Survey: Consumers Blame Brands For Bad Location Data

\

Today at SMX West local data and marketing platform provider Placeable released findings from two related surveys it recently conducted online. The company polled consumers (n=1,000 US adults) and marketers (n=228) to gather data on local search attitudes and behaviors.

Marketers were asked to discuss their behavior when they acted as consumers. Overall the marketers (as consumers) were more mobile, more interested in personalization and more active in social sharing and content creation than their “ordinary consumer” peers.

Below are some of the more interesting “regular consumer” findings from the survey.

Percent that use a search engine to find a local business in the category:

• 56 percent to find a retailer
• 51 percent to find a restaurant
• 25 percent to locate a bank ATM (nearly 50 percent go to a bank website)

The location where local search happens:

•  71 percent say they’re most likely to be home when they research and confirm a business location before visiting the business for the first time
• 22 percent use a phone
• 7 percent drive directly to business

The way a question is framed or worded in a survey can sometimes profoundly impact (or skew) the responses. I’m not saying that happened here. But the “71 percent do their research and location lookups at home” is somewhat counterintuitive now that so many people have smartphones (65+ percent). And many local verticals and directory sites see between 40 percent and 60 percent of their traffic coming now from mobile devices.

My guess here is that when people are doing research and comparing businesses they want the larger screen of a PC (or potentially a tablet). However it’s possible that some of the 71 percent are doing research on smartphones while at home, although the question juxtaposes use of a phone and being “at home.” 

The survey also found that the majority of respondents lost trust or confidence in a brand or business when online listings are found to be incorrect (73 percent) or when consumers get lost because of bad directions from incorrect location information (67 percent).

This slight discrepancy suggests people blame businesses slightly less if directions are inaccurate (vs. incorrect online listings). The problems are one and the same, however, given that directions are derived from the database of listings — bad address, bad directions.

On the question of receptiveness to personalized promotions or offers:

• 55 percent liked the idea (compared with 72 percent of marketers in their roles as consumers)
• 45 percent said they weren’t interested or didn’t like it (probably goes to privacy)

Here context and wording really matter. In this case “personalization” was undefined and left up to the respondent to consider.

The safe inference is that consumers are ambivalent about personalization and the little understood methodologies behind it. Pew found two years ago that consumers overwhelmingly don’t like personalization when it comes to search results in general.

Despite being ambivalent about personalized offers, these consumer respondents were very open to receiving offers in general. Just over 60 percent said that they would try a competitor upon seeing a special offer while searching for a specific business. That number went way up to 73 percent in the case of restaurants.

Twitter Suffers Outage, Returns After 47 Minutes Down

Twitter is down at the moment. We started hearing reports about 15 minutes ago. We are watching the Twitter status page, which hasn’t been updated since March 2. We have also reached out to Twitter for comment and will update here if we hear anything.

Postscript (2:24 p.m. Eastern): Twitter updated its status page moments ago with this: “Most users are experiencing issues accessing Twitter on web and mobile apps. We’re looking into it.”

Postscript (2:49 p.m.): Looks like the outage is clearing up, if not entirely. I’m able to tweet via the website and the Mac app. This status page for developers is showing no interruptions, whereas earlier it was showing three.

Postscript (3:24 p.m.): Twitter updated its status page with an explanation about the cause of outage. During an update of one of its services, “… we experienced unexpected complications that made Twitter unavailable for many users starting at 11:01am [Pacific].” The company said it rolled back the changes and the was fully recovered service was restored by 2:47 p.m. Eastern.

And The $1.5 Million Winner Was … “What’s #EsuranceSave30?”

Now it can be told. The tweet that earned a Northern California man a $1.5 million pallet of cash from Esurance’s post Super Bowl promotion was … “What’s #EsuranceSave30?”

Perhaps not the most resonant marketing message, but Esurance is still very pleased with the results of the campaign that created the Super Bowl’s most-tweeted hashtag. If you need reminding, here’s the campaign’s tale of the tape:

• The hashtag got 5.4 million Twitter mentions during the 36 hours after the Super Bowl
• It was responsible for 2.6 billion worldwide social impressions and 550 million impressions from other media
• It fueled follower growth of nearly 3000%, @esurance going from 9,000 followers to a high of 267,000

Esurance’s motive for the promotion? To raise public awareness of a brand that lags in name recognition in the hyper-competitive insurance industry, explained Josh Raper of  Leo Burnett, the agency that created the campaign today in Austin at a South by Southwest Interactive session.

So check that off the to-do list.

“If you have an awareness issue, 2.6 billion social impressions go a pretty long way,” Raper said. “The great part about it was that it was organic. You saw people conversing online. You saw somebody post ‘I want a new car’ or ‘I want to pay for my college education, #esuranceSave30.’ ”

Personal pleas didn’t hold any sway, however. Esurance worked with Twitter and social media data cruncher Mass Relevance to make sure anyone who used the hashtag was entered into the contest. And the winner was picked at random.

The SXSWi session, which also included Esurance vice president of advertising Nancy Abraham, Twitter director of online sales John Ploumitsakos and Jesse Dillow, associate creative director of Leo Burnett, filled in details about the quick-hitting campaign.

The idea — to give away the $1.5 million savings for booking the first TV advertising spot after the Super Bowl game instead of an in-game ad — came only six weeks before the game. With a tight deadline and uncertainties about the wisdom of exposing their brand to the untamed wilds of social media during the year’s biggest event, Esurance gave the green light.

Abraham explained: “The person who leads our social media strategy said ‘Be afraid and do it anyway’ and that’s really what we did.”

The keys, Raper said, were to create a participative event with the Esurance brand at the center of the conversation and to make sure that people were watching after the game. To prime expectations and guard against people turning off the TV after a blowout (um, yeah), they created video teasers to let people know to expect something big from Esurance after the game and spread the word via social media.

5 Steps To An Integrated Approach To SEO-Friendly Content Marketing

The content explosion and the search engines’ shift toward meaning-based content in 2013 has led to a tipping of the scales in the opposite direction from where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was before Panda and Penguin.

Gone are the days of black hat practices like keyword stuffing and paid linking schemes that resulted in a bad user experience and little focus on content quality.

While the increased focus on quality has created a better user experience, now the challenge of the marketer is to integrate SEO best practices into the content creation process.

User-friendly content must also be easy to find, and that means including SEO in every step of the process.

Because investments in content are growing at a record pace, the pressure for online marketers to show increased returns are heightened. And with organic search as a leading source of traffic for many marketers, streamlining the content creation process while optimizing for search is a business necessity.

In other words, the content must be optimized for the user as well as the search engines before it is even published.

The Integrated Approach To SEO

The integration of search engine needs and user needs means that the SEO has to be involved at every step of the content creation process. Here’s how SEO-focused thinking can be applied to the primary steps of content creation:

1. Understand User Needs & Behavior

How do users search for the type of content you offer, and in what volume?

Keyword research early on in the process will help focus content creation efforts, preventing the wasted effort of creating content for low-volume keywords. Keyword research hits the sweet spot in your content creation efforts by finding the balance between users’ product-related needs, the product offerings, and how users actually search the web.

As you think about keywords, consider the impact of Google Hummingbird and how Google is getting even better at semantic search. This can be a huge opportunity if you put yourself in your users’ shoes and understand how they actually search – think conversational search!

2. Write Optimized Content

Many writers are aware of SEO best practices such as keyword density and headline optimization. From our experience working with enterprise content teams, we understand that content writers are generally motivated to optimize their content for organic search.

If the SEO team empowers writers with the skills and tools to keep SEO best practices in mind, content will be search engine friendly right out of the gate.

For example, one of the largest online travel companies commits resources to training content writers on how to optimize content for search as they write. Writers are educated on the value of organic search and the positive business impact of ranking in search engines, as illustrated through historical performance of their sites. Content writers are also trained to edit titles, header tags, meta tags, image tags and the page URL, among other on-page optimizations.

When SEO tools are seamlessly embedded in the content writing workflow, SEO is not seen as an obstacle, but integral to the process of publishing quality search-engine friendly content.

3.  Optimize Technical SEO Elements

Enabling writers to make content inherently search friendly is a huge leap toward making content ready for search. This also helps the SEO team scale.

However, there are some technical SEO tasks that writers may not be equipped to handle. The SEO team needs to take the baton and review pages before publishing to ensure consistency between the content, keywords and the technical elements of each page.

This step is not just about optimizing the on-page elements. The critical part of this step is to define a process that ensures a smooth hand-off from the content writers to the SEO team (or a process which allows parallel writing and optimizing on-page elements).

Regardless of how you choose to manage these two steps, be sure to document and communicate this across the SEO and content teams.

4. Publish & Promote

The two primary SEO elements involved in publishing and promotion are linking and social engagement.

Are the linking sites relevant to both the content and the keywords that content is being optimized for? Look at the internal links, both inbound and outbound, to make sure they are linked to the relevant pages. Also look at your competitors’ link profiles for pages similar to yours. Who links to their pages and what is their authority?

When looking at backlinks, set tasks around the opportunities and the competitor tactics you have identified. The benefit of backlink analysis and activity accrues over a longer period of time, so it’s important to follow up periodically after content is published.

As for social engagement, are keywords being reinforced in social promotion? What is the social media traction for your competitors’ pages? Does it correlate with their rank? Given the volatile nature of trending topics on social media, it’s also important to  consistently analyze current trends and incorporate relevant messages into your content.

Don’t force these topics in your social sharing — instead, let these questions guide your actions:

1. What’s trending in social media that is relevant to your content?
2. What semantics are used to describe these topics?
3. Are these adjacent to the keywords that the content is optimized for? If yes, you are in a good place to share relevant content that is trending in social media.

Feeding America followed such a process to drive 2.5X traffic growth from Twitter.

Again, the success in this phase largely depends on how you map the workflow between the SEO, social and link building team/team members.

5. Measure SEO & Business Performance

Measuring content performance takes all your investment in technology, content, SEO, link building and social media to its logical end.

Once the content is published, you need to carefully track it against business outcomes. How well do the pages rank? Is the conversion rate within your target range? Is new content cannibalizing existing content? How are related groups of new pages performing?

Track not only overall traffic from organic search but business performance of pages based on their rank and estimated keyword volume. Examine competitive strategies for competing content. What can be learned from actual performance that can be applied to future SEO and content creation efforts?

Secure Search & Content

Steps 2 through 5 are a practical implementation of page-based SEO, which I have been a huge proponent of, particularly since the move to 100% Secure Search.

The loss of keyword referral data forces us to look at SEO from a page-based view reinforcing the position that a focus on content is what truly matters. Keywords still are core to SEO, but SEO is not exclusively about keywords, and the use of keyword data has changed.

For a more detailed description of Page-based SEO and how it is all the more important in a Secure Search world, my article, Secure Search & SEO Methodology: Key Strategies & Enablers, shares more detail.

Conclusion

A true content-centric content strategy is also SEO-centric. SEO thinking needs to step out of its silo and into every step of the content marketing process: audience research, writing, optimization, promotion and measurement.

Successful content programs are built from a foundation of not only knowing the audience and what they want, but knowing how they look for what they want. By integrating search engine needs with human and business needs, marketers will achieve greater success in 2014 and beyond.

Better Data, Public Transit Coming To Apple Maps In iOS 8

According to unnamed sources cited by 9to5mac, Apple’s forthcoming iOS 8 will see a number of improvements to its mapping product across platforms. The site says the next Apple mobile OS will offer:

• Better and more complete points of interest and business data
• Public transit information and directions (rolling out first to major US cities)

Much of the discussion in the article is about subtle changes to the Apple Maps UI or functionality improvements coming with the new OS. Further out, says the report, are indoor maps and augmented reality:  ”Apple has also begun work on augmented reality functionality that leverages the iPhone’s compass hardware to visually see nearby points of interest.”

Apple Maps dug a big trench for itself when it launched two years ago with incomplete data and flawed navigation. It was slammed by bloggers and the tech press for not living up the the hype it created for its new product.

Since the big mea culpa by CEO Tim Cook about maps the company has been steadily working to improve the overall user experience and accuracy of its data and navigation. As part of that initiative, Apple has acquired a number of mapping related companies in the past two years:

• Locationary
• BroadMap
• HopStop
• Embark
• WiFiSlam (indoor location)

While Apple trails Google in mobile maps usage the company isn’t that far behind (for a product with a troubled reputation). Apple has also helped open up the market and make new competition possible by breaking the perceived lock Google had on the mapping space.