In part one of my recent interview with Mike Blumenthal, local SEO expert and co-founder of customer experience management platform GatherUp, we spoke about the lack of resources Google allocates to addressing spam on Google Maps. Here, in part two, we talked about the importance of review attribution for local businesses on Google Maps. Reviews are not just a way for you to get stars on your Google Maps listings but a way for you to listen to what your customers are saying. You can use these reviews as a content driver for your content strategy. Reviews can also be used as a way to learn more about your competitors, a competitive intelligence solution, if you will. While Google may not invest a lot in spam mitigation in Google Maps, it does invest a lot in other areas. Here is part two of our interview: If you’re a search professional interested in appearing on Barry’s vlog, you can fill out this form on Search Engine Roundtable; he’s currently looking to do socially distant, outside interviews in the NY/NJ tri-state area. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel by clicking here. The post Video: Mike Blumenthal on review attribution in local search appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/37EazTX
0 Comments
Whether we’re getting glimpses into co-workers’ and clients’ homes on video calls or home-schooling our kids between meetings, the COVID pandemic has brought home one important fact: We’re all humans who face similar challenges, whatever the image we present in the office environment. This insight, as well as the desire to bring together a far-flung team suddenly thrust into working from home, led Integrate founder and CEO Jeremy Bloom to initiate weekly virtual town-hall meetings featuring special guests with a wide range of experiences. Beginning in March, Integrate staffers heard from the likes of high-tech CEOs, highly-competitive athletes, a professional rock climber, a Minneapolis-based police officer, a neurosurgeon and even Bloom’s sister, whose life was captured in the movie, Molly’s Game In this interview, we’ll hear from Bloom about the surprising insights gleaned from these town hall meetings, and how they can be applied to better cope with the “new normal,” both personally and in our roles as businesspeople. Q: What is it that you would like our readers, in particular, to know about you? A: My name is Jeremy Bloom and I’m the founder and CEO of Integrate. We are a B2B enterprise marketing SaaS company and we’ve been around for nearly 10 years. We’re helping B2B marketers advance their thinking and ability to generate new business, new prospects and new customers at scale, on a global level. We have almost 300 employees around the globe and an amazing roster of customers, world-class businesses, world-class marketers like Adobe, Microsoft, Salesforce, Verizon and the like. We’re really excited about what we’re doing and we focus on delivering happiness to our marketers, which is really one of our biggest goals. Q. I know you have quite a storied history as well, as an entrepreneur and leader in this space. So, outside of your immediate role as CEO, how has your perspective been shaped? A: I think we’re all shaped by our experiences. That’s really how we grow, through our successes, but also the inevitable adversities of our past. I spent most of my teenage years, and my early and late 20s, as a professional athlete. I knew at the age of 10 that I wanted to ski in the Olympics and play in the NFL, so I was on a path to pursue these two athletic goals and dreams from a pretty young age. And I was able to accomplish both of those goals — I skied in the Olympics twice for the United States and was drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles and spent some time with the Eagles and the Pittsburgh Steelers. So through my teenage years and my 20s, my perspective was shaped by playing on a football field or skiing on a ski slope. I think that prepared me for entrepreneurship in several ways. First and foremost, one of the hardest parts of being a CEO and of being a founder is managing your own psychology. When you’re a founder or CEO, especially in the early days of a startup, but really any day, you’ll go through a period of 24 hours where you’ll wake up in the morning, and you’ll just be certain that your company is going to be a huge success and you couldn’t be more excited about what you’re doing and where you are. And then right around lunchtime, you’ll get several emails and a phone call that will make you think that your company is not going to last through the month. These huge emotional swings can happen daily. And our ability to manage through the ups and downs, to keep a level head about ourselves, and separate the signal from the noise often defines our ability to be successful or not. I learned in football and skiing that some days you win, the next day you lose. Some days, you’re the best in the world and another day, you can’t make it to the top job. Some days you win by 40 points. Other days, you get beat by 60. So you’re always on this emotional roller coaster. You’re always experiencing really high highs and really low lows, and developing the mental muscle to be able to handle those emotional ups and downs is critical. It really applies for all of us, because life throws curveballs and ups and downs, especially if you’re a founder or CEO, because the spotlight can often be quite, quite big and bright. Q: From a professional standpoint, how do you quiet those voices and make decisions, especially at a time like this where the challenges are so immense? How do you keep a level head and move through these things with a sound mind and be confident in your decisions when there’s so much noise around you? A: We have to be able to see the forest through the trees. We have to zoom up to a higher elevation and look out of the telescope of life rather than focusing on what’s under the microscope. Oftentimes when these experiences happen in our lives, we are analyzing every single inch of a problem and we don’t have a long-term perspective, because we lose that in the emotional state of chaos. So when chaos hits, I like to remind myself to ask questions, to gather all the information first. We very rarely, in that state of chaos, have all the information. So we need to keep our composure and ask questions and seek to understand the key factors that are contributing to us being in this situation. That’s the first step. Then once we’ve gathered all the data, then it’s time to plot the plan. We need to talk to other people about that plan, we need to seek information from others. And then we need to build the plan, and then we need to execute. There’s this gravitational pull in moments of chaos that compels you to go fix it — to go do the game plan before you have the game plan. This is a huge mistake because oftentimes, we’re running in the wrong direction to fix the problem, because we don’t even understand it. Q: We’re in a time where business goals, strategies, and even on a personal level – everything has shifted so drastically this year. So from your perspective as a leader, how do you ensure that you’re still able to meet those goals and pivot so quickly? A: I think back to a guest speaker that we had at one of our town halls by the name of Carrie Garten. Carrie was a synchronized swimmer in the Sydney Olympics. She described jumping into the pool for the Olympic finals and, in the first 10 seconds, making a devastating mistake. She had to figure out a way to keep her composure, because she still had five minutes left in the routine. She was able to do that, and not make any more mistakes, but ultimately it hurt the team. She got pretty emotional talking about it, even 20 years later. But she said it taught her to be dynamic; it taught her to be able to think quickly on the fly and react to different situations. She talked about how she uses that in her life now as a senior executive. Another guest speaker we had was Brandon Marshall, an all-pro football player, one of the most physical receivers ever. He suffered from bipolar disorder and had to be open with his coaches and, later in his career, with the fans, about the fact that he really struggled with this. When you’re a professional athlete, showing any kind of weakness is really scary because you’re taught to show no vulnerability and you’re taught that the best athletes are the strongest. So, Brandon had to be brave to do that. I often think about those two people and their journeys and how they had to get comfortable with the uncomfortable. Q: Could you share your perspective on broaching those types of conversations about mental illness and other things that aren’t discussed very openly? How do you embrace that level of empathy with your workforce, the people who look up to you and trust in you? A: Empathy and compassion are critical to any successful team and so is trusting one another. I think trust is built on two things — authenticity and vulnerability. In the absence of both of those, human beings have a difficult time trusting one another. What Brandon did, or what Carrie did, putting themselves out there by speaking about a time that was very disappointing and sad for them, builds both authenticity and vulnerability. It creates this experience where people trust them more, and want to help, and want to be part of their lives and part of their journey. These are powerful ways that everybody can use to build great and powerful relationships with one another — to speak with authenticity and to never be afraid to be open about our fears and areas of vulnerability. Q: How do we humanize the workplace to foster better collaboration as well as trust and authenticity? A: The world has gone through such a difficult year. And it probably would have been a lot easier if we all went through it together and weren’t separated by our political beliefs or racial differences or gender differences, those types of things. The approach we’ve taken is to lean into things that would normally be off the table to talk about or uncomfortable. One of the things that we leaned into was the Black Lives Matter movement. We talked about the importance of racial equality, the importance of Black lives, specifically, things that I think we would have previously avoided — not because we didn’t think that the topic was important, but because it wasn’t the politically correct thing to do in an environment with lots of different people. We even brought a police sergeant onto the town hall, Justin Fletcher, who lives five minutes from where George Floyd was murdered. His perspective on what it’s like to be a police officer in today’s world was incredibly enlightening. He brought forth so many profound ideas to advance policing in a way that makes it more equitable. We just need to have these uncomfortable conversations and make it okay to be around people that disagree with you. We’re all living in a kind of echo chamber where we only follow people on social media that share our own beliefs and any time somebody contradicts our beliefs, we just unfollow them or block them. That’s not the way the world should work. We should be open-minded to new ideas. This doesn’t mean that we have to believe them, but we should be okay with accepting the fact that people see things differently. Q: As a marketer, I’m curious about your perspective on the key traits that are most important for marketing leaders right now. A: Being a marketing leader is all about getting to know people, getting to know your audience, getting to know your customers, being part of the conversation. We’re starting to see it more and more on social media, where brands are having real conversations with people. They’re playing a role in the content. I don’t know if you’ve seen the Ocean Spray story, where a TikTok video inspired a response by the drummer from Fleetwood Mac, then Ocean Spray surprised the lip-synching skateboarder by giving him a truck full of Ocean Spray. This is not just humanizing marketing, but humanizing everything. You look at a company — for example, at integrate, we have 300 people — and oftentimes you look at the job title and reduce that person to playing that role. But at the end of the day, we all have one job — to be human. I think humanizing leadership, humanizing the conversation, humanizing all aspects of business, is a trend that will continue to accelerate. We should all spend more time thinking about how we can bring more human-first leadership to our organizations. Q: Could you talk about brand values and a company vision and what role they play in a company’s success. How important are they? A: I think it’s important today, and it will be more important tomorrow. And more important the next day and the next day after that. When you look at the Millennial generation, when you look at Gen Zs as a generation, they orient towards life experiences over money. They focus on culture over opportunity. They focus on philanthropy. Gen Zs are showing signs of being one of the most philanthropic generations that we’ve seen in many, many decades. So if you’re a business and you want to attract the best people, then you have to be a company with a mission that’s bigger than profits, that’s bigger than just revenue. We were inspired by Davis Smith from Cotapaxi — an outdoor adventure brand. He’s built a very successful company as a B Corp. That means that you give a percentage of your profits to a cause that’s important to you. He inspired us so much that we’re now doing the discovery and due diligence for Integrate to become a B Corp. You have to have a bigger social mission than just, hey, we’ve got to grow revenue, we’ve got to grow margin. Those things are important, absolutely, but they’re not the only thing that’s important. Having a bigger purpose is paramount. The post 7 life lessons on leadership during COVID and beyond appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/35AU1JW The post 20201026 SEL Brief appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2HxJjf2 There are endless reasons and ways. You’ve got three kids. You’ve got three teeth. The rent is four months past... The post Everything Will Conspire to Stop You … So What? appeared first on Copyblogger. via Copyblogger https://ift.tt/3oq8Jfi A few years ago I decided to put together a boys trip. We ended up calling it the “Alpha Male Adventure Club” as every man in the group was a top performer in business. (Here come the toxic masculinity replies) Even though I wasn’t a hiker and had never climbed a mountain of any size before, El Mateo’s brilliant idea here was to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. If you’re gonna go, go big, right? I reached out to my buddies and issued the challenge inviting them on the trip. And in typical Alpha Male fashion, they accepted. There were 14 of us in total. I could write a month-long series of emails with lessons gained from this trip. No other experience (training event, seminar, book, audio, etc) gave me more insights into success than this expedition.
Today I’m going to share just one powerful quote that reminds me of the trip…
Now for some homework. Write this quote out by hand because not only will you need to know this lesson for yourself, you will most certainly need to give this lesson to others. On your climb to success, you’re going to stumble. There will be days you slide back down the mountain. There will be times when you are so exhausted, beaten down, or discouraged it will feel like you simply can’t climb any higher. Just know this… No matter what happens – even if… especially if… it hurts – you are becoming stronger so that you can climb even higher. If you’d like some advanced training to fine tune your network marketing climbing skills, hop over to https://www.7strategiesbook.com/ After 25 years of climbing “MLM Mountain”, reaching the top, and guiding hundreds of others to the summit, I’d love to be your guide to help get you there as well. Let’s go! Matt Morris You may also READ our previous blog post about “How to Motivate Yourself to Achieve Your Goals and Dreams” Want Some Advanced Training on Leadership?Feel free to hop over to LeadwithMatt.com. I’ve got some strategies there on becoming a powerful leader and recruiting powerful leaders. Learn How To Overcome Every Major Objection in Network Marketing:Go to https://www.overcometheobjection.com/register-now for the FREE overcoming objections training. Go Make Life An AdventureBe sure to check out my Facebook and Instagram account for daily motivational and inspirational content. The post How to Get to the Top of MLM Mountain appeared first on Matt Morris. via Matt Morris https://ift.tt/3ku98e9 Last night here in Fredericksburg was gorgeous as the sun started to set. Devon and I were walking around the vineyards here at the resort trying to find the perfect view of the sunset. Unfortunately because of all the tall trees, we couldn’t get a good view. So we walked into our two-story cabin and went up to the balcony. No luck – wrong side of the house. “I have an idea”, I said. “Let’s climb up on the roof.” So we grabbed a couple pillows, and from the balcony climbed on top of the roof to enjoy a breathtakingly beautiful sunset. It was magical. As we sat soaking in the beauty of God’s creation, I wondered… How many other people that have stayed in this cabin have missed the incredible sunset because they weren’t willing to simply climb up on the roof? If I had to guess, very few (if any) have enjoyed the sunset the way Devon and I were able to. Not because they couldn’t. Only because they weren’t willing to simply do something different.
Then I started thinking about Network Marketers…Most are never able to ever see the view from the top. Not because they can’t. Only because they aren’t willing to do something different. Most network marketers fail because they play it safe.Safe with:
It’s all a matter of scarcity or abundance. Sadly, most will never understand that you cannot live in abundance with a scarcity mindset. I suppose the view from the top isn’t meant for everyone. But if you’re reading this right now, I hope you’ve decided it’s meant for you! Lots of love, Matt Morris You may also READ our previous blog post about “Why You’ll Fail to be a Millionaire Without This” Want Some Advanced Training on Leadership?Feel free to hop over to LeadwithMatt.com. I’ve got some strategies there on becoming a powerful leader and recruiting powerful leaders. Learn How To Overcome Every Major Objection in Network Marketing:Go to https://www.overcometheobjection.com/register-now for the FREE overcoming objections training. Go Make Life An AdventureBe sure to check out my Facebook and Instagram account for daily motivational and inspirational content. The post 2 Choices that Determine Your Destiny appeared first on Matt Morris. via Matt Morris https://ift.tt/3kpocKa What’s the key to growing sales, revenue, and profit in the upcoming year? It’s not automated campaigns or increased ad budgets. The real secret is learning from this year’s ad performance – and applying that knowledge to next year! In this e-book, Omnitail walks you through completing a sales and spend forecast using a square root model, to help you measure the impact of your ad spend on your overall revenue. You’ll also discover your ideal contribution margin, and even the level of adjustment required to achieve that ideal – so you can make the changes needed to grow your business in 2021. Visit Digital Marketing Depot to download “Forecasting Paid Search Spend & Sales with a Square Root Model. The post Forecasting paid search spend and revenue appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3jpIFgH The post 20201023 SEL Brief appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/35zcqa6 Foursquare began life as a gamified social “check-in” app, which offered helpful tips for others as they competed to become “the mayor” of local venues. It evolved into a local search purveyor but after adoption plateaued and investors grew restless, the company pivoted to location intelligence. And although the Foursquare app continues to exist it’s now primarily a first party data source for the B2B analytics business. Clippy meets Her. With Marsbot, company founder Dennis Crowley has effectively reinvented Foursquare for audio. Dubbed “an experiment,” Crowley calls it “a lightweight virtual assistant that proactively whispers local recommendations (and other fun snippets) into your headphones or earbuds as you’re walking around.” With tongue somewhat in cheek, he describes Marsbot as a cross between the original Foursquare, Microsoft Word’s Clippy and the virtual assistant from the film “Her.” Right now Marsbot is only available for iOS but an Android app is coming. It’s a mobile app, but most of the action happens in your earbuds. As users walk around town, Marsbot “will proactively whisper things to you that you may find interesting.” Things in this case can include places, buildings, public art or people. If you allow it, the app will announce to other Marsbot users that you’re nearby and vice-versa. People can also record audio snippets about places that others will hear. Marsbot for iOS A basic use case involves being in a restaurant (at some point in the future) and getting tips about menu items in your ear. It will also alert you without a prompt that there are other interesting places close by. However, users must be in or very near places for Marsbot to activate. 100 million users on deck. This is essentially the same vision Crowley had for Foursquare, transplanted to AirPods. He often spoke in the early days of the company about “making cities easier to use.” Marsbot seeks to leverage Foursquare’s local data and user-generated content to fulfill that promise via augmented reality, which isn’t limited to your smartphone’s camera. There may be more than 100 million people in the U.S. who own AirPods or an equivalent set of earbuds. That’s an already massive installed base of potential users. A virtual assistant in your earbuds that can make you smarter or enhance your experience of the world is more compelling than glasses (see Google Goggles). You also don’t need to invoke Marsbot with a “hotword” like “Hey Google.” It uses your location — right now it has to be “always on” — to trigger audio notifications. The idea is inspired; the execution will be key to whether people adopt and use it. Regardless, Marsbot points the way toward a new category of augmented reality audio apps that offer all sorts of intriguing possibilities. Why we care. The marketing implications here are fairly obvious: brand awareness or ad opportunities tied to location. Once in a venue, the user could also be prompted to take advantage of a special offer. But monetization will follow adoption if Marsbot can get that far. Getting the user experience right, however, will be tricky. What’s more, currently marginal use cases such as notifying you about friends nearby could become dominant. Hopefully, Foursquare will stick with the app; it could become a model for a host of interesting new audio-AR experiences. The post Marsbot is Foursquare for AirPods appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3ko6RkM Google ads is now 20 years old. At its 15 year milestone, we chronicled AdWords’ evolution into a $60 billion business. We were still talking about Yahoo as a player in search, enhanced campaigns ushered in mobile as a marketing must-do just two years prior and ads-only Google Shopping was three years old. Fast forward five years and a rebrand later, ad revenue has more than doubled (the ads business generated more than $135 billion last year), Yahoo surrendered search ads to Microsoft, mobile is ubiquitous, free listings are back on Google Shopping — and AI and machine learning have transformed the way Google Ads works and the way advertisers work with it. Here’s a look at some of the biggest changes in Google Ads over the past five years that point to what’s ahead in the next five years. Rise of audiencesseveral years after Facebook and Twitter had launched their first-party targeting products, Google launched Customer Match in the fall of 2015. This marked Google’s leap into audiences beyond standard website retargeting. It then introduced similar, affinity, in-market and interest audience targeting. This year, it introduced predictive audiences based on purchase or churn probability that are powered by the new Google Analytics 4. One of the most substantive changes of the past five years occurred in 2017, when Google began allowing Google users account data to be used for YouTube targeting, including demographic and search behavior information from users signed into Google. The new targeting signals helped boost YouTube’s ad revenue, and also opened up the ability to combine signals from Search and YouTube in Google audiences. Decline of keyword (match types)The way Google defines close variants of search queries over the past several years has been significant. Google’s evolving use of machine learning to match users’ search queries to the keywords advertisers buy has forced advertisers to rethink everything from campaign and ad group structures to ad copy to keyword management. Now, the effects of privacy changes and regulations are further complicating keyword management. Last month, Google began limiting the search terms it reports to advertisers. Only queries that are searched by a “significant number of users” are reported. Some advertisers With the expansion of close variants, advertisers have adopted a negative keyword management approach to keyword optimization. That means search terms reports had become critical tools. Advertisers have reported losing visibility into 20% or more of the queries that drove users to click on their ads. Related:
Automated campaigns and adsBased on the results it saw from Universal App campaigns, 2018 ushered in the era of fully-automated ads and campaign types in Google Ads. “No longer is automation limited to certain aspects of campaign management — such as bidding or dynamic headlines. Now, every facet of a campaign — bidding, creative and targeting — can be automated based on a few inputs from the advertiser,” I wrote after Google introduced automated Smart (for small businesses), Local and Smart Shopping campaigns that year. The other big change with these campaign types is that they automatically run across multiple Google owned and operated properties. More on that below. 2018 was also the year responsive search ads (RSAs) came on the scene. RSAs use machine learning to predict the best combination of ad titles and descriptions to show a user based on historical data and various signals available at the time of the auction. Advertisers enter several variations of titles and descriptions and hand over the reigns to Google algorithms to assemble the winning combinations. In August, we reported Google was testing making RSAs the default Search ad type. Related:
Surfaces across GoogleWhile “Surfaces across Google” is an option specific to Google Shopping — opting into Surfaces across Google allows retailers to show their products for free (organically) on Google Images, Google Shopping, Google Lens, and Google Search — it captures a broader theme. And that is the expansion of surfaces on which Google now shows ads. While there are still pure Search campaigns in Google Ads, nearly every other campaign type now automatically runs ads across multiple channels, as we mentioned earlier, and Google continues to expand where ads can appear on its properties. Here’s a look at the various campaign types in Google Ads and the channels and surfaces they run across:
Online-to-offlineE-commerce has surged this year due to the pandemic, but Google is also well-positioned to dominate the online to offline economy as my colleague Greg Sterling wrote in June. This is the result of more than a decade of groundwork. Despite some early challenges, Local Inventory Ads have become popular vehicles for retailers to promote their products to nearby searchers, and increasingly, they measure the impact of those ads on store visits and store purchases. This year, Google announced automated bidding optimization for store sales. In response to changing consumer behavior amid the pandemic, Google has added several features to Local campaigns and Local Inventory ads to emphasize buy online pickup in store (BOPIS) options including curb-side pickup badges. Expect to see Google continue to invest heavily in online-to-offline capabilities. The post Google Ads turns 20: The most important trends and changes of the past 5 years appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/37xP8nu |
Archives
April 2024
Categories |