Digital marketing insights.

I'm so happy to share this transcript from an SEMrush webinar on Personas that I was fortunate to present. The host, Tristam Jarman, opened the door and I walked through into a wonderful world of friendly faces and great questions. I hope you enjoy. There's a lot a good intel in here.

I want to start this by painting a picture. You walk into a store looking for a specific item. You aren’t sure where it would be, whether it’s in stock, or even if it’s necessarily the item you need to solve your problem.

Ask the average business leader what they want from their web partner and they may tell you it’s a killer website. Okay, so you know making it pretty isn't enough... they might also mention prompt service, transparent billing, or consistent lead generation results. These are all good answers of course, but I think a lot of people miss the biggest point of all.

A zero-click search result occurs when a user visits Google, enters a search string, and never leaves the Google ecosystem. This typically occurs because they click to YouTube, see an answer snippet, or click a link to Google Maps, etc. It's a huge barrier to searchers clicking through to your site.

You've probably noticed that I'm a huge proponent of content marketing. I don’t just recommend posting articles for the sake of SEO, but more so as a way to start conversations and share knowledge. Most people I meet love this… right up until the moment they sit down and start typing.

It’s at this point they realize their minds have gone blank and they don’t know where to start.

A lot of businesses think that content marketing goes something like this: you write a bunch of articles, post them to your blog, share them in social, and magically see new leads come pouring in. What happens is quite different.

About a decade back, I worked with a gastroenterologist who was turning heads in medical research. I had the good fortune of traveling with this man through Europe putting together the presentations he gave to peer researchers.

Ask almost any marketer what customers think about when viewing a website and they’ll tell you it comes down to, What’s in it for me? It's generally agreed that’s the big thing we have to get across. It's incentive to keep reading or to take action. The presumption is that “what’s in it for me?” neatly distils our buyers’ motivations into a very clear question. Or does it?

People around me know that I’m not afraid to give ‘it’ away. What I don’t think I’ve been very good at is expressing why. In September of 2019, I participated in the Landmark Advanced Course which helped me to gain clarity around this. I’d like to share that why with you here.

I had a chance to speak with a group of my peers recently. Rather than talk with them about the latest search engine optimization trends or lead generation tactics, I asked them a very simple question: were they vendors to their clients, or partners?

As you undoubtedly know by now, it’s a good thing to have your business or website being discussed in the right circles. Links between a High-rise Window Washing business and a Truffles Kiosk aren’t likely to be relevant.

You may have heard... in the midst of the Christmas rush 2018, Automattic (WordPress’s parent company) deployed Gutenberg, the new WordPress editor, freaked out millions of users, and frustrated developers as well.

I have to ask: does Social Proof still hold value?

It's one of the concepts internet marketers love to talk about, even bemoan the loss of (share counts discontinued in 2015 by Twitter, for example).

If you are a Wordpress user thinking of updating from version 4.9.8 to 5.0, you may want to read this. Unless of course, you like to get caught napping.

Every time I see articles that focus on designing for new apps (like Gutenberg, Wordpress' next-gen editor), the latest design trends (like flat design), or visuals that are supposedly “outside the box” (meaning non-standardized) I have to roll my eyes just a little bit.