5 Successful Sales Tips with Daniel Pink

May 26, 2015 by John McDougall

Copyblogger Authority Rainmaker 2015 conference review series #1

Sales has changed radically. More radically in the last 10 years than in the last hundred years according to Daniel Pink, author of the #1 bestseller To Sell is Human.

Marketers no longer have the advantage of a captive audience like they did when there were a limited number of media outlets and we have shifted from a world of buyer beware to a world of seller beware. Daniel Pink calls this information asymmetry.

This means you have to sell less and engage more via helpful content.

Dan Pink’s talk was organized into the following structure:

A. One insight
B. Three principles
C. Five takeaways

One insight: What do I do about this?

He mused that top MBA programs don’t teach sales, although they do teach how to manage sales people lol.

Three sales principles

Attunement – it’s important to find common ground with prospects If you are just giving a monologue and not listening, asking questions and attuned to your prospects, you’ll never find common ground or create a deep connection.
Buoyancy – it’s important to stay afloat in an ocean of rejection Dan said that you can increase your sales experience and buffer rejection by using a positive affirmation such as “you can do this”. Even better is to ask yourself “can you do this?” Top athletes do this before they perform and it makes them mentally prepared for competition by creating powerful internal dialogue that pushes them to affirm what they are capable of.
Clarity – help customers learn what questions to ask In this day and age, customers have an incredible amount of answers right at their fingertips. What they often don’t have is someone to help them curate the information and decide what questions to ask.

Five takeaways – sales tips

People think that extroverts are better sales people but in reality ambiverts are the best. Glad-handing used car salesman types don’t make the most sales but neither do introverts who can’t leave the house. The good news for many of us is that research shows people who are somewhere in the middle connect with customers best.

Asking questions is one of the most powerful sales tools and it helps customers internalize their debate about working with you. Ronald Reagan asked the country “are you better off than you were four years ago?” He did not say to Jimmy Carter, “Your economic policy deteriorated over the last 48 months.” This made people draw their own conclusions deeply. This principle works great when the facts are clearly on your side but does not work great when they are not.
A principle outlined by Dr. Robert Cialdini says that a small negative added to a list of benefits of your product or services can significantly increase trust. So next time you add a big bullet list of everything that is so wonderful about you and your company on your website, strongly consider adding a very small negative that makes you more human and believable.
Rhymes enhance processing influency. Studies show that rhymes, lists, alliteration and repetition help in marketing. E.g. “Woes unite foes” versus “Woes unite enemies”, works better. Children learn from nursery rhymes and this is ingrained in our DNA. We can make use of this in sales and marketing.
Give people an offramp and make it easy. Sometimes it’s not about changing people’s minds but just making it very easy for them to act.

Daniel closed by saying essentially that it is important to serve first and sell second. That helps to make selling human.

When surveyed, Daniel showed how people have very bad things to say about salespeople. In reality, we are all selling something just about every day but the key is helping people by selling what they already want and not pitching to those that have no interest.

Financial Brand Forum: marketing conference review 2015

May 14, 2015 by John McDougall

Digital authority is usually won in the niches, such as various segments of finance and yet banks and credit unions are not well known for leading the charge online. There are some very clear reasons as to why.

I came to this Financial marketing conference looking for something very specific. At McDougall Interactive, we’ve had national level success with bank and credit union marketing over the years, but at times I get very frustrated with the compliance issues.

Some of our local clients are painfully slow to accept and embrace the full process of content marketing. Some have even started with high expectations and then stopped because the compliance officer or the IT department slows things down to a crawl that makes a snail on Valium seem faster than a speeding bullet.

Others have even had award winning and national success and then backed off of full-fledged content marketing, and even conversion optimization, due to a regulatory burden or various other fears.

Is it the fate of financial services marketing to forever be slow and behind the rest of the marketing community? That’s what I wanted to explore more deeply, and what follows is my conclusion.

The overall tone of some of the top-level speakers

Brett King, author of banking 2.0, who is apparently known for shaking things up, said that there are far too many bankers and far too few technologists, behavioral psychologists, information designers and data experts.

Brett also quoted Bill Gates who said “if your culture doesn’t like geeks you are in real trouble.”

He said that over the last 250 years there has not been one industry that was immune to disruption, and the bankers and financial institutions that put their head in the sand and refuse to fully get on board with digital transformation will not make it, and some will even go out of business.

Another speaker cited that by 2020, 40% of the US population will be “digital natives” and will account for 39% of the nations income. This means that anyone who doesn’t fully embrace digital marketing will be missing out on nearly half of their potential audience.

Brett also mentioned that there are 18,000 financial technology companies receiving more than $20 billion in funding. That’s a lot more money pouring into them than to branches and traditional banking.

I asked Mark Ryan, the co-founder and chief analytics officer of Extractable, at the end of his talk (which was my favorite of the conference) if he felt that content marketing was working consistently for banks and picking up steam, or if the regulatory burden was diminishing their future of partaking in the space.

He said there is really good news for those that do embrace creating great content and getting people to engage with it, because many banks are struggling to grasp how it is a game changer for their bottom line. He shared results based on having analyzed client data from 10 million users over 10 years. It showed how content marketing used for search engine optimization, social media and increasing conversions has the overall largest effect on increasing the return on marketing investment for financial services companies.

So is content marketing too difficult for banks?

The answer is definitely yes for those that let it be too difficult. The answer is no for a small amount of pioneers that are going to eat the lunch of the bankers that fail to get on board quick enough.

Which digital marketing tactics are hot?

One of the first talks to go into great detail on tactics was by Matt Wilcox of Fiserve.

Here are his seven most effective digital marketing strategies in banking.

Leveraging smart data and analytics
Email marketing
Social media
Mobile marketing
Retargeting
Search engine marketing including SEO and paid search
A/B testing and conversion optimization

A continual theme of the conference is that some financial institutions are doing a poor job of truly leveraging analytics and website data to improve their website experiences. Those that are doing a great job with it are having the biggest wins. Those that do things like put the Google Analytics code in their website and then don’t do anything with it are losing.

Where do we go from here?

Mark Ryan, the cofounder and chief analytics officer of Extractable, showed a funny picture of young kids coloring on large white paper on the floor. He said that is the perception of the web team by many of the c-suites. This perception has to change because website marketing teams are more like people at the command center of NASA. We are a combination of engineers and artists, and we leverage big data to generate tens of millions of dollars of revenue. That kind of activity cannot be solely left to IT departments and rogue graphic designers.

He reminded us of how financial institutions have historically been some of the top spenders in paid search and online content creation, and how some of the top tasks that people do online are finance related. The Internet continues to grow, and with it the opportunities for marketing, but the gap between the people doing it right and the people dipping their toe in the water has never been wider.

Mark Ryan simply blew my mind with his talk. I have been doing digital marketing for over 20 years now and can recognize greatness when I see it. The level of detail that he shared about projecting the lift on revenue from the various stages of Internet marketing, makes it clear why he has been chosen by companies like Chase and PayPal to do their marketing.

These are the kind of talks that inspire me to come to conferences. Clearly some people are doing financial services marketing properly, using search engine optimization, competitive analysis, paid search with landing pages / conversion optimization, leveraging analytics to inform website redesigns, getting conversions from social media and using email marketing to nurture prospects into becoming multi-product customers.

I suppose the best news of the conference is that there are a lot of people I will come across that won’t hire me and that won’t do deep content and digital marketing. That means that the financial institutions I work with that embrace it fully are even more likely to be amazing case studies.

How to Make YouTube Videos and Position Yourself as an Authority

April 29, 2015 by John McDougall

John McDougall: Hi, I’m John McDougall with workingdemosite.com/authority, and I’m here today with Jimmy Craig and Justin Parker of Methodloft and FatAwesome. Welcome, guys.

Justin Parker: Hi.

Jimmy Craig: Good to be here. Thanks for having us.

John: How did you guys get started with viral videos?

Jimmy: It started back when we both were still in college. I feel like it was right around the time when viral videos were just becoming a thing. It wasn’t a household term at that point. Sites like eBaumsWorld and CollegeHumor were just starting to blow up. We made this video called “Turtle Boy.”

We were still in college, and it was within a week, the video had blown up on all the major comedy sites. Before we knew it, we were getting phone calls. It was on MTV, VH1, BBC. People actually flew out from Tokyo to interview this kid.

John: To interview turtle boy?

Justin: Yeah.

Jimmy: Yes.

John: He was what? One of your friends? Local guy?

Justin: He was a kid from my school, and he was the right look.

John: You got started. Did you intend to become popular on YouTube, or did you just fall into it?

Jimmy: We started making videos just for ourselves, but then when we saw viral videos were a thing, we were like, “maybe we have a knack for it.” Then we continued to do it. When we had several videos do well online, it solidified what we thought. At that time, it was like, “We’re not going to make a career out of this.” It was still just cool for us.

Eventually, things snowballed to the point where more doors were opened to work with brands, and television networks and stuff like that.

John: How do you stand out as a couple of white guys in their 20s?

[laughter]

Justin: You know, we start with what makes us laugh. We try to have a unique idea about something that is common. That’s the optimal situation. A lot of times we can have an idea that’s this really weird, out there idea, and maybe a lot of people aren’t going to laugh.

John: A certain group will, but that group’s too small to go broad.

Justin: The videos, they take a while to make. You’re trying to balance out how much effort do we want to put into something that not a lot of people are going to watch? It’s definitely this balance that we try to find between selling out a little bit, and try to expand the audience but still being ourselves, and 100 percent doing something that we want to do. We do either. It depends on how we’re feeling that day.

John: Try a little bit of both. Nice. How do people get more subscribers on YouTube? How did you start to get people back to your site from YouTube, things like that?

Justin: As Jimmy was saying, we had a few videos go viral at the beginning, and we were getting featured on a lot of sites. Some things were getting on TV. Nobody was connecting the dots that we were making it, because we didn’t brand ourselves well or at all. We just had the title, “Fatawesome” at the end.

It was frustrating, because we were like, every video that we make has to go viral on its own, without any work we had done previously. Every video has to be the best video ever or no one’s going to see it, and it was very frustrating. We decided to brand ourselves. We made this red, dancing monster.

We started putting that at the end of videos, and people loved it. Now we had a thing. That’s a huge, huge part of YouTube is having a thing. Every day there’s another viral video, 10 viral videos a day, whatever it is. You just move on to the next one. People oftentimes don’t dig any further.

If you start to have this thing that ties it all together, they’re like, “Oh, I remember this monster. I love this monster.”

John: To come back to regularly, you mean? You had hits early on, but in order to get consistency, is that what you’re saying?

Justin: Yeah. Maybe somebody saw one video and they loved it, and they didn’t dig any further.

Then, if we had another video go viral, they’re like, “This red monster, I remember this. Now this is two videos that I’ve seen with this. All right, let me take a look at these guys. Maybe they’re putting out stuff on a consistent basis that I would like.” Now it’s more than this one‑off thing.

We found that that really changed things for us.

John: You had to work on your branding?

Justin: For sure.

John: What else? Did you redesign your website or try to get more people coming from YouTube to click over to your site?

Jimmy: For getting subscribers, it was just like Justin said, helping people connect the dots. This is the same duo that’s producing all this different content, and creating one destination for them, and funneling people toward our YouTube channel.

John: Can that work for any company, getting viral videos, or is that more for brands that have an ability to be funnier?

Jimmy: I think any recognition helps establish yourself as an authority. A viral video, whether it’s serious or funny, brings attention to you. Ideally, positive attention to you. Any of those things will help establish you as an authority.

Justin: Everybody thinks of a viral video as being “I want to do this crazy, zany idea”. That’s not the case, necessarily. Or people are like, “How can I make a viral video for my company? I don’t fit the mold. I’m not Doritos.”

John: Law firms, for example. A medical malpractice law firm may not be the best choice necessarily, for a viral video.

Justin: Right, unless they wanted to do something that was very educational that was in their general world, like the history of…You know what I mean? It’s doesn’t have to be — it’s just something sharable and educational.

John: You can’t think about it as always — viral is not necessarily funny.

Justin: Correct.

Jimmy: It’s just sharable, that’s it.

John: For example, McDougall Interactive, how could I make my YouTube channel more sharable?

Jimmy: Well, consistently put out content.

Justin: Yeah, consistency’s big. Brand everything. And think, again, what is sharable? You’re on the Internet. You work in the Internet.

John: You have to broaden it out, you’re saying? Don’t think just — we’ve had this conversation before, and I would say, “Let’s do the history of SEO.” You might say something more broad than that.

Jimmy: At the same time, it’s still important to have a thing. The SEO guy that’s such‑and‑such.

John: Right, like Rand Fishkin, from Moz. He wears yellow sneakers at conferences. He has a funny handlebar mustache, he has Whiteboard Fridays. I think what you’re saying is create a thing, a little schtick, and you have to do that to brand yourself on YouTube.

Justin: Right, and you can go viral even in your specific practice area. For you, maybe a video gets 30,000 views, everybody involved in SEO watched it. It depends. It doesn’t have to be eight million people.

John: If the density of your small community, the amount of people in that community, 30,000 would be a lot.

Justin: Correct.

Jimmy: Also, it’s like targeted marketing. Depending on what your goal is, if it’s to reach potential clients, if you’re an attorney that has a specific kind of case, you’re not going to try to reach every person in the US. No, you’re targeting a specific person.

John: Yeah, so viral success within niches. How can YouTube popularity lead to media appearances?

Justin: We have some examples of that. We’ve been featured on “The Today Show” for one of the videos that we did. It was “Cat Friend vs. Dog Friend”. We happened to make a video. It started to go viral. We thought it would be a good fit for “The Today Show.” It’s family friendly.

We searched online, found a contact, gave them a call, said we had a great piece of content here for you. With the 24/7 news cycle, most shows, websites, they want content. They’ve got to keep the content flowing.

If you approach them with a good piece of content that fits whatever their audience is, most people are going to embrace it. To do a little bit of that legwork can help not only make your own thing go viral, but also get you on a television show, as well. We’ve had that happen a few times.

John: What was relevant about “Cat Friend/Dog Friend” at that particular time? Were they doing something on that topic?

Jimmy: It just happened to be that Meredith Vieira was being interviewed about some book, and it was pet related. It fit perfectly. It didn’t fit perfectly, necessarily, with the content, but it fit enough.

John: You just called them?

Jimmy: Yeah. Another thing, too, we did around Christmas is we made a parody about Rudolf. It was related to the media’s obsession with calling people out like witch hunts. And Fox News, the “Fox Five at Five” panel discussed the video. Like Justin said, media outlets need content.

If you can produce something that, ideally, is quality, but something that people can discuss and it’s timely and it’s relevant, obviously these things all increase your chances.

John: And if you have no media experience at all, probably better that they see you on YouTube, “Hey, they might make a good guest,” right?

Jimmy: Yeah, for sure.

Justin: They’re going to learn if you’re personable. They get a better reflection on your character and how you present yourself than just in a blog post. You might be a great writer, but you might not be the best guest. So it’s like a proving ground, you could say, to have YouTube videos.

John: What about your competitors, again? In the sketch group comedy world, who are some of the people that you look up to? Or not necessarily look up to, but who are some of the people out there that you have to keep an eye on, because they are making some ground?

Justin: We’ve crushed all of our competition. I’m not sure there’s anything left to reference.

Jimmy: I’d say the only people, one sketch group that we both were big fans of, actually, are on SNL now, “Good Neighbor.” It’s been fun to watch them make the transition to television, and we’d watch their stuff.

John: That’s pretty rare, right?

Jimmy: Yeah. I’d definitely say it’s very rare. But again, it was a good sign to us, because we feel like we have similar sensibilities, similar sense of humor. They have successfully made the transition into television. They weren’t very “YouTube-y”.

John: How is YouTube really different from comedy on TV?

Justin: YouTube is this massive ocean. There are so many different forms of comedy of everything. What we find that’s the most popular on YouTube, as far as comedy goes, it seems like it’s more towards a younger audience.

John: There is a lot of silly stuff. Cat videos and all.

Jimmy: Yeah. Very zany. Everyone’s like, oh, short attention spans, but that really is the case. You’re going into a YouTube video with, I think, a completely different mindset as opposed to watching a movie or a television show. You’re sitting there invested. You want to see something, a story, some unique perspective.

A lot of videos that go on YouTube are just “10 things that I hate that happened at the movies”, and then it’s just clips of “don’t you hate when people chew, don’t you hate when people keep putting their jacket on”. They’re just saying things that happen. Those things are the kind of things that go crazy viral.

John: What it says is that you need to know the medium that you’re going after. If you want to be on comedy on YouTube, you would need to do that. If you want to be on history on YouTube, there would be a way to get popular and look at what’s going on there.

The same if you want to get on MTV and you want to have a show on there. They have a certain style that needs to fit in there. So you need to know the medium.

Jimmy: It sounds cheesy and generic to say it, but stay true to yourself. “Be authentic” is going to be, you’ll find, the easiest avenue to be successful. For our comedy, we’ve always considered dumbing it down or changing it, adjusting it to reach a wider audience.

Sometimes we have adjusted things, but we still need to be doing what we’re good at, and not trying to cash in on something else. That helps.

Justin: It’s definitely that balance. It’s an interesting situation. Let’s say you want to be a painter. You’re like, “I want to make a living from being a painter. I don’t want to just be a painter, I want to make a living.” And you start painting things that just you like. And you’re like, “I love this,” but everybody’s like, “I don’t love it.”

Now you can’t make a living. You’ve got to find people who love it, too. It’s definitely that balance. Jimmy and I have conversations about this all the time. I think there’s definitely a line where if you’re going to be in entertainment, the only way that you become successful and can make a living in, like, what we’re doing, is other people have to like it. If there’s no audience, you can’t make a living. Sometimes you have to adjust a little bit how you’re going to go about — if we want to make a video that maybe we’re like, “This is too random. Nobody’s going to get this,” right? Or we could do the same kind of sensibilities but base it on something everybody can relate to. We can still bring our flavor to it, make the kind of jokes we want to make.

But instead of making it about “wouldn’t it be crazy if dolphins could talk” or something, we make it about “let’s make a video that pokes fun at the concept of engagement rings”. We did that, and it went viral. It’s definitely a balancing act.

For anybody that’s involved in anything creative, you’re always walking that line between “I want to be me, but I also want to make a living, too”. I think a lot of people can relate to it.

John: What I find interesting is a lot of people would just assume that a lot of the things that go popular on YouTube are very spontaneous. It sounds like, in order to make those things happen, you have to be true to yourself, whether it’s comedy stuff or a law firm, even.

Then you do have to produce it a bit. You have to think about how it’s going to reach the audience.

Justin: Yeah, for sure. It’s not even necessarily about being true to yourself. There’s probably people out there who make things like, “I don’t even like this, but it sells, so I keep doing it.” It’s picking a thing and reproducing it.

So if people like your sensibilities, your kind of comedy, and they go and watch your other videos and it’s not that at all, they’re like “oh, I don’t like this.” So, it’s trying to have your thing. Then you can build your audience, regardless if that’s comedy or if you’re a health guru. Whatever it is, having your thing and sticking to it.

John: You have to have a repeatable, almost a show, if you will.

Jimmy: That’s why I feel like the biggest channels on YouTube are people, individuals, not necessarily “this is a channel about dogs”. It’s “this kid makes videos”. It’s people just connect to a person. They connect to a personality. When they go to the channel, even if they’re making one about videos, and the next one’s about clothes or something like that, they know what to expect from that person. Because that’s them, whether or not they have a gimmick.

I think that applies to any business, too, especially if someone wants to establish themselves as an authority. It’s like creating that personal connection.

John: Absolutely. Those are some great tips, guys, and I appreciate you being here today. Good to see you.

Justin: Thanks for having us.

Jimmy: Thank you.

John: Good. Thanks, everyone, for joining us again on workingdemosite.com/authority. You’ve been listening to John McDougall and Jimmy Craig and Justin Parker from Methodloft and FatAwesome.

Authority Marketing Infographic

April 16, 2015 by John McDougall

The infographic we created below was part of a blog post that I co-authored for the Huffington Post. It helps illustrate how authority marketing is a systematic process that helps you build credibility and thought leadership.

Internet marketing keeps getting more and more complex with so many people developing content and it is harder and harder to stand out. If you are an expert but not yet an authority, there is light at the end of the tunnel when you realize how much greater visibility you can have, if you follow the steps in the authority marketing roadmap.

Advanced Seo Tips With Conductor Digital Marketing Software

March 30, 2015 by John McDougall

John McDougall: Hi, I’m John McDougall, and welcome to “The Authority Marketing Roadmap.” Today, my guest is Charity Stebbins, senior content strategist at Conductor. Conductor’s Searchlight product helps customers manage their Web presence to achieve higher traffic, conversions, and revenue results.

Today, we’re talking about advanced SEO tips with Conductor Digital Marketing Software. Welcome, Charity.

Charity Stebbins: Thank you for having me, John.

SEO vs. Other Tactics

John: Absolutely. How important is SEO, compared to other tactics?

Charity: As you know, one of the reasons that we’ve started talking today is that you wrote a fantastic article, comparing search and social…

John: Thank you.

Charity: …which you should link to and have people check out. I thought you brought up some great points. One of them is just the sheer volume of traffic that comes from search. Most companies we see ‑‑ and you do a great breakdown there, with some specific examples ‑‑ but most companies have over half of their traffic come from organic search, which is just a gigantic amount of views.

Also, the lead quality that comes from that traffic is typically very high. We did a study of demand-gen marketers, or rather a survey. We asked them to compare organic and paid lead quality, and every one of them said that for the four categories we asked about ‑‑ which was volume, quality, consistency, and conversion rates ‑‑ they ranked organic higher by at least 10 percent, sometimes 15.

Really, that lead quality is very high. It drives a lot of traffic, and it drives a lot of qualified traffic. Then, I would just say, overall, SEO is very much growth‑oriented. If you turn off, say, your paid ad, you’re going to immediately stop receiving that traffic. If you stop tweeting or sending your email newsletter, that traffic will dissipate and drop off very quickly, too.

SEO is a long‑term and constant source of qualified traffic. I’ve heard it described as, say, the difference between day trading and a mutual fund. That mutual fund is like SEO, where once you invest in it, even if you sit back and turn your attention to something else, you’re still going to be reaping the rewards down the line.

The Buyer’s Journey and SEO

John: That’s a great analogy, definitely, for our financial services marketing clients as well, and listeners. What about the buyer’s journey? Google talks a lot about that. Can you explain a little bit, from your perspective, what that is and how it could help with advanced SEO?

Charity: I love this question. I love talking about the buyer’s journey. One of the reasons is we see such tremendous success with the clients that are paying attention to this. For example, your Brooks Brothers, your REI, your New York Life, and all. I will get into what I’m talking about, but essentially, everyone knows that your customers are not always ready to buy.

Sometimes, they are researching your products. Sometimes, they don’t even know that your products exist, and they just want to be educated about a need. One example that I’ve heard that I think is really useful is there’s a product ‑‑ I don’t know if you like to grill, John ‑‑ but it’s the…

John: Yeah.

Charity: …remote meat thermometer. Have you heard of that product?

John: I haven’t. I haven’t, but I’m a big fan of grilling. John Maher running the podcasting has been doing some of that experimentation with smoking and stuff like that.

Charity: I can’t wait for summer and steaks. You’re a perfect example of why early stage content is great. When you go to Google, and you’re thinking about smoking and cooking the perfect whatever, you’re going to put in that query. You’re going to say, “How to cook the perfect steak,” to get that information.

You have no idea that a retailer sells a product called a programmable remote meat thermometer, where you basically put in the information, and you can walk around with this in your pocket, and it’s going to buzz you when the temperature is just right.

John: The Internet of Things on a steak thermometer.

Charity: That’s out there. It would be really useful for someone like you, but this retailer needs to write content just about how to cook the perfect steak, instead of writing content about what a programmable meat thermometer is. They really need to address your early stage needs and begin to educate you that there is that solution and that product down the line.

That’s where the bulk of your customers probably don’t even know that you exist or that your product even exists. Early stage content is teaching your customers before they’re purchase‑ready, much before that stage. I’ll also add that it’s really great brand awareness. You create a lot of trust between customers and your brand if you’re the one educating them and teaching them.

One example that we love to talk about is how REI really educates its customers by writing articles like, “What Is Stand‑Up Paddleboarding?” I wrote an article about a year ago about how they actually outrank Wikipedia for “What is stand‑up paddleboarding?” because they wrote this fantastic piece of content that educates their customers on this topic.

They’re obviously selling those products, too. It’s a lot easier to get customers to start thinking about your products and to go deeper into your website if you can capture that early stage content.

John: Those were a couple of really good examples. There are multiple layers to the buyer’s journey, and the big one is, again, that early stage of the funnel. Certain keywords are going to match that, right?

Charity: Absolutely.

Multimedia Content & SEO

John: You can’t just go for, to use a law firm example, “mesothelioma attorney” is really at that bottom of the funnel and the later stage. If you’re only coming up for that, you have a problem. Does having multimedia content, like YouTube videos and podcasts, help significantly with SEO and search engine optimization?

Charity: I think to answer that question, we should really zoom back on what Google’s business model is and what it is they’re really after. Their business model is basically that they want to answer every single question every single person could possibly ask a search engine. This is a vast, vast amount of demand that Google has.

There are all kinds of different people. John, maybe you prefer to read, or maybe you prefer to watch video. Of course, there are actually people who need video or need audio, in order to get information. It’s definitely Google’s priority to be looking for great content in all sorts of different kinds of mediums to serve up to its audience who needs all kinds of different things.

A wide variety of content, podcasts, videos, infographics, whatever your teams can come up with, all of those things really help because Google wants to serve up those high quality and diverse results. To zoom in on YouTube, specifically, we can talk about how YouTube is actually owned by Google, so of course, that’s going to be a good thing for you, if you’re paying attention to YouTube.

It’s the second largest search engine in the world. I read a study recently by Cisco that mentioned that by 2018, they predict 79 percent of all traffic will be video traffic, which is…

John: That’s stunning.

Charity: It’s a stunning number. We can stand behind that number or something similar. Video traffic is huge. People love and demand videos to educate themselves or to be entertained. The final thing I’ll say about YouTube, which is a note for the nerdy SEOs out there, like myself, is that YouTube and other channels help us patch together a better understanding of our consumers.

For example, many of you will be familiar with the “not provided” event a few years ago, where Google stopped giving us most of our organic keyword data. YouTube actually gives you referral keywords in their analytics. We see a lot of our sophisticated customers using keyword data from YouTube in order to round out their organic strategy.

John: That’s fascinating. I wasn’t aware of that, exactly. By what year is 79 percent of traffic coming from video? What was the stat?

Charity: Cisco predicts 2018.

John: That’s right around the corner. That’s pretty stunning. To be 80 percent of Web traffic. If that’s true, then you really need to get on your YouTube strategy. We’ve been pushing — I should say nurturing — our clients into that, almost requiring it in some cases, with our SEO programs.

If YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, how can you possibly not have some level of SEO strategy? But with that stat, it takes it to a whole other level. Adding the ability to get the not‑provided keywords, it really pretty much sets the nail in the coffin, I think.

Charity: To clarify, too, the YouTube does have a different search algorithm than organic search, but everything is driven by that same impulse, where Google is trying to satisfy its customers, and it is looking for the highest quality content. Creating content that your users love on whatever channel is going to be a great thing, but if you’re not creating video content, you will swiftly be left behind.

How can Conductor help you build topical authority?

John: How can Conductor help you build topical authority and be seen by Google as a thought leader in a certain niche?

Charity: I love this question because I think that’s what SEO is. SEO is all about strategic repetition. One thing people don’t necessarily understand is that Google does not put you on page one because you’ve created one great piece of content. It’s recognizing a sphere of authority. It is seeing that you submit a lot of pieces around this particular topic.

That’s where good SEO comes from. How Conductor specifically works with that, and there’s so many little examples that I’ll just talk from an abstract point of view, on a very high level.

You can spot and scale opportunities. You can find what content is under‑performing, what’s not being seen, and Searchlight will provide recommendations to fix that. You can also develop a broader authority by having content coverage for personas over the buyer’s journey.

I’ll mention this a little bit more later if it comes up, but basically, we have a functionality called content mapping that allows you to put in your personas and different buyer’s journey stages with segments, with our content segment capabilities, and look and see where you maybe don’t have coverage for those areas.

Maybe you’re not doing a very good job of early stage content for your “dads who love to grill” category, for example. It’s about that whole big picture. Technical little things, but then also content coverage for your whole organic strategy.

John: And you have a nice way to look at the competitors in a chart to, kind of, look at your content gaps versus them?

Charity: Absolutely. For competitive analysis, you can look at your search market share. One thing that a lot of people don’t realize, particularly when they’re starting out in SEO or maybe they get a little lazy about checking up on, is that your online competitors are always shifting. They’re also very, very different than your brick‑and‑mortar competitors.

You’re probably competing with your Wikipedias or your eBays. Maybe you’re even competing with an affiliate program. Maybe you’re even competing with yourself. You have a couple mediocre pieces of content, rather than one great piece of content that could be attracting more clicks.

It’s a really big picture, that competitive piece, and something that I think companies need to be very much aware of and constantly checking in on.

Where is SEO headed with semantic search?

John: Absolutely. Why are the old‑school, basic SEO tactics not enough anymore? Where is SEO headed with semantic search?

Charity: There’s a lot to unpack there. Just to clarify, there are a lot of old‑school SEO tactics that are still very effective. For example, you will never want to stop tediously updating your metadata. That’s a part of SEO. Your SEO has got to love that part of optimization and paying attention to metadata and canonical tags and stuff like that. That’s still very important.

You’ll always need to optimize your content, both for your human user and your autonomous user, your Google bot. However, what is not working anymore are definitely your black hat tactics of keyword stuffing and micro sites and all that. Google is just too smart to put up with stuff like that.

Then, overall, there’s a mindset that’s very out of date, that’s still actually very prevalent. That mindset is putting algorithms over audiences. Instead of focusing on what your audience really wants, you get very caught up on the next algorithm shift. Those are always going to be happening. I’m not saying you ignore one, but the best mindset is to have audiences over algorithms. That idea was brought up by Wil Reynolds. He’s a great search guru.

He probably would hate that I used the term “guru.” It’s a little overused.

John: That’s all right.

Charity: He mentioned in a recent interview that a few years ago, maybe 2 percent of SEOs were really focused on their audiences over algorithms, but now, he said probably only 10 percent are doing a really good job of that. We have a very long way to go, as an industry.

John: Absolutely, but Google is really looking at who the authorities are, who the thought leaders are, and semantic search helps with that, I think. Looking at topical authority and are you really covering topics completely and giving them a better…making their job easier, to see the relationships between the various keywords you’re trying to cover.

Charity: Specifically with semantic search, I think that the future of semantic search is personalization. Everyone who is in the SEO industry is hearing tons about local and mobile right now. Those are all aspects of personalization. I heard a prediction from Kara Alcamo. She is the director of search marketing at R2I. That’s one of our agency clients.

I really respect her thought leadership on semantic search. She said that it’s not a far stretch to think that Google probably has different profiles to test what content is delivered by a site by personas or profiles, and that they are probably testing these different persona or profile‑based SERPs, and that we’re going to be seeing more and more of that in the future.

I think that that’s interesting prediction that I can get behind.

John: The bottom line is things are changing all the time. Having good tools like Conductor can help you stay ahead.

Charity: Absolutely.

John: Thanks for speaking to us today, Charity. Tell us how people can get in touch with you.

Charity: You can visit our website. We’re conductor.com. We’re @conductor on Twitter. Feel free to email me, as well, personally. I’ll happy to put you in touch with whoever you need to talk to. I am cstebbins [at] conductor.com.

John: You have some kind of a demo that you do?

Charity: You can go to our site and fill out a form, and we will get a demo set up for you.

John: Sounds good. Check out workingdemosite.com/authority for more interviews and information on Authority Marketing. I’m John McDougall. See you next time on the Authority Marketing Roadmap.

Charity: Thanks for having me.

John: Absolutely.

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