-influencer/

Increase Ad ROI With Audience Suppression

Perhaps one of the most critical techniques for building a brand through advertising is audience suppression. Audience suppression involves removing specific people or groups from an advertising campaign based on whether they make conversions.

For example, if you are advertising a product and a customer purchases it, it would be great to know so you don’t spend money continuing to advertise that product to him. You’ll want to remove him from the product campaign and, perhaps, add him to a different campaign instead that advertises complementary products or value-added services for the item he’s already purchased.

It’s important to consider how it may affect your brand if you continuously present customers with ads for things they are no longer in the market for. Talking about products that have already been purchased not only reveals to your customer that you are trying to personalize your marketing — but more importantly, that you are not succeeding in your effort. Thus, your customer becomes annoyed with needless ads and receives a negative perception of your brand.

Being unable to suppress users also results in precious advertising dollars being wasted. If you’re spending money on impressions and opportunities to continually retarget an already-converted user, all those impressions are being wasted. Being able to prevent those recurring ads from reaching that user can drastically improve your ROI because, now, you can use that ad dollar in a more effective way.

Suppression Challenges
As important as audience suppression is, it’s not perfect. Following are some ways in which your efforts may be foiled as well as how you can overcome those challenges.

1. Cookie-Based Targeting
Cookies typically alert you to retarget ads to people who leave your site before making a purchase. Sometimes, however, people clear their cookie histories, implement blocking software that prevents this type of advertising, or simply use a different browser. Cookies tend to have short shelf lives, and that can prevent you from knowing the result of your customer’s journey. Further, when customers do make a purchase, you may not know and could unnecessarily continue to retarget them with your campaign.

2. Un-Segmentation
Let’s look at another scenario. Let’s say, a customer doesn’t make an immediate purchase, and retargeted ads are initiated. Then, after further consideration, the customer ultimately makes a purchase. However, now, the retargeting has already been configured, and the marketer doesn’t have logic in place to stop the targeting platforms. The condition that causes users to exit specific audience segments is called un-segmentation — and many companies, nowadays, don’t do it very well. The key here is to be able to make real-time calls to say, “The purchase has been made. Stop targeting this campaign.”

3. Offline Conversions
Another issue is that many conversions happen offline; people are known to walk into physical stores and buy things. In those cases, a data-management platform (DMP) can help you incorporate the offline retail data to make a suppression call — even if those purchases didn’t happen on your website.

Suppression Techniques and Processes
In addition to overcoming challenges, there are a few proactive practices you can adopt to improve your audience-suppression processes.

1. Use Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
Many advanced businesses are using APIs to conduct suppression in real time, which eliminates the need to drop a file and wait for it to process. Daily processing might take 24–48 hours to notify the DMP to say, “This person has purchased that product; please stop marketing to her.”

2. Suppress Audiences Across Devices.
A good process to understand regarding audience suppression is how to do it across multiple devices. When campaigns and retargeting efforts are based on cookies or device IDs, the ad is based on the device and not really the person who might be using it, resulting in different experiences for the user on different devices.

Let’s say we have reason to stop advertising to a specific consumer. Without being able to tie multiple devices to that user, we may end up retargeting her anyway because she is on a different device. Another issue could be that we’re running two campaigns simultaneously, resulting in a user receiving different offers for the same product on different devices.

However, if we can understand the device graph and how devices are connected to people, we can target much better and coordinate offers and messaging much more accurately. We can also suppress much more effectively because we’re not basing it on a single cookie that exists in a device.

3. Know When Not to Retarget.
There may be scenarios in which you don’t want to retarget ads to a customer. One example would be retargeting ads for a hotel visit because a person stayed in that hotel previously. If the customer is a business traveler, she may return to that city soon and want to stay there again. However, if the hotel was classified as vacation travel, the customer typically won’t be booking that hotel again for a while, making retargeting an inefficient use of ad dollars.

Different products have different lifespans and are typically purchased in a variety of intervals. For instance, I might buy a new car once every five years or switch my cellphone plan once every two years. For products like these, suppression is based on the frequency of those types of sales and the likelihood that person would buy the product again.

Use Audience Suppression to Improve Ad ROI.
Audience suppression is a valuable advertising tool that can yield impressive ROI while reducing media spend. By understanding some of the potential challenges to implementation and utilizing smart processes regarding who you retarget and how, audience suppression can be easily implemented and managed to boost your advertising strategy and minimize wasted ad dollars.

The post Increase Ad ROI With Audience Suppression appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/increase-ad-roi-audience-suppression/

Ask Yoast: Old static website, move to WordPress?

Get on the Preconference Training Fast Track at Adobe Summit 2017!

Why should you join Adobe for preconference training at Summit 2017? Here are just a few great reasons:

• Speed: Trained customers increase their product usage by 130 percent. You’ll master the technology and hit your goals in record time.
• Convenience: You’re coming to Summit! Maximize your time away from the office and learn as a team.
• Experience: Our instructors have trained thousands of customers — “They know the ‘gotchas’ and ‘killer tricks’” (quote from a customer).

Preconference Training — Individuals Reap Rewards!
Preconference training at Adobe Summit is one of the best opportunities available for those of you who are focused on accelerating your digital transformation and hitting your goals. We’ve learned that customers who train with us increase their Adobe product usage by 130 percent. What that means for you is that you immediately gain more value from Adobe products after training. By getting an inside scoop on how to use the tools, you accelerate your business growth and hit your goals more quickly. We like to say “Under the gun? Get trained!”

Preconference Training — Whole Teams Can Benefit!
Many customers bring their entire teams to train with us at Summit. They generate maximum ROI by gathering everyone together outside of the office and focusing the team on working as a well-oiled machine. Customers rave about learning at Summit — they call the training “fabulous and opportune,” and a great “cost-effective way to onboard everyone at once and get the whole team out of the day-to-day.” There’s no better way to get the most from Summit.

Start 2017 Ahead of the Game!
We always try to accommodate customers by adding sessions to meet demand. Last year, we doubled the number of attendees from the previous year’s Summit. Customers know that preconference training will supercharge their skillsets and help them hit their targets. Better yet, if you already have an All-Access Learning Pass, use it to attend preconference training and gain even more value from the investment in your digital marketing chops.

Join us for preconference training at Adobe Summit 2017 and learn firsthand what all the hype is about!

The post Get on the Preconference Training Fast Track at Adobe Summit 2017! appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/digital-marketing/get-preconference-training-fast-track-adobe-summit-2017/

HTTP status codes and what they mean for SEO

Point of Sale: Retail & Travel Weekly

This week’s articles examine retailers and how they may be missing the mark with emails; content marketing’s ability to boost customer-lifetime value; online-shopping expectations and their influence on in-store experiences; and more.

• Retailers miss on email marketing goals [Business Insider]: Twenty-five percent of consumers say that retail emails are rarely relevant.
• Content Marketing May Boost Customer Lifetime Value [Practical Ecommerce]: Content offers a potential way for retailers to boost customer loyalty and have an impact on customer-lifetime value.
• Online shopping changes consumers’ in-store expectations [Internet Retailer]: Shoppers are bringing their online-shopping expectations — for convenient and personalized experiences — to their in-store experiences.
• How Retailers Use Personalization — If They Do at All [eMarketer]: More than one-third of e-commerce executives in North America cite not currently using a personalization technology.
• Retailers haven’t perfected buy online, pick up in store yet [Internet Retailer]: More than half of surveyed shoppers use buy online, pick up in-store; but less than one-third found the experience to be a smooth process.
• 7 tips for mcommerce email success [Mobile Commerce Daily]: Activating click-to-call, using image-rich campaigns, and integrating physical-store promotions and information are included in recommendations for achieving more success with email on mobile devices.
• Robots and artificial intelligence set to upend the art of making a sale [Washington Post]: From interactive robots to displays that can tell whether you’ve picked up a product, new technologies are emerging to better support in-store experiences.
• Mobile search correlates to higher purchase conversion rate [Mobile Commerce Daily]: Users who search for products on mobile have higher propensities to visit stores to make purchases.
• SEO: Google Rolls Out Mobile Popup Penalty [Practical Ecommerce]: Google recently rolled out a mobile-search update that penalizes mobile sites that have intrusive popups upon consumers’ initial visits to the site.

The post Point of Sale: Retail & Travel Weekly appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/news-and-resources/point-sale-retail-travel-weekly-32/

Digital Marketing Resolutions That Will Make A Difference in 2017

The post Digital Marketing Resolutions That Will Make A Difference in 2017 appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/digital-marketing/digital-marketing-resolutions-will-make-difference-2017/

Yoast internal linking: the making of

Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health: Seeking the Cure for the Common Website

The healthcare landscape has changed dramatically over the past few years, prompting hospitals and providers to rethink strategies for communicating with consumers. With more people relying on the Internet for information on everything from specific medical conditions to doctors and hospitals in their area, Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health transformed their digital presence, including how they reach consumers through the web, apps, and social communities.

Turn to Adobe Marketing Cloud Suite for a Simpler, More Complete Transition.
After choosing Adobe Marketing Cloud (AMC) as its digital marketing platform, the organization’s first step was to consolidate its six custom-made content management systems and centralize digital asset management onto a single platform — Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). Using the Adobe Activation capability, Jefferson migrated 16,000 pages of content and 6,000 assets into AEM in only six months, maximizing its AMC investment by completing the task one year ahead of schedule.

Today, 300 people at the university use Adobe Experience Manager Sites to create content for students and patients using branded templates. Adobe Analytics helps the team study the behaviors of its 2.75 million annual visitors to better understand how to meet site visitors’ needs. Soon, Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health will begin personalizing experiences for visitors using recommendations with help from Adobe Target.

Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health are also expanding their community-engagement strategy with social media and mobile apps using Adobe Social and the Mobile capability in AEM. The mobile team creates apps that connect patients — from any device — with information about doctors, services, and facilities. Furthermore, content created for the web can also appear in the app, saving time and effort while maintaining consistency.

For a more in-depth look at their story, download our whitepaper Health care in the digital age. Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health engage the community with powerful content and experiences using Adobe Marketing Cloud. 

The post Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health: Seeking the Cure for the Common Website appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/web-experience/thomas-jefferson-university-jefferson-health-seeking-cure-common-website/

SEO fact or fiction?

SEO has a somewhat questionable reputation. Why is that? At Yoast, we advise you to make an awesome website. Our SEO advice always comes down to: make sure to outrank the competition by being the best result. We actually collaborate with Google in the development of our plugin. So, why does SEO have a questionable reputation? And what about all those ‘supposed’ SEO tricks that’ll get you instant rankings? In this post, I’ll take a look at what’s an SEO fact and what’s SEO fiction!

The origin of this reputation

A lifetime ago, when Google’s algorithm wasn’t that good, you could trick your way into the search results. Putting down keywords in white (so nobody would see, but Google would crawl it) was an effective strategy back then. As was buying bulks of links from questionable sites. As Google evolved, these kinds of dirty SEO tricks started to backfire. If you’re wondering whether certain tactics of old school or blackhat SEO still pay off, just think about the following questions: does it give the user a better experience on your site? Does your website become a better result? If you can answer these questions with yes, then it’s probably a good SEO strategy. Anything that feels like a trick though, probably won’t be a good SEO strategy in the long run. So, let’s look at some SEO statements and find out if they’re fact or fiction!

SEO: fact or fiction?

Fact or fiction 1: Content is King

Content is a very important aspect of any SEO strategy. After all, Google crawls texts and determines the ranking of your site on the quality of your texts. High-quality content also leads to lower bounce rates and more social media attention.

SEO fact: Content is King

Fact or fiction 2: Get as many links as possible

While backlinks are definitely important for your SEO strategy, you should be rather selective in which kinds of backlinks you’d want to attract to your website. You shouldn’t buy large amounts of links. You shouldn’t exchange links. You shouldn’t use any automated programs to get links. You shouldn’t do guest blogging with very thin and off-topic content. You shouldn’t have links that are unrelated to the topic of your website. You shouldn’t have links from sites that have no real content. You shouldn’t have links from spammy sites whose only purpose is to advertise for gambling, viagra and porn (unless your website is about gambling, viagra and porn). You should never pay for links. If you choose to go overboard on link building, you’ll risk a penguin penalty and loose your rankings in Google.

SEO fiction: Get as many links as possible

Fact or fiction 3: Keyword density should be sky high

Some people try to put as many keywords in their texts as possible. They hope that Google will notice the amount of keywords they’re using and therefore will rank the text highest in the search results. However, their text will become unreadable. So they shouldn’t do that! It’ll definitely backfire. Never write content that’s created for the search engines. Always write content with a real audience in mind. Invest in high-quality content, that’ll generate long term stable traffic to your website.

SEO fiction: keyword density should be sky high

Fact or fiction 4: You don’t need high-end technical skills to do SEO

Technical SEO definitely is an important element of an SEO strategy. And it doesn’t hurt to learn a bit of code (it could even be great fun). However, if you’re using WordPress and our Yoast SEO plugin, your technical SEO is pretty much covered. Our plugin is designed to take care of all the technical aspects of your SEO strategy.

SEO fact: You don’t need high-end technical skills to do SEO

Fact or fiction 5: SEO is all tricks

At Yoast, we propose an SEO strategy we refer to as holistic SEO. You should develop a long-term SEO strategy focusing on all aspects of website optimization in order to be the best result. You should write awesome content, do great PR and social, make sure your website is properly secured and create a superb User Experience. And of course your website should have technical excellence and an awesome site structure. That’s no trick. That’s just a whole lot of hard work.

SEO fiction: SEO is all tricks

Conclusion

The final SEO fiction actually says it all. SEO is not all tricks. Not at all. SEO, in our view, is a longterm strategy, focusing on getting and keeping those high rankings in the search engines. It is a lot of work, but it will definitely pay off in the long run!

Read more: ‘Holistic SEO’ »

from Yoast • SEO for everyone https://yoast.com/seo-fact-fiction/

Customers Don’t Care About Your Regulatory Requirements

In highly regulated industries that handle the most-private customer data, a great customer experience starts with great security. But, that’s not the whole of it. While you can easily become bogged down in security and privacy concerns — resulting in websites that are dull and boring at best or make users jump through hoop after hoop for security purposes — the best customer experiences happen when security is present but invisible. But, heightened security can’t be your end goal.

At the most basic level, customers expect you to keep their information secure and meet all regulations; then, they expect brands to go above and beyond to deliver outstanding customer experiences. In fact, within the next year, Gartner estimates that 89 percent of businesses will be competing based on customer experience. Thus, despite burdensome security regulations, you can’t afford not to optimize your user experience — no matter how regulated your industry may be.

Great Customer Experiences Are Not Optional.
Brands like Amazon and Nordstrom may not seem like your competitors. Still, they set the baseline for how customers expect to engage with brands. Customers are used to sharing private data, having it stored securely, and having a personalized user experience. Brands that aren’t delivering on all fronts — no matter what regulatory issues they face — simply aren’t meeting their customers’ expectations.

Yes, Creating Exceptionally Secure Experiences Is a Must.
Of course, both security and regulation-compliance are core parts of a great experience — starting with regulations such as SOC 1, SOC 2, ISO, FedRamp, and HIPAA. But, there’s more to it than just this.

It’s also important to have eyes in place to notice when something doesn’t look right. To do this, organizations must have security programs and personnel in place that will constantly be looking for, prioritizing, and tackling threats based on which are most harmful; keeping up to date on the latest issues that could threaten users’ security; and ultimately, putting processes in place to help them stay ahead of the security game and quickly react to protect. Some things you can consider implementing to ensure you’re hitting these baseline goals include:

• Weekly risk-management assessments to determine where you may need improvement;
• Compliance initiatives;
• Scheduled practices that look for ways to minimize potential downtime for services; and
• Adequate communication with customers regarding potential risks and how to prevent them.

Regulation tends to be a slow-moving process. Thus, brands that are in a highly regulated industry often feel they are restricted from making innovative changes. However, with the right risk assessment, regulatory processes, and security practices in place, you can move on to develop customer experiences that will create happy, brand-loyal customers.

Technology Helps Brands Deliver Great Customer Experiences Despite Heavy Regulations.
Using technology to create a baseline for security frees you to deliver a great user experience. For example, creating a unified website experience — using solutions that consider great security a critical requirement for a great customer journey — can have a major impact in regulated industries, helping companies to move past the burden of security to deliver the experiences their customers expect, because companies only have to authenticate and meet security standards one time. From there, marketers are free to innovate. They can make user-experience changes, such as not requiring the same form fields to be filled out ad nauseam, as may be required when managing multiple systems across sites or apps. This allows marketers to focus on user experiences first without constantly thinking about regulations.

In fact, one government healthcare program recently decided to improve its user experience. This process included the migration of over 10 million pages of active content from 91 institutions. Despite privacy regulations, this government was dedicated to making their website as user-friendly as possible. As a result, it went from having 4,000 sites dedicated to healthcare-related topics to having a single, intuitive site by using Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Analytics. The results: customers can find and access government information and services from their mobile devices or laptop computers. The website is organized by topics and tasks. Coupled with an improved search function, this allows customers to easily conduct business and access the content they need via the website. In sum, the new site will grant easier access to information in English and French, increase security, allow for integration capabilities across systems, and deliver an overall improved user experience.

Great Customer Experiences Start From the Top Down.
To implement a culture that really focuses on great customer experience, this strategy must be driven from the top down, allowing technology to be used across functions and on all levels to deliver the experiences customers expect in a consistent way. Executives — and, potentially, even board members — will need to be on board with focusing on delivering stellar customer experiences.

It’s important that this is not just your brand talking the talk — you also need to walk the walk. Tie your customer experiences to your business goals, key performance indicators (KPIs) across all functions, performance assessments, and ultimately, compensation. Without tangible metrics — that impact your brand, your employees, and your culture — change will not happen.

A leading managed-care provider in the US wanted to reach their $1 billion revenue goal, all while improving customers’ healthcare and well-beings. To do so, it replaced its various point solutions with Adobe Marketing Cloud to ensure it could integrate its marketing disciplines across analytics, targeting, and content management. Because of this unified-platform approach, they were able to gain a better understanding of their customers, including how they came to their websites, whether users were individuals or employers, and how users could be redirected to the resources they needed most. By implementing a strategy that crossed marketing disciplines, they were able to deliver content based on user data — targeting cancer-screening information to high-risk patients or diet information to diabetes patients, for example. This, in turn, helped them to acquire and retain customers, fueling their growth and ensuring that they will remain a leader in the healthcare industry. Creating a seamless, personalized user experience helps customers to engage with your brand and remain loyal over time. This is true in any industry — even one that is highly regulated.

A Little Goes a Long Way.
Making great customer experiences — from optimized security to personalized, targeted content — a core part of your company’s culture is the best way to really make change happen. This is especially important in highly regulated industries. It can be easy to become so focused on meeting regulations that innovation and a customer-centric approach fall by the wayside. By changing how your company views customer experiences and putting the right supporting technology in place, you can bring innovation — and great customer experiences — back to your brand. Great security is only a part of the experience your customers expect.

The good news is, creating personalized customer experiences in highly regulated environments poses big challenges for all brands, and many brands are failing. An already-low bar means that those companies that take the initiative — even small steps — to implement a customer experience-focused strategy will move the needle in a big way, putting them ahead of the curve.

If you work in a highly regulated industry but are interested in improving your security to provide an even better user experience, read more about how security can save you time and money.

The post Customers Don’t Care About Your Regulatory Requirements appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/digital-marketing/customers-dont-care-regulatory-requirements/