1. Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is a “machine” that thinks and reacts like a human being. It is the fast-growing branch in computer science and affects all areas of our lives, including digital marketing. 

AI solutions help aggregate and understand complicated data, qualify sales, predict future ROI, better predict ideal customer profiles and come up with competitive advantages. AI-based marketing platforms can even help define more competitive, contextually relevant pricing as well as predict the effectiveness of upselling strategies.

Recommendations AI is a perfect example of how Artificial Intelligence can help make your digital marketing efforts and sales funnel more effective. The solution personalizes product recommendations, auto-generates the most effective CTAs, and delivers the best user experience in real time.

2. Semantic Search

Google has used semantic search for years in order to generate more relevant search results and search snippets. Now semantic search is making its way into digital marketing, allowing small business owners and marketers to better understand search intent and create a better converting copy.

Text Optimizer, pictured below, is one example of how AI lets content creators analyze all possible buying journeys and adjust their copywriting techniques accordingly.

3. Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality overlays virtual objects on top of a real-world environment. AR enhances reality by making it a more effective tech tool for digital marketing by allowing buyers to test products in real-world contexts.

“Can you imagine having this?” 

AR helps answer that question in an affirmative and convincing way. The basic idea is that the consumer is much more likely to invest in something they can experience first. 

Here are a few examples of AR-empowered digital marketing:

• IKEA Place lets you virtually place IKEA products in your room.
• Topology Eyewear lets you to try their eye-glasses on.

With the pandemic forcing us to shop and travel from home, AR has also found its ways in museums, art galleries and even colleges.

Apple offers free tools to help you create AR-based apps to integrate your product into the surrounding reality.

You can even integrate AR technologies into your website through WordPress.

4. Text to Video

It is hard to imagine just about any digital marketing campaign without videos. 

Videos capture attention on social media, make ads more effective, improve email open rate, make your assets more engaging and shareable, etc. Yet, not many businesses have budgets to invest in video content.

Luckily, new digital marketing tech tools let you create professional videos with only a few clicks of a button. You can easily turn your existing assets (like text and images) into videos.

Invideo is one the pioneers of that small-business-friendly video creation technology that make video marketing doable on a modest budget.

5. Remarketing

Remarketing, also referred to as retargeting, was initially introduced by digital marketing giants like Facebook and Google. It lets you reach people who once interacted with your brand or your site. Since you already have data on what they interacted with, you can reach out in a more meaningful way.

Many businesses don’t realize you can also create on-site remarketing access to better engage your past visitors. For example, if a user read your guide on how to sew, you can serve them custom CTAs to buy your sewing kit. You can reach them as they continue their journey through your site or next time they visit.

Ultimately, remarketing allows marketers to consolidate multiple marketing channels to create more detailed customer profiles. The more channels we use, the more data we collect. This includes on-site data, email engagement, social media interactions and monitoring, etc. 

All that allows us to develop a genuinely customer-centric focus providing tailored, cross-channel, consistent, and connected experiences. Remarketing has a positive impact on SEO KPIs pushing marketers to re-think shopping behaviors and focus on conversions rather than clicks.

Recap: Digital Marketing Tech Tools to Try

Ultimately, digital tools will improve search and product discoverability by creating personalized experiences and letting marketers understand (and serve) their target audience better.

To accommodate fast-moving technology, businesses should try to add it into their marketing strategies.

You can invest in advanced content development and lead nurturing applications, smart and increasingly independent chatbot-building platforms, and enhanced dynamic personalization software.

Marketers should always be looking for, learning, and testing digital marketing tech tools. 

The post 5 Digital Marketing Tech Tools To Embrace appeared first on Relevance.

When it comes to search engine optimization, for just about any company there’s always one question: To outsource SEO services or move in-house?

Neither of those two choices is easy. Hiring and training an in-house team takes time, while finding a reputable SEO company is quite challenging as well.

I hear this question again and again: To hire or outsource? My answer is always both.

You cannot keep everything in-house (things like link building and technical SEO would need too many resources), but at the same time, having a smart SEO team who can manage projects and tell good providers from spammy ones is always helpful.

But how can you create a good in-house SEO team? Well, start from your current in-house talent and encourage self-education.

SEO is mostly a talent rather than a skill. You need people who want to become good, SEO-focused employees who also want to educate themselves independently. 

This is where self-learning SEO resources, courses, and tools come into play.

Sadly for the SEO industry, we don’t have unified and recognized certifications. In most cases, clients and employers don’t care about SEO certificates since they know that no certificate can prove your experience in the ever-changing SEO landscape.

However, there are several solid options out there to check out:

Free SEO Courses

Google’s Own Certifications 

Google offers free Adwords and analytics courses and certification that can help you look more credible and build your digital marketing career.

• Google Ads certification
• About Google Analytics Individual Qualification (IQ)

Those certificates are recognized by most marketing companies and are required for some SEO roles. If you are a company, being a Google Partner will give you credibility as well!

The certifications are also great for internal team training as they provide scores, so your team members can independently assess their knowledge.

Basic HTML courses

Basic HTML and CSS courses will help your team stay up-to-date with the more technical implementations of SEO.

Codecademy gives a good choice of those.

In frameworks like WordPress, it is pretty easy to navigate and implement basic needs. However, as website standards become more and more feature-rich over time, digital marketers who know some basics will have a faster time with implementation. 

Knowing basic HTML can be hugely beneficial when it’s the distance between a 10 minute fix versus sending it off to a freelancer or dev team.

This allows SEO teams to stay agile in the current markets and avoid roadblocks that can draw out implementation time and ultimately delay timelines on projects.

Hubspot Academy: How to learn SEO like a pro

Hubspot’s Academy offers Inbound Certification that includes a powerful SEO component.

Hubspot and Google are very reputable companies. As such, I highly recommend that digital marketers get these certifications in order to increase their knowledge, especially if they are just starting out.

Many resources like DistilledU or Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO are great for learning SEO. Another option is to sign up for a marketing program at a recognized local university or college with the diploma or certificate upon completion.

When picking public resources for self-education, focus on those that provide actionable advice. You want your new teams to be able to implement some or all of those tips right away. For example:

• This article provides a clear instruction on how to perform an SEO audit (and lists tools for every step).
• Here’s a solid checklist on improving on-page engagement, which is a strong SEO signal.

If you are serious about creating a well-educated SEO team, you may also create an internal resource containing everything they need to read, as well as SEO testing they need to take. Creating an internal resource is easy with any of these WordPress-based solutions.

Educational SEO Tools

I am a big advocate of using tools for SEO education. You can read all you want, but you will not become an SEO until you start implementing what you’ve read. And using tools is the first step to understanding how SEO works and how to go about SEO implementation.

Ahrefs: Research what moves the needle

For SEO education, tools like Ahrefs are perfect for SEO education because it offers a very clear interface that is incredibly easy to use. If you want your team to complete an easy assignment, give them access to SEO tools. This will help them figure out how to learn SEO. With Ahrefs, you can see:

• Which search queries are driving search traffic to any website (let them identify why those exact words are working for those site).
• How much traffic each search query is bringing (let them figure out why those queries are sending that amount of clicks).
• Which sites link to any page (let them theorize how those pages got those links).

Text Optimizer: Understand how semantics works

Another great tool to use for education is Text Optimizer because it provides a score for each copy to grade how semantically relevant it is to target search results. Grading helps teams to always try and do a better job. Plus, it helps your SEO team to understand how semantic search works.

Since Google heavily relies on semantic analysis these days, it is important for your in-house SEO team to know what it is.

Install newbie-friendly analytics

For new employees and SEO teams, it is also a good idea to create dedicated Google Analytics dashboards that would be newbie-friendly. It is also a good idea to use a newbie-friendly Google Analytics clients like Analytify. It integrates into your site and gives a good overview of important numbers without being overwhelming.

Another newbie-friendly platform is Finteza. It’s very easy to use and doesn’t require any technical skills for set-up or event tracking. You can slice and dice data, compare different data sets and research your traffic quality by just clicking through reports and sections:

Conclusion

Having a well-educated in-house SEO team can save you a huge amount of time that would otherwise cause delays in project execution. 

Being a jack of all trades can sometimes be a good thing (when it’s balanced), but you should spend more time on where your proficiencies lie. All the while this strategy serves to help marketers stay ahead of ‘the curve’ and adopt a more agile marketing approach.

The post How to Learn SEO (to Create an In-House Team): Courses, Certifications and Tools appeared first on Relevance.

An article by 99Firms gathered some incredible SaaS stats that we should all be taking seriously over the next year:

• The corporate SaaS industry will be reaching an estimated $7.4 billion by the year 2021.
• By the end of this year, it is expected that at least 41% of all company workloads will be on the public cloud, with ever reducing numbers on on-site workers or servers.
•  A full 73% of surveyed businesses stated that they will be using all SaaS apps for their needs by the end of 2020.

This tells us something very special: SaaS companies are not just necessary, they are insanely profitable.

But this also means higher competition in just about any niche?

How to still drive new sign-ups to your SaaS platform?

Here are a few ideas:

1. Start Marketing Videos

Video content can boost performance of just about any marketing efforts, from landing page conversions to social media engagement:

• On social media, Optinmonster reports that marketers have an average of a 54% rise in brand awareness when they combine social media and video marketing.
• In a survey, CharityDynamics found that 60% of millennials prefer watching videos over reading newsletters. This was done in 2017, so the number is sure to have risen. Not to mention the younger generation, which operates almost entirely through video.

You can create videos on how to use your platform, which problems it is solving, and how to integrate it into your business. Renderforest’s video creator will help you keep video creation in-house by giving you online templates and tools to put a professional video together.

Here’s a full list of provided video templates. You can edit each of those to make it completely unique.

Renderforest provides online tools for creating professional explainer videos to promote your SaaS platform. 

2. Optimize for Search Intent

I assume you know what keywords are and how to identify and optimize for your target keywords.

Well, keyword optimization is no longer enough. Google has moved away from exact keyword matching. Google knows exactly what each particular user is looking for. They understand each query context, and so should we.

Text Optimizer allows you to identify context behind each query by applying semantic analysis to each search engine result page and extracting related concepts and entities. It’s a great way to enrich your content while making it better optimized for search intent.

3. Embrace Web Accessibility

How many people are not currently able to register for your free trial or even navigate your site? Quite likely, it may be a quarter of your target audience, as it has been estimated that one in four American adults lives with some kind of disability which may be preventing them from using the web effectively.

Adjusting your website to the needs of all of these people may ultimately open your doors to new users (who were not able to use your site previously) as well as positive press praising your for your inclusive marketing practices. 

Better accessibility means a more optimized site for voice search as well, because voice-activated devices navigate websites similarly to how assistive devices are navigating the web. So web accessibility compliance will help you on many levels.

Here’s a solid guide on making your site more accessible. You will see it is quite doable!

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4. Clearly Understand Your Pricing Structure

I see this happen all the time. An SaaS launches and they have an overly complicated and sometimes even undervalued pricing structure. The reasoning for this is easy: they want to please everyone and they are afraid of charging too much in the process.

Both of these things can chase off new customers. For the structure itself, too many tiers will just annoy the average user. Having three is plenty, maybe four if you want three tiers plus an enterprise customization offer. 

As for price, if your service is too cheap, it will lower the perceived value of your service. You know your SaaS is worth having, so show it is worth paying a fair price for it.

5. Partner up with others

Keeping a close eye on your competitors is a good way to learn new marketing strategies and understand their customer base better. Yet, it’s not just competitors you need to look for.

There are likely to be lots of matching SaaS platforms which can help you build online presence.

For example, let’s say that you run an SaaS that allows freelancers or small businesses to create and track invoices. You could try to team up with another SaaS that specializes in providing self-serve taxes for that demographic, or creating verified legal documents and contracts.

Partnering with influencers is another good idea to explore. 

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Conclusion

In the end, your best bet is to just have a product that is going to catch word of mouth, on top of your efforts. So focus on quality, not just pushing out as many ads as you can. To get those customers flowing, the tips above will really do a lot.

The post Five Ways to Drive More Users to Your SaaS Platform appeared first on Relevance.

In reality, there are few freelancers who truly understand how digital marketing works. This is a fairly new field when compared to other areas of expertise.

And, when considering those in their mid-career level, few people had any exposure to digital marketing while they were in college. Fortunately, it is something that is gaining more exposure for the up-and-coming generation.

Why does this skill set matter?

Digital marketing is important because it is one of the most effective and efficient ways to market to customers. Unlike other marketing channels, digital marketing does not cost a lot of time or money. Or, at least not when compared to other methods of marketing.

Now is the time to start thinking about how to improve your skills in this area. As more and more businesses are struggling to keep their businesses running in this next normal reality, digital marketing is more important than ever.

Now that we have selected our skill (digital marketing) and assessed its importance (or lack of importance) in our career or endeavors, we need to figure out how we can strategize to move forward in success with that skill.

In the case of digital marketing, here are some tips for anyone who wants to learn more. We have broken them down into strategy groups.

You can use these strategy group examples to develop your own task list and larger categories of tasks. What do you have when you have finished that? A full-fledged strategy (plan) for moving forward with your digital marketing! Hey success, we are on our way!

Strategy 1: Online Courses

There are various online courses for anyone who wants to learn. Years ago (as in decades ago), we were lucky if we could find a book or what is called a correspondence course on a topic.

Fortunately, we now have all sorts of courses, in all different categories available to us online. We also have them in different skill levels and price levels, even free of charge.

In some cases, you may even be able to get your employer to pay for courses online. In the case of improving your skill sets, it doesn’t have to be a college-accredited course. That may help if you are going for a college degree, but the idea is to learn so that you have the opportunity to apply those skills.

Granted, if you have the opportunity to obtain a certificate, demonstrating that you have learned that skill, then that is also very helpful to demonstrate your success and your accomplishment.

If you are looking for the most bang for your buck, in other words, the best return on investment (ROI), you are looking at a certificate program that costs less than most college courses but gives you the advantage of providing a certificate as proof of your accomplishment(s) in learning the skill.

A few examples of great (and free/affordable) digital marketing courses:

• Learn WordPress for free in a week (or less)
• Free content marketing course (by yours truly)

Digital marketing courses are going to give you a strong base of knowledge to use in the future. These online courses are not difficult to complete, but they will require a lot of reading and research.  Fortunately, programs like the one that Simplilearn offers, guide you through the process. You could even consider creating your own digital course to make money online.

Strategy 2: Getting Experience (Working in the Field; Volunteering; Apprenticeship)

Working in the field of digital marketing is the best way to improve your skills in this area. Nothing can replace practical work experience. There are many people who are willing to work in an internship in order to get more experience.

It is also an opportunity to put into play all that you have learned in your online course. You may even find it helpful to start the practical aspect while finishing up your course.

Digital marketing is a valuable skill in the economy today. Working in this field will open up many career opportunities down the road. Not only that, but you will be able to add a lot of value to the companies that you work for with these skills.

Not only are you gaining experience if you offer your skills, say, in a volunteer capacity, but you are growing your future and your future opportunities.

To help you out, here’s a step-by-step, very actionable guide on creating a social media strategy, and here’s how to create a doable SEO strategy.

Strategy 3: Share the Wealth (Mentoring; Giving Back to the Industry)

Another way to improve your knowledge and skills in digital marketing is to get a mentor who has experience in this industry. There are many people who are willing to invest time and effort into the lives of people entering the field.

And, this is not something that is only for the young. Granted, oftentimes mentors are more eager to help the young (possibly for free) but that is probably because of their insecurities. If you are “mature” in age, don’t give up on trying to find that mentor! Many times, other “mature” mentors are willing to give a helping hand.

Finding a mentor will allow you to ask questions in a controlled environment. Over time, you can build up your knowledge and make a bigger impact in the community. Now is the time to start investing time and money into learning about this subject in order to improve your career.

In Summary

Wow – time for a sip of that favorite drink you poured up during our Prep Steps. We are on our way to getting that list of mastered skills longer and accomplishing success! You have also put together a strategy and a plan that can be repeated again and again to continue to grow your success and that “mastered skills” list!

The post How to Improve Your Digital Marketing Skills appeared first on Relevance.

Everyone has a Print Screen button somewhere on their computer. For most people, this will create a copy image that they can then transfer to some kind of image editing program, such as paint. It is an efficient and easy way to make screencaps. It is the way that I personally use most often, and it gets the job done.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work for everyone. Some people with older models won’t have a working button, or maybe a website or program won’t allow it to work and deletes the image before it can be saved. In any case, it makes grabbing a screenshot a real pain.

If you need even more fun, here are quite a few tools that have been made to make screenshot marketing even more fun:

Screenshot making, editing, and hosting tools

1. Snag.gy

If you’re looking for something really quick that doesn’t require any kind of download, this is a great choice. You can take anything from your clipboard and past it directly onto the web by clicking and dragging it into the paste box.

It has a basic editing feature so you can add annotations, or just crop and resize it. You can also post local files and images from around the web into the same program. It is very simple, and it works wonders in a pinch.

2. ShotPin

Are you a Pinterest fanatic? Now you can add screencaps directly to the fastest growing social networking image site. This handy Chrome plugin allows you to take the cap, then select a pin button to put it right onto your board as you would any other image. It is a little buggy, but it still works pretty well.

I am personally keeping my fingers crossed for some editing tools in future versions, but we will have to wait and see. There are a few more tools helping you with Pinterest content to check out.

3. Gyazo

Want something more specific? This tool lets you highlight the part of a page you want to be screen-capped, and ignores the rest. All you have to do is add them to your bookmarks toolbar, rather than being forced to download a plugin or app.

It then gives you an embed code, which provides the cap and an image map. It works better than many other programs, though some people prefer just to have a cap and not an image map and embed code to deal with.

4. Snagit

If you want something more extensive that does more than just get caps, this is worth a download. Create custom images, and profiles and upload your own web server by using their provided PHP script.

Upload using multiple hosts, like Photobucket, Flickr, Stashbox, and several others, use their built-in image editor, and much more. It is free and a fantastic application.

5. Skitch

Available for browsers, iPhones, and Android, this is another simple little photo capture, edit, and share tool.

You can also use it for taking photos and adding cute little effects before posting them onto your social media profiles. Of course, most of these effects are cheesy, similar to Paint. But it is still fun to play with. Their screen capping features are some of the better I have seen.

Screenshot marketing ideas

Scientific studies on visual marketing prove time and again that images are the most engaging and shareable type of content.

There are many ways to use screenshots to diversify your social media feeds and make your content more useful and/or engaging. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Get more SERP visibility for your product or content

Images often take lots of real estate in Google search, especially in mobile results, and I have found screenshots really clickable when they show up in search:

To get your screenshots to appear in organic search, use basic image SEO, including:

• Use several of them within each of your articles or landing pages
• Use keyword-based anchor text and file names
• Use semantic search to build relevant context around your image

When it comes to the latter point, it is getting more and more important, so don’t miss the step. Whenever I work on any article, I use Text Optimizer to create well-optimized text context for my images and videos:

Text Optimizer uses semantic analysis to extract related concepts and entities from Google or Bing search result pages. The more of these concepts you include in your copy (while avoiding keyword stuffing), the better it matches Google’s (and its users’) expectations, and the higher it ranks. Here’s a better explanation of semantic search and how it works.

Share your case studies and testimonials

Nothing works better than sharing your own results, and this is where screenshots turn really helpful.

Use screenshots to repurpose text content into visual assets

The easiest way to tap into visual-only platforms like Pinterest and Instagram is to simply take a screenshot and share it. And this has resulted in some coolest memes! Easy and effective!

Conclusion

Screencapping is fun, efficient, and an easy way to share (funny and catchy) content. If you agree and you want something other than the Print Screen button in your arsenal, these programs are for you. From the simple to the complex, they have what you are looking for.

The post How to Use Screenshots to Boost Your Marketing Efforts appeared first on Relevance.

The post-pandemic marketing world is entering the “next normal” which is defined as “the post-viral era” in which digital transformation is no longer a future goal but a matter of the business survival.

Here are five digital trends that are being sped up by the global COVID-19 crisis.

1. The “Internet of Things” ecosystem is growing

The coronavirus epidemic and global lock-downs have caused companies across all the sectors – including healthcare, education, and even transportation – to adopt a wide variety of devices and new technologies enabling remote operations.

This Internet-powered network of smart devices that connect, interact and exchange data is referred to as “Internet of Things”. The best known smart devices that are already finding their ways into our lives are: smart watch, smart security systems, smart speakers, (partially) self-driving cars, etc.

[bctt tweet=”With smart inter-connected devices, everything in the consumer’s house suddenly becomes an ecommerce channel driving and automating shopping behavior.” username=”relevance”]

Apart from autonomic shopping decisions and technology-powered purchasing experiences, IoT also opens up the ability to leverage the data those devices collect to understand customers’ needs for advanced personalization and machine learning capabilities.

To make your products part of these machine-powered buying decisions, build your presence on both Amazon and Google. Both of these brands are powerful IoT players. Amazon has Dash Buttons reminding you to reorder your previously purchased products based on your shopping patterns. Google has Shopping actions: allowing brands to make their products across multiple Google-run devices (Android, Google Home, Google search, etc.)

2. Engaging customers is getting harder

With lots of large and small brands rushing online to make up for the lack of brick and mortar sales, it is easier to get lost on the crowd of emerging competitors. If you haven’t yet started experimenting with new customer acquisition and engagement tactics, now is a good time to start.

[bctt tweet=”Focusing on intent optimization is the first step in getting your traffic engaged as this strategy aims at giving your site visitors exactly what they were searching for.” username=”relevance”]

Now is good time that we should re-evaluate our landing pages and analyze just what kind of audience they are attracting how to optimize them for search intent better:

Image source: TextOptimizer

Even social media traffic requires an extra effort to engage your target audience.

According to the cosmetics marketing report, a good engagement strategy can actually turn your business around. As an example, one of the fastest-growing cosmetic brands called Bambu Earth was able to turn their marketing results around by implementing an online “Skin Quiz” which served as both important audience data source and engaging sales funnel:

3. Monitoring customers’ journey is getting more challenging

The overall digital literacy is growing fast. Generations that had been previously shying away from technology are now readily buying groceries online or jumping into a video call with family and friends.

The result: the buying journeys are becoming more diverse and consequently harder to predict.

[bctt tweet=”Your website needs to engage customers quickly at each “touchpoint” making purchasing experience as fast and hassle-free as possible.” username=”relevance”]

Adopting new ways to monitor your site users’ browsing and buying journeys is a must.

Using various customer journey analytics tools remains a good idea, but you need to also explore new tools.

There are also several emerging ecommerce analytics solutions that can help you clearly understand how consumers are interacting with your sales funnel:

Image source: Finteza

4. Marketing automation is becoming unavoidable

As customers’ buying patterns are quickly changing, marketing becomes more complex (think omni-channel marketing, global marketing, multi-location marketing, lead verification, serving personalized + dynamic content, real-time marketing, etc.).

As digital marketing is getting more and more complicated, many digital marketing tasks are impossible without automation, e.g. keeping track of multiple local business listings, monitoring social media sentiment, etc.

The good news is, marketing automation can boost sales productivity by ~15% (Source: Invesp), so it is a smart idea anyway.

The key is finding a reliable marketing automation partner that offers features you need without breaking your budget. It can be as simple as picking a smart email marketing platform (here’s a good list of email marketing solutions which offer marketing automation features).

Adding a chatbot marketing solution to your company’s toolset is also a good idea.

5. Privacy is nothing to take lightly

With so many people forced to adopt so much new technology, privacy is going to become a hot topic again. We already saw Zoom hit hard by privacy scandals. There have been numerous other scandals which even prompted new legislation.

With privacy becoming the center of attention again, is your business prepared.

At the very least:

• Don’t just collect the data. Incentivise data sharing and ask for consent. The good news, thanks to Amazon and Netflix, most of your customers will be willing to create an account at your site (or install your app) if you do a good job explaining the benefits (e.g. offer personalized virtual assistance, personalized meal plans, etc.)
• Tweak your privacy policy and settings to ensure you are describing your data in a most detailed and transparent way.

Conclusion

Digital marketing has always been an ever-changing industry but with COVID-19 crisis upon us, the change has been developing at an unprecedented rate. The web is getting even faster, engaging the customer is getting even more challenging. The answer is in building cross-platform presence and using the aggregated data from all the channels for advanced analysis capabilities.

The post Navigating the Next Normal: 5 Marketing Trends Fueled by COVID-19 Crisis appeared first on Relevance.

But that doesn’t mean that everyone has managed to use it to their advantage. In fact, many people have tried to utilize the site, only to have the hashtag backfire spectacularly. Such as with these five examples, where they attempt to engage users didn’t go according to plan.

1. #McDStories

McDonald’s is a controversial business. Cited for their food that doesn’t spoil, the use of ingredients like the now infamous ‘pink slime’, and their role in the obesity epidemic that is sweeping the globe, their reputation is in the pits. So some clever PR work was definitely needed, and marketers thought that adding a personal touch from customers might help. Hence, #McDStories was born.

Customers were asked to post a tweet using the hashtag, telling people their own stories of the restaurant. But unsurprisingly, most were less than positive about their comments. PETA stepped in and posted a photo of the liquified goo that makes up chicken nuggets from the fast-food store.

One user told a story about getting food poisoning from one of the stores in the 90s and ending up in the hospital. In fact, there were several stories like that one. It quickly became apparent that McD’s had made a mistake, but by then the campaign went viral. It has become one of the most notorious hashtags backfired examples in history.

Takeaway: Avoid opening up your brand for public interaction with no community management, social listening, or crisis mechanism. Make sure you have an effective reputation management process set up. Here are a few reputation management tools as well as social media plugins to help you out.

2. #MuslimRage

Newsweek has always had a reputation for writing provocative stories. But during the peak of the Arab protests that swept the Middle East, they came out with a story entitled ‘Muslim Rage’, which was accompanied by a cover of angry Arab men burning a flag. It was met with harsh criticism from critics.

But mostly it was met with intense amusement from Twitter users, and Muslim’s in particular. Newsweek put the nail in their coffin when they asked those users to use the hashtag #MuslimRage to comment on the story or issue. Which they happily did.

“Having greatest hair day, no one even knows,” said one Muslim woman who was wearing a head scarf in her profile photo. “I am a Muslim, therefore I rage. Thanks Newsweek!” said another. “Lost your kid Jihad at the airport. Can’t yell for him” was retweeted more than a thousand times. Oops, Newsweek…you should have known better.

Takeaway: Avoid promoting hashtags that may be considered racial or political. These can easily blow up! Additionally, use calendars to plan your hashtag campaigns to avoid the hashtag backfiring. Careful planning and cross-team collaboration will help you avoid unfortunate failures like this.

3. #IfOnlyIWereMexican

Mitt Romney has always caused a lot of mocking from both sides of the political spectrum. But when a secretly recorded video was taken of him during an address to a conservative organization, he had a nasty PR situation on his hands.

He managed to insult everyone from Americans to the Chinese, and one very memorable quote insinuated the laziness of Latinos. Nice, Romney.

Michael Moore quickly jumped on the comment. He asked Twitter users to post about how much easier life would be if they were Mexican. But not everyone understood the reference, and what ensued was a clusterbomb of replies from the offended to the offensive. The biggest problem?

Many of the replies used racist stereotypes, thereby fanning the flames that Moore himself was trying to comment on.

Takeaway: Don’t try to venture into cultural differences. While these hashtags may spread like crazy, there’s no controlling the outcome.

4. #Cairo

The violence that erupted in Egypt in 2011 was a true tragedy. Many people died, assaults by police were reported as commonplace and CBS reporter Lara Logan became a famous face that illustrated the horrors of treatment against women in the area after she was gang-raped by citizens, a problem that plagued women so severely that many were afraid to leave home.

But that didn’t stop Kenneth Cole from advertising his new fashion line using the hashtag #Cairo, one already being used to discussing the horror in the city.

“Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online”

he tweeted.

This caused an immediate backlash, though so have his many billboards mocking 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, terrorist attacks, and more. In other words, Kenneth Cole is kind of an opportunistic jackass. Also, he isn’t funny.

Takeaway: Do research your hashtag prior to marketing it. Google it and search on Twitter and Instagram. Also, sites like Urban Dictionary are helpful for timely finding some nasty associations. In fact, try engaging with other branded hashtags and Twitter chats prior to setting up yours. This will give you a better feel of what you can expect.

5. #AreYouBetterOff

Once more, our list goes back to presidential candidate Mitt Romney. During one of his speeches, he and his staff started using the “are you better off than 4 years ago?” rhetoric.

But when his team of campaigners asked tweeters to use the hashtag #AreYouBetterOff, things really got messy, at least for Romney.

Within 24 hours, thousands of responses had been posted saying “Yes”. To this day, it is one of the funniest missteps in a campaign already littered with gaffs from the Republican nominee.

This may well be the longest-living political hashtag out there:

Takeaway: When your hashtag invites an answer, consider all possibilities as to how it may go wrong.

What were some of your favorite examples of hashtag backfires? Let us know in the comments.

The post 5 Examples of Hashtags Backfiring (and What We Learned) appeared first on Relevance.

That means a huge chunk of your time is going to be invested in finding and recording references, then setting up your bibliography.

Keeping all of that organized can be a nightmarish job. That is why having the right tools can make all the difference in the world.

Get Organized

Content marketing is an extremely overwhelming and loose process. You often don’t know where to start and it is always hard to picture the scope of the project until you are halfway there.

In other words, content marketing is undoable without getting organized, so try to follow some basic rules:

• Find your own system to organize notes and new content ideas (check the tools below for some ideas)
• Always create to-do lists and mark your progress every day. Put even tiny tasks into your to-do lists, including following up with an editor and catching back with a niche expert
• Write all content ideas down but try and categorize them into types (listicle, how-to, interview, etc.) and topics. Here’s a solid guide on keeping track with your content ideas in WordPress
• Avoid overplanning: Take some time to figure out what you manage to accomplish every day and don’t stretch yourself too thin. Writing burnout is real and often happens when you are trying to do too much
• Set your writing hours every day and stick to them, but remember that you can be flexible when you need to. If you work better early in the morning or late at night, then keep that in mind and don’t be afraid to tweak your hours accordingly

Here are six fantastic helpers that can turn your computer into a fact-curating machine:

1. Outline

Outline is a free website that acts as an online highlighter for any webpages. You highlight the facts you want (or the entire page), and it provides you with a URL to share your notes with anyone. There is a feature to let you comment on or edit the fact, and it creates an automatic bibliography that can be printed out or copied for your reference.

All information stored can be accessed from anywhere, just sign into your account on a supported browser. Because of this, it is accessible from most smartphones and tablets, as well as other computers. Outline can also be used to bypass some paywalls.

2. Diigo

Another collection tool that works in a similar way to Outline, Diigo is a little bit more feature heavy. It offers a number of categories like Bookmarks, Notes, Images, Docs, Sticky Notes and Highlights. So you can truly gather all of your materials in one place, unlike other sites that claim to provide that ability.

It is accessible through your PC or Mac, or through apps for both the iPhone and the Android models. If you are an educator, they have a free upgrade to the Diigo Education Edition. This means everyone in your classes or groups will automatically be signed up with a basic edu account without you having to do it manually.

3. Mendeley

Part research collector and part social network, with Mendeley you can actually share the facts and resources you curate over the course of your research. All while getting advice and suggestions from others who know the topic you are studying.

Papers can be imported from other software, you can access it from any computer or through an iPhone app. Plus, it has a bibliography generator which is a huge timesaver.

4. Text Optimizer

Text Optimizer is your ultimate content research driver. It will show you (or your writer) the direction by clustering your target query into underlying concepts. Use the tool to discover more angles and content sections, where to branch out and how to create more in-depth content.

Get a better understanding of a topic, searching patterns and subtopics to cover on your site. Read more on how semantic search works here.

TextOptimizer also keeps a record of all your research tasks and edits for you to look back at any point time and pick up an old idea to develop.

5. Zotero

If you want something a little simpler that just lets you gather, store, track and share your facts without having to go overboard on the social networking aspect, Zotero is a nice alternative.

There are groups, people, forums and documentation if you want them. But mostly, it is a storage site to keep you organized.

6. Evernote

Everyone has probably heard of Evernote, the cross-platform productivity app, and you might not have made the connection when looking for research tools. But this is a simple tool you may have already that can be used. Just collect the facts, pages and information you need.

Tag it so it is easy to find, such as by project. Then access it from your phone, media device, computer or tablet. There are many more note-taking tools to check but I’ve only had an experience with the above ones, so I’ll let you choose more if you feel like trying more tools.

Conclusion

While I would be careful of double checking to make sure all of your references are in any automatically generated bibliographies, these tools are really solid and helpful.

Whichever tool you use, there’s one basic rule to use: It shouldn’t be taking too much of your time. If your tool is too fun to play with, it will be more of a distraction than a helper.

They keep everything you need in one place, make it easy to access the information and otherwise provide sources without having to fill up a doc file and search through it later. Some are even searchable to make it that much easier.

Do you know of any good tools that allow you to organize your research notes and sources? Let us know in the comments!

The post Six Tools To Run and Organize Your Content Research appeared first on Relevance.

While I do have a personal blog, I much prefer to have a group blog, where I can have support of co-writers and delegate certain work to others. Especially in areas I am not so knowledgeable in.

I have worked a lot with group blogs for this reason. They are a great way to widen the expertise and get a more robust tone for your site. Other writers can add a different flair to your posts, and contribute something special. Plus, you don’t have to shoulder all the burden of responsibility that comes with owning a blog.

Here’s how to start and market a group blog:

Step 1 Pick Your Platform

Here are three ways you can create a group blog, and some tips on how to market it. I have personal experience with all of them, although my personal preference is the first one.

Use WordPress

Of all blogging platforms WordPress is the most popular. Not only is it free to use, but those paid features you might want are very cheap, and most plugins cost nothing at all. It is easy to customize and use, even if you know nothing about computers. Everything you have is totally guided, and that is perfect for the average blogger.

You can add authors, moderators and administrators on the main dashboard. Just invite them through email, and they will be able to create their own About Me page and change things like passwords. But what is great about WordPress is that as the admin you can post as any writer by changing the name on the post edit box.

Here are a few plugins you may need when setting up a personal blog on WordPress:

• If you need more flexibility with what your co-writers can (or cannot do) use the User Role Editor plugin
• For more community features allowing your co-writers to support and encourage one another, consider using BuddyPress which also have a few great plugins

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Use Tumblr

Tumblr is a great platform if the bulk of your posts are going to be visually based. While it allows text to be used, most people are there to find images or videos. These have a wide appeal for reblogging, and the main demographic seems to be young, such as pre-teen to young adult. Of course, that isn’t exclusively who uses the site, but if your niche is aimed at those ages then this is definitely the platform for you.

When you sign up, you will be doing it under a primary name that will be used as your Tumblr ID. You will then create a new blog, which will be the secondary profile associated with that ID. All future blogs should be made under that original account, as it will make it easier to manage multiple blogs that way.

Now that you have that done, go to the account dashboard and select the group blog. Go to Members, then put in each email address for the people you want to collaborate. They can follow the invite link to become an official member of the group blog. They will now be allowed to publish posts, and you can upgrade them to administrators if you wish. That will give them full access to edit the blog itself.

To allow anyone to publish posts, just select ‘allow submissions’ on the dashboard page. Keep in mind that your co-writers will be able to “leave” your blog without any notice but their content will still remain on your site. Here’s more info on that: How to Delete Tumblr Account and What Happens When You Do

Use Blogger

If you don’t know, Blogger is Google’s somewhat unloved child. Still, many people enjoy it because it has been synced with all Google services, making it faster to access different programs. Blogger is pretty easy to use, and it can be made public or invite only without any trouble. So if you are looking for something more private or selective in its readership, this could be for you.

To create a group blog you would just set up the account and blog itself the way you normally would. Just follow the registration details on the main page. Then go to Settings|Basic and select Permissions. From there you can put down who is allowed to publish posts (in Blog Authors), and who is allowed to read if you are keeping it private (Blog Readers).

Anyone invited can follow the emailed link to verify their address, and customize their information from the author dashboard. You can select whether they are contributors or admins.

There are many more SaaS platforms that offer collaborative content management features but I haven’t used all of them enough to recommend.

How To Use a Group Blog For Marketing

You will be able to use a group blog for marketing in the same way you would a single person blog. However, the unique element to a group blog is that you have more people using the same tactics. This raises your chances of increasing visibility in a very significant way.

Not only do you have more content available, but you can also encourage your writers to share one another’s content on social media, manage umbrella social profiles and more. It is a group effort, and the results will show the benefit.

To make this happen, use ContentCal that allows co-workers and co-writers to manage brand-owned social media channels from a single dashboard. Simply invite your writers as contributors and remind them to add social media updates on a daily or at least weekly basis. You will be able to review and edit every update before scheduling it to go live. This ensures consistent quality of brand-owned content:

On top of all, you need to make sure all your group blog content is well optimized for Google. You can achieve that by allowing access to Text Optimizer that prompts writers to create more in-depth, better optimized content by encouraging them to include related concepts into their article:

Make it a requirement for your writers to score at 70% minimum. This ensures that their content will meet Google’s and its users’ expectations

Furthermore, you may want to also set up a collaborative visual asset creation dashboard as you want your writers to create eye-catching images to be included in their content.

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Some options include Venngage (which allows to set up a brand kit allowing teams to create consistently branded visual content) and InVideo that allows teams to co-created branded video content at as low as $10 a month:

Do you have a platform that you think is best for group blogging? Do you have any tips of marketing a group blog? Let us know in the comments.

The post How to Start and Promote a Group Blog appeared first on Relevance.

Making your website accessible and usable is more than just following standards. It’s about making sure anyone can buy from your website, regardless of their personal difficulties.

What is ADA Compliance?

ADA refers to Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) regulations that – among other things – ensure that people with all types of difficulties can fully access a service. ADA was introduced back in 1990. When the Internet became part of our lives, ADA was adopted for digital services and goods too.

When it comes to the digital world, building an ADA compliant website means giving people with all kinds of disabilities or difficulties an equal ability to access and use your site and any of its functionality.

While ADA is a civil law, failing to comply may be considered discrimination against a disabled person. This means that not complying means running into risks of facing a legal action. But even more importantly, failing to comply may trigger some online reputation issues.

And the risks are higher than you may think. According to the American Community Survey (ACS), the rate of people with severe disabilities in the US population was almost 13% in 2016. But it is not only about being severely disabled. Your site should accommodate customers suffering from all kinds of difficulties, both mild and severe.

And this is a quarter of the US population, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention claims that 61 millions of American adults live with some sort of disability. This includes people having trouble hearing, blind people, people with all cognitive difficulties and more.

Is your website accessible to all of these people? Or are you exclusing ¼ of the US population from using your site and hence from buying your products and services?

That’s right. ADA incompliant website also means ignoring a huge percentage of your potential customer base. Apart from being risky, it’s also a poor business decision.

So what to do?

Building an ADA Compliant Online Presence

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) offers very detailed Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1 AA) which explain how to make sure people with all sorts of difficulties can access your site.

WCAG is an attempt to reach consensus in understanding what web accessibility entails.

It is a long list but it helps you understand all kinds of difficulties a disabled person may be having with your site.

What makes the issue more complicated is that there’s no clear law or standard defining web accessibility. All we know is that we need to make our sites accessible to all, but it is a bit loose.

Luckily there are solutions out there that can make your life easier. Let’s see!

Use Dedicated Web Accessibility Solutions

accessiBe offers accessibility testing, optimization and fixing, all through an easy to install script. With solutions like that, you can ensure ADA compliance within minutes on a very affordable budget.

Put simply, the tool does the following:

• Once installed, it crawls your site to understand its structure
• Tweaks your on-site forms and images to make them usable through assistive technology devices
• Adds a handy control panel giving your users an ability to change the font size, color contrast, and more
• Makes your website fully operable by a keyboard: By using Artificial Intelligence, the accessiBe empowers your site users to navigate your entire site using the TAB key, trigger buttons and links using the Enter key, operate drop-downs with the arrow keys, etc.

Make Sure Your Site is Truly Responsible

A responsive web design is a design approach aiming at delivering flexible web page layouts to provide optimal viewing, regardless of a device you are using to access a site.

Thus web design responsiveness lies at the core of accessibility optimization. It makes your site usable when the font (or any image) is enlarged, keeps your content readable by ensuring correct reading order (regardless of screen resolution), and so much more.

In essence, a responsible web design principle helps ensure following the most important and fundamental principle of web accessibility, i.e. the web should be “available to all people, whatever their hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental ability.”

It is the essence of inclusive web design and digital marketing strategy.

Finteza allows you to monitor which screen resolutions and applications your site is being accessed from. You can even assess your sales funnel performance on different screen resolutions and devices to see if your site is working properly, regardless of the screen size:

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Build an ADA-Compliant Marketing Strategy

While web accessibility is mostly about on-site experience, following ADA principles when planning your marketing strategy is always a good idea. After all, the more inclusive your marketing strategy is, the more people you will be able to attract.

There’s no one single answer to making an accessible marketing plan, like there’s no clear definition to web accessibility in general. But following fundamental and commonsense principles is always a good idea:

Structure Your Content Well

Structure makes your content easier to understand for people with cognitive disabilities. It also makes it possible for screen reader users to grasp the idea and navigate your articles. You can create effective content structure by using Text Optimizer.

Text Optimizer uses question research allowing you to build your content around popular questions.

Content structure that relies on question research is both useful and engaging. Plus, it prompts you to work more on each article by answering all related questions.

Moreover, always structure your content using subheadings and jump-to navigation. This makes your content easy to navigate using screen readers and possible to understand for people with cognitive difficulties.

Well-structured breadcrumb navigation is another way to make your content much more accessible.

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Use Text Whenever Possible

While we love visuals, videos and graphs, providing a textual context for all of them will make the content more accessible:

• For video campaigns, always provide text captions, subtitles and the full transcript script
• For visual and infographics campaigns, always provide detailed descriptions of your infographics or graphs.
• When you are putting together a report, use accessible data display methods. For example, organizing data into tables makes data easy to understand for people and possible to convey for screen readers.

Overall, create diverse content formats to make your content accessible on various devices or through any assistive technology. For example, offering a PDF download as an additional option to a web article will help make it easier to make your content accessible. On the other hand, creating a video version of your text content will make it consumable for people with difficulty to focus.

Overall, taking an extra step to ensure your content or social media campaign caters to all kinds of audiences is always a smart business move. I hope the article above has given you some ideas!

The post How to (And Why) Make Your Website ADA-Compliant appeared first on Relevance.