How do you know what to change on your website or landing page to make it more effective?
Are the tweaks and tests you made to your site really successful? Or do they just look successful?
Could the best practices you’ve been following for years actually be what’s holding you back from achieving your goals and KPIs?
If you’ve ever asked yourself these questions or ones like it, it’s time to run your own website experiment.
Learn a step-by-step process for conducting website experiments to help you get the data you need to make good decisions.
We’ll show you how to set up and design experiments to collect data that will have the most value and impact for you and your audience.
You’ll learn:
When to run an experiment: Learn how and when to run your experiments to get the most informative and accurate data.
How to avoid data disasters: Learn how to prevent other factors from influencing your results and what to do if things do go as expected.
Experiment design: Tips for working with low-traffic sites, reducing costs caused by testing, and other challenges you’ll face when testing and running experiments.
Join our very own Angie Nikoleychuk, Content Marketing Manager, and learn the key factors to focus on when running website experiments, how to manage your data collection, and how to learn about the things that matter to your audience.
PLUS: You’ll get an exclusive walk-through of our new ad experiment, where we examined how ad types and layouts affect user behavior on our website. You’ll never guess what we found. We sure didn’t!
Don’t miss out on this opportunity!
View the slides below, download your copy of the resources, and watch on demand to learn how to run easy experiments on your site.
Join Us For Our Next Webinar!
How To Boost 2024 SEO Performance With Pillar Pages & Topic Clusters
Join SEO experts and Conductor’s Customer Success Managers, Alex Carchietta and Zack Kadish, to learn how effective pillar pages and clustered content improve site structure, internal linking, and on-page SEO.
Building a successful business is no easy feat, especially in a world where consumers have more options – and distractions – than ever before.
That’s why market research is essential to any business marketing plan and marketing strategy.
Market research lets you learn more about our target consumers and their behavior, spot emerging trends, uncover important data, and make informed business decisions.
But with so many target consumers out there and so many places and methods to reach them, where should you start?
In this article, we’ll cover some of the best market research tools available to you across a variety of tactics and approaches.
Let’s get started.
1. SurveyMonkey
Screenshot from SurveyMonkey, September 2023
One of the more well-known survey tools, SurveyMonkey offers a broad list of features and capabilities for creating audience surveys.
Whether you want to create your own survey or choose from one of its 250+ expert-created templates, SurveyMonkey offers a user-friendly interface that enables you to customize your surveys to your needs.
It also offers a suite of helpful features, including AI-powered knowledge to help you pose the right questions, as well as built-in reporting and analytics.
Pricing:
SurveyMonkey offers a free Basic tier with unlimited surveys featuring up to 10 questions and 10 responses per survey.
Individual plans start at $39/month with unlimited surveys and questions, and up to 15,000 responses per year.
Team plans start at $25/user/month, starting at three users. This level also gives you unlimited surveys and questions, but offers 50,000 responses per year.
2. Typeform
Screenshot from Typeform, September 2023
Typeform is an easy-to-use tool focused on helping users create intuitive and engaging forms, surveys, quizzes, polls, and more. Its selling point is the ability to create truly conversational, beautiful forms.
With Typeform, you can create slick surveys with customizable interactive elements, such as images and videos, that encourage your audience to take action. Its focus on interactivity makes it an appealing tool for market research.
Typeform offers plenty of useful features – from conditional logic to creating dynamic surveys – that adapt based on answers to real-time data analytics and integrations with tons of popular tools, from Slack to Google Analytics.
The company even offers a standalone video tool, VideoAsk, where users can create “video forms” to prompt responses.
Pricing:
Typeform offers a Free plan with unlimited typeforms and 10 responses per month.
Paid plans start at $25/month billed annually for Basic, $50/month billed annually for Plus, and $83/month billed annually for Business.
The company also offers an Enterprise plan.
3. BuzzSumo
Screenshot from Buzzsumo, September 2023
BuzzSumo is a content research and analysis tool that can help you gather some powerful market insights.
Regarding market research, BuzzSumo can help you understand the content landscape in your industry (and beyond), find out what’s resonating with your target consumers, identify influencers in your niche, and track how your content is performing vs. your competitors’.
The BuzzSumo tool analyzes articles (over 5 billion!) and social media posts across the internet to identify top-performing content. It allows you to comb through five years of data so that you can discover the right content ideas for your audience.
Pricing:
30-day free trial (no credit card required).
Membership tiers start at $159/month billed yearly for Content Creation (individual) plan, $239/month billed yearly for PR & Comms plan, $399/month billed yearly for the Suite plan, and $999/month billed yearly for the Enterprise plan.
4. Qualaroo
Screenshot from Quaraloo, September 2023
Want to capture user feedback and deepen your understanding of market trends? Qualaroo might be the tool for you.
Qualaroo is a customer and user feedback tool that claims to be “10X more valuable than email surveys.” Using Qualaroo, you can add a survey to a page on your website or integrate it into your product.
The tool uses behavioral triggering to show surveys or feedback prompts in response to specific user behavior, so you know you’re targeting the right people with the most relevant questions.
Qualaroo also offers visual customization so you can get the branding right, automatic language translation, a library of survey templates, audience targeting, and IBM Watson Sentiment Analysis to help you organize your results.
Pricing:
15-day free trial (no credit card required).
Plans start at $69/month billed annually for Essentials, $149/month billed annually for Premium, and $299+/month billed annually for Business tier.
5. SpyFu
Screenshot from SpyFu, September 2023
SpyFu is a great choice if you’re looking to conduct competitive analysis as part of your market research efforts.
It allows you to effectively “spy” on your competitors by viewing their marketing strategies, advertising history, what keywords they’ve bought on Google Ads, and more – which can help you find gaps in the market and optimize your own approach.
You can feed the SpyFu tool a URL, and it will instantly show you its results for SEO topics like organic keywords, top pages, backlink analysis, total traffic, competition, and more.
Not only can SpyFu help you gain an understanding of the SEO landscape for your industry and gain a competitive advantage, but it can also tell you how hard it might be to dominate a specific niche.
Pricing:
SpyFu offers paid plans starting at $16/month for Basic, $36/month for Professional, and $149/month for Team (billed annually).
6. Ahrefs
Screenshot from Ahrefs, September 2023
Another great tool for SEO and competitive analysis, Ahrefs is a popular choice of many marketers for good reason.
Using Ahrefs, you can learn more about the search landscape of your market, discover what keywords your customers are searching for, track your competitors, and analyze content in your industry to inform your own strategies.
With its keyword and content capabilities, Ahrefs will help you find gaps and opportunities in the market so that you can improve your content, your site, and your search visibility.
Pricing:
Website owners can sign up for Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free limited access to its Site Explorer and Site Audit tools.
Paid plans start at $83/month for Lite, $166/month for Standard, $333/month for Advanced, and $833/month for Enterprise (billed annually).
7. Delve AI
Screenshot from Delve AI, September 2023
User personas are a crucial facet of an effective marketing strategy – and as such, developing them is a common step in any market research process.
Thanks to tools like Delve AI, it’s easier than ever to build user personas.
Delve AI offers a suite of persona-building tools based on your needs and the data available to you. Depending on what stage your business is in, you can generate:
Competitor personas using Delve AI’s data.
Social personas based on your social audience.
Customer personas using your customer information.
Live personas for your website based on Google Analytics data.
Beyond its multi-channel capabilities, Delve AI uses AI algorithms for accuracy in personas, offers behavioral insights, real-time updates to your personas, and more.
Pricing:
The company offers a free Lite plan.
Business plans start at $71/month for Standard, $159/month for the Growth tier, and $439/month for Pro (billed annually).
Agency plans start at $167/month for Standard, $343/month for Growth, and $687/month for the Pro tier (billed annually).
8. Sprout Social
Screenshot from Sprout Social, September 2023
We don’t need to tell you about the importance of social media when it comes to connecting with your audience and driving business success. It can also play a major role where market research is concerned.
Sprout Social offers a robust suite of social media management features. Perhaps the most useful for market research are social listening features – which allow you to track market trends, industry keywords, and social conversations – and its competitor analysis capabilities.
It also provides insights into audience demographics, behavior, and interests, which you can use to inform your marketing approach.
Pricing:
Free 30-day trial.
Plans start at $249/month for Standard, $399/month for Professional, and $499/month for Advanced.
Sprout Social also offers an Enterprise tier plan.
9. Google Trends
Screenshot from Google Trends, September 2023
How can you supercharge your market research efforts? Look to search data.
Google Trends is an incredible tool that enables you to analyze real-time and historical search data to discover market trends, up-to-date consumer insights, and more.
By using this tool to access the latest information on how people search on Google, you can spot emerging interests and opportunity areas, and keep an eye on what consumers are most interested in.
It also offers location filtering so that you can see what’s trending in any given market.
Pricing:
10. Statista
Screenshot from Statista, September 2023
If you’re looking for data and statistics on pretty much anything in the world of business and marketing, you might want to check out Statista.
It’s a business intelligence platform that provides “statistics, reports, and insights on over 80,000 topics from 22,500 sources in 170 industries.” This means that if you’re looking for specific market research insights, Statista most likely has something to fit your needs.
From in-depth reports to data visualizations and industry forecasts, Statista can give you reliable insights into what’s happening in markets around the world, and highlight market and consumer trends.
Pricing:
Free Basic account available.
Paid accounts start at $149/month for Starter and $490/month for Personal (billed annually), with more options available.
11. Qualtrics
Screenshot from Qualtrics, September 2023
If you’re looking for something extremely robust, Qualtrics’ market research platform is an all-in-one, AI-powered solution for your market research needs.
It offers a suite of features and capabilities, including:
Panel Management: Enables you to create research panels from email lists, site visitors, social followers, and more.
On-Demand Respondents: Companies can pay for access to survey respondents that match their target demographic.
Product Development: Get access to early feedback on your new products and services from customers.
Purchase Behavior: Explore data on what is fueling purchase decisions among your target customers.
And more.
While it requires a more dedicated investment, Qualtrics’ software is scalable and powerful. It comes with automation and integration with many other tools, and customers have access to a support team.
Pricing:
Qualtrics offers a free survey maker tool with up to 500 responses.
For pricing details, reach out to the Qualtrics team.
12. Temper
Screenshot from Temper, September 2023
It’s important to stay on top of how your customers feel about your business, services, and products – and Temper provides a super simple way to do just that.
The concept is simple: Come up with a simple question you want to ask your question, and your customers can respond by clicking a smiley face that corresponds to how they feel.
You might want to ask your customers, “How do you feel about our new product?” or “Please rate your experience with our customer support team.” With just a little bit of code, you can place a Temper widget on your webpage, in a blog post, or in an email footer and get quick feedback on audience sentiment.
Pricing:
Plans start at $12/month for Hobby tier, $49/month for Pro, $89/month for Business, and $199/month for White Label.
Temper offers a 60-day risk-free, money-back guarantee.
13. Quora
You’ve likely heard of the question-and-answer site Quora, but have you considered its potential as a market research tool?
Quora is an online community where real people can go to ask questions about anything they’d like, and share their experiences and opinions with others via answers.
It offers a unique opportunity for brands to conduct market research within their specific industry or area by connecting with Quora’s diverse community of consumers, professionals, and others.
Try searching Quora for topics related to your business or niche, and look at what types of conversations are trending. Or, you could ask a question yourself!
Quora is free to use, though it also offers separate business solutions.
14. Crunchbase
Screenshot from Crunchbase, September 2023
Crunchbase is a handy tool for getting a good picture of your industry landscape and how your competitors are faring.
It’s a database of companies that includes information like funding round data, investors, and financial information for each business. It also includes information such as employee headcount, leadership data, and more.
You can search Crunchbase by region or industry, allowing you to see how other companies in your niche are growing, and who is deciding to fund them. This can help you identify investment opportunities and market gaps, or even just gauge the overall health of your industry.
Pricing:
Crunchbase offers a Free plan where you can preview profile pages at no cost.
Paid options start at $29/month for Starter and $49/month for Pro (billed annually).
An Enterprise option is also available with custom billing.
15. Google Market Finder
Screenshot from Google Market Finder, September 2023
Another excellent market research tool from Google is Market Finder. This free, interactive tool is focused mostly on researching target markets – so you can use it to discover which markets might have the most potential for your company, monitor demand for your products or services, and more.
There are two primary features within Market Finder:
Test your export readiness. By providing your company’s URL and completing a short quiz, the tool will grade your “readiness” to expand into new markets abroad.
Dive into new markets. You can take another short quiz that will suggest new market recommendations based on the information you provide, as well as external data like search volume and Google Ads.
Market Finder can also integrate with your Google Analytics data for more accurate information.
Pricing:
16. Semrush
Screenshot from Market Explorer, September 2023
Semrush is a one-stop marketing tool that can be leveraged to gain incredibly useful market research insights.
The company offers features dedicated to this type of research, such as its Market Explorer tool, which enables you to get quick information on your specific industry, conduct an analysis of market share, and benchmark your business against your competitors. You can also use the tool to analyze the potential of a new niche or market region for your business.
You might also find Semrush’s traffic analytics tool useful, as it allows you to go deeper with competitive analysis and target consumer demographics.
Pricing:
Semrush offers a free account with limited capabilities.
Paid accounts start at $108.33/month for Pro, $208.33/month for Guru, and $416.66/month for Business (billed annually).
17. Pew Research Center
Screenshot from Pew Research Center, September 2023
While not a traditional marketing tool, the Pew Research Center is a widely known and respected resource that can be super effective when it comes to market research.
The site hosts a robust catalog of reports, surveys, and research covering everything from tech and digital media to politics, cultural trends, and more. The data is unbiased and credible, offering a unique perspective into what today’s consumers think and feel on various topics.
You can use the Pew Research Center as a tool to further hone your market research efforts, providing you with insights into the attitudes and behaviors of your target consumer, as well as the various factors that are impacting their desires and purchasing decisions.
Pricing:
18. Exploding Topics
Screenshot from Exploding Topics, September 2023
We all know the saying, “I liked it before it was popular” – well, with Exploding Topics, your business can be the one to say this.
Exploding Topics helps you spot trends before they become super popular by analyzing searches, mentions, and conversations across the web to identify products, topics, and industries that are on the rise.
You can use Exploding Topics as a resource to help you predict shifts in the market and consumer interests, which can inform everything from your product design and strategy to your marketing approach.
It’s a lot like Google Trends, with some key differences; it pulls in data from a variety of sources and is focused on highlighting emerging trends before they take off.
Pricing:
Exploding Topics offers a free version of its Trend Database.
Paid tiers begin at $39/month for Entrepreneur, $99/month for Investor, and $249/month for Business (billed annually).
19. Loop11
Screenshot from Loop11, September 2023
In today’s day and age, you can’t build a successful business without an effective website. But how can you know whether your website will resonate with your target consumer?
You can use Loop11, a usability testing platform that helps facilitate user testing of your products.
Loop11 makes it simple to create a usability test and secure participants.
It enables you to view the user’s experience through video, audio, and screen recordings. Then, it presents you with in-depth insights and UX metrics to help you understand what’s working with your website, app, or product and what’s preventing people from converting.
Pricing:
Free 14-day trial with full capabilities.
Paid plans start at $179/month for Rapid Insights, $358/month for Pro, and $533/month for Enterprise (billed annually).
In Summary
Market research is key to any business plan, no matter what industry you’re in, what stage of growth your business is at, or what customers you’re serving.
From competitive analysis to keyword research, user feedback, and more, focusing on your market research efforts will pay dividends to your business in the long run.
And while there are plenty of different ways to approach market research, these represent some of the best tools available to you – and can be a great jumping-off point for you to get started.
With AI taking the content marketing world by storm, many are wondering about the big questions: can you use AI to create high-ranking, effective content? And what’s the right way to do it?
How do you utilize AI to your advantage, while remaining cautious and avoiding common pitfalls?
These are questions we get asked time and again across webinars. So, I was excited when the Semrush team decided to talk about merging AI + content in their latest webinar.
If you’re looking for ways to use AI to create high-ranking, effective content for your business, you’ll want to watch this on demand webinar.
Get the key concepts behind successful AI usage, along with real-life case studies from marketers using AI for their SEO and content.
You’ll learn:
Ways to combine SEO & AI: Learn how to supercharge your SEO efforts by merging the power of SEO data with AI technology.
How to think outside the box with AI: Explore unconventional yet impactful applications of AI in content creation that will set your strategies apart from the competition.
Case studies that inspire: Dive into real-world examples that showcase the remarkable impact of AI on content creation, optimization, and SEO performance.
Join Margarita Loktionova, Content Marketing Lead at Semrush, and Andy Crestodina, a globally-recognized content marketing expert and the founder of Orbit Media, as they discuss how AI can redefine your approach to digital marketing.
Whether you’re aiming to create compelling content, enhance your SEO strategies, or simply stay ahead of the curve, incorporating AI into your process could be the key to unlocking success.
How To Use AI To Enhance Your SEO & Create Better Content [Slides]
Join Us For Our Next Webinar!
How To Perform Website Experiments [+ SEJ Experiment Walk-Through & Results]
Join our very own Angie Nikoleychuk, Content Marketing Manager, and learn the key factors to focus on when running website experiments, so your users stay happy and engaged.
Image Credits:
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
However, the success of any innovation, product, or technological advancement boils down to the quality of that data. Utilizing the correct data is essential when connecting generative AI, search, and content marketing.
Data is exploding, with the IDC projecting that the size of global data will reach 175 zettabytes by 2025.
This is twice the amount produced last year, signaling a significant growth trend. I actually predict more!
To adapt to this data boom, professionals utilizing generative AI must evaluate their data sources and identify the most valuable functionalities for the future.
Poor Vs. Quality Data
The detrimental impact of poor data on businesses is undeniable.
Poor-quality data is the root cause of operational disruptions, inaccurate insights, and poor decision-making.
According to a report by Gartner in 2021, organizations suffer an average annual cost of $12.9 million due to bad data quality.
In the past, data quality efforts were primarily focused on structured data in relational databases.
However, marketers now face new challenges with the rise of big data systems, cloud computing, and unstructured data types like text and sensor data. Managing data quality across cloud systems has become essential.
In search and content marketing, data has never been so important. However, 57% of marketers misinterpret data, resulting in costly mistakes.
This can result from that data via disparate data sources and the related problems with processing large data sets at scale
What Is Quality Data?
Quality data combines crucial factors such as accuracy, connectivity, completeness, and reliability.
Image created by author, September 2023
The accuracy of the data you use defines success in search – ensuring executives, content, digital, product, marketing, and sales departments are equipped with accurate information is essential.
Reliable data is driving increasingly intelligent search decisions that impact business performance.
In addition to accuracy, several other dimensions contribute to good data quality, including:
Completeness: Data sets should contain all the necessary data elements.
Consistency: Data values across different systems or data sets should not conflict.
Uniqueness: Duplicate data records should be avoided in databases and data warehouses.
Timeliness: Data should be regularly updated to remain current and readily available.
Validity: Data should contain the expected values and follow proper structure.
Conformity: Data should adhere to the standardized formats established by your organization.
By meeting these factors, data sets become reliable and trustworthy and align with data governance efforts to ensure consistent and effective data usage across organizations.
Data, Search, And Generative AI
A combination of humans and machines creates a data and content marketing battleground where quality and connectivity are crucial to success.
The adoption of AI tools, machine learning applications, real-time data streaming, and complex data pipelines has further complicated the data quality process.
Compliance with data privacy and protection laws, such as GDPR and CCPA, has increased the demand for accurate and consistent data.
While the volume of global data grows exponentially, at the same time, SEO is changing as consumer demands continue to evolve, and search engines cater to these changes by creating new experiences and experimenting with the integration of AI in search engine results pages (SERPs).
As a result, marketers need to carefully reconsider their approach to data, technical SEO, and generative AI outputs.
Data Inputs And Generative AI Outputs
The quality of generative AI outputs depends on the quality and connectivity of the data that feeds it.
Many of you will have experienced this, especially in the early days of generative AI and ChatGPT, Bing AI, and Google Bard.
This is why we see more and more prompt engineering and fine-tuning of data from large language models (LLM).
Generative AI based on quality data analysis is already saving time and efficiency for SEO pros.
Image from author, August 2023
Generative AI can help SEO and content marketers complete repetitive tasks at a faster pace and with accuracy.
Over 98% of our customers are saving valuable time crafting SEO titles and descriptions utilizing BrightEdge Copilot (Disclosure: my company).
However, the value of quality data feeding generative AI also extends beyond time savings.
By utilizing quality data, marketers can enhance their understanding of consumer and conversational intent (the key to generative AI results in the SERPS) and understand datasets by incorporating external industry classification data, ultimately reducing processing times.
Additionally, generative AI can create training and synthetic data sets to support the further development of AI and machine learning models.
However, this evolution does call for marketers to adjust their approach to data and ensure;
Quality and Connectivity of Data: AI outputs are only as good as the inputs. Ensure the sources you use are complete and combine historical and real-time data. Avoid multiple disparate data sources that give an incomplete picture of your consumer behavior to avoid GIGO – Garbage In, Garbage Out.
Integration into Enterprise Data Strategy: Generative AI should be considered an integral part of the data strategy. Ensure its inclusion from the outset and align it with your broader enterprise marketing goals.
Proactive Challenge Addressing: Proactively address security, bias, and accuracy challenges specific to generative AI. Assessing and mitigating these risks is essential for successful implementation and future compliance issues.
Focusing on Analytics Cycle Components: The initial adoption of generative AI should target specific components of your marketing campaigns and specific use cases. Testing outputs continuously to ensure applications work and guarantee success, especially when outputs are being produced at scale.
Prioritizing Business Impact: Prioritize programs that drive measurable business impact to your campaigns. Ensure any technologies you use are tried and tested, and innovations in generative AI are validated and backed by foundational quality, high-fidelity data sets.
Moving Forward With Data In SEO
When looking at how AI impacts SEO, it’s good to consider that every webpage has human and machine visitors: people seeking relevant content that answers their questions and needs and search engine spiders or bots analyzing technical content.
Data processing has become indispensable for assessing site content and informing digital strategies.
SEO marketers are now inundated with incremental data additions that can be overwhelming to decipher. We are fortunate that AI and automation in SEO are not new, and automated technologies can reduce manual data efforts and improve business decision-making such as;
Collecting and structuring big data to generate smaller, more valuable, actionable insights.
Improving tasks like data classification, tagging, and cleansing.
Online research, site auditing, and intent modeling.
Uncovering valuable insights into how consumers are interacting with search engines.
This also helps marketers who lack the necessary degrees or experience in data science to do this effectively.
Marketers who leverage data correctly can adapt to changing consumer expectations, keep up with granular search changes, and meet Google standards.
Utilizing a combination of unique knowledge and high-fidelity data (propriety) is crucial for staying competitive and ensuring that AI applications are successful on solid data foundations.
For example, retail marketers can uncover the issue of duplicate content, while marketers in banking can focus on concise content. Tailored best practices and industry-specific problem-solving give marketers a competitive edge.
This all helps create better, faster search experiences.
Image created by author, September 2023
Conclusion
Many SEO pros still do not fully utilize the value of data due to its overwhelming complexity. However, with the help of advanced AI, these hidden insights can be uncovered and understood.
By harnessing the power of AI-first technologies, marketers can optimize their content for maximum impact across multiple digital channels, adapting to changing technologies and consumer behavior.
As organizations forge ahead with their generative AI strategies, it is vital to remember the success of applications relies on the data that feeds it.
Ensure quality and connective data are central to your AI roadmap. Without it, success will be limited.
So, the first thing we need to do within the Purpose category is to define the core activities (or responsibilities) that are within these pillars.
In the simplest of terms, how will we manage the “content lifecycle” from ideation all the way through to measurement? This is going to help us understand this “wicked problem.”
When we think about how we’re going to allocate all of our time, resources, etc., we like to categorize things.
In our personal lives, those categories might be work, lifestyle, or family. In our business lives, they might be via divisions, marketing, sales, product, human resources, accounting, etc.
In order to make a plan for how we will accommodate all the activities that need to be performed as part of our content marketing strategy, we first need to identify what they are – categorize them.
Within each of the three pillars, a six-step lifecycle for content makes up the categories of responsibilities that need to be applied. But now we can see how the three pillars of content align with a very linear content lifecycle process.
As you can see in the image, each of the six responsibilities flows through the three pillars from coordination of content, through operations, and ultimately into our portfolio of experiences.
And, of course, our new content team won’t be responsible for all of them across all three pillars.
So, we start by defining them (and what we will and won’t be responsible for) as our Purpose – within the Content Coordination pillar. The six responsibility categories are:
1. Strategy: Planning And Prioritization
As with any communication, strategic content is planned and prioritized. Not all ideas for content are good, and most should be combined with others.
So a key first step in the content lifecycle is a coordinated activity of cross-functional planning, resource allotment, and prioritization for content.
2. Create: Content Assembly And Editing
One of the biggest challenges in the content lifecycle is separating the idea of content creation (the raw content) and production of the designed assets (the containers).
But this is a necessary split to ensure that great content can be re-packaged and re-used across multiple layouts and designs.
3. Produce: Design And Production
Once content has been created and production gets underway, you must have a planning process to manage that work.
This is the activity of designing and producing all of the containers for content that needs to be created.
4. Merchandise: Scheduling And Distribution
Think of this as internal distribution of the content produced.
If you have planned well, you are creating lots of assets from big ideas, and your publishing schedule looks forward, not behind.
In other words, because you’ve been planning, you’re likely completing assets that may not be published for weeks or even months. This responsibility is the internal distribution planning and lifecycle.
5. Activate: Publishing And Promotion
Whether you’re a team of one or 100, you should develop activation plans as part of your content plan.
After content is published, this is a question of not only a “marketing plan” but of all the content and assets that may need to be created as part of a marketing plan for other content assets.
6. Measure: Analytics And Insight
Who is wrangling and working the decision-making process for how you will determine measurement?
It’s about creating a planning and ongoing management process.
Who is responsible for tracking the metrics?
Who is accountable for getting the numbers?
Who will be consulted?
Who needs to be informed about them?
So – with these responsibilities in mind, the question then becomes how you delegate (or assume) each of these six responsibilities across each of the three different pillars.
Is one team handling all of the responsibilities across all three pillars, or are multiple teams handling some of the responsibilities and outsourced agencies handling others?
Or are all teams handling all of the responsibilities as separate silos?
It’s a decision to make. There is no right one.
And don’t worry – you are building to change, so as things evolve, you may decide to change from one to another.
The critical thing is to make a conscious decision about each.
Remember, these are activities that you will constantly manage, not projects that cannot be undone.
This article is the first in a series of three on Search Engine Journal that delve deeper into the concepts discussed in the book. We’re also excited to announce that the book will be officially launched on September 26, 2023.
As a token of appreciation for your readership, Kogan Page Ltd. has generously shared a 20% discount code exclusively for Search Engine Journal readers. If you’re interested in purchasing the book, please use the promo code CMS20 at www.koganpage.com/content-marketing-strategy to redeem it.
So how do you find out whether your content is really resonating with your target audience?
And what metrics should you consider when making adjustments to your strategy?
If you’re looking to maximize your marketing efforts and create the kind of content that both captivates and converts, our upcoming webinar is one you won’t want to miss!
Join us on September 20, as we reveal the 7 key metrics for measuring content effectiveness.
You’ll get expert insights from iQuanti’s Wayne Cichanski, as well as Conductor’s Rachel Schardt and Rayan Nahas, on how these metrics can help you refine your content strategy and maximize ROI.
In this webinar, we’ll dive into topics like:
Content Relevancy: Learn how to measure the relevancy of your content and ensure it aligns perfectly with your audience’s needs and interests.
Content Depth: Your content should do more than just scratch the surface. Explore ways to gauge the depth of your content and ensure it offers genuine value to your readers.
Influenced & Direct Conversion Rate: Conversion rates are the ultimate litmus test for content quality. Discover how to measure the true impact of your content on your business’ bottom line.
Engagement Metrics: Discover the engagement metrics you should be paying close attention to, and learn how to leverage them to boost audience interaction and retention.
Consumer Demand/Volume: Learn how to measure consumer demand for your content, helping you tailor your strategies to meet their expectations.
Tone-Matching Demographics and Persona: Matching your content’s tone with your target demographics and personas is crucial for effective communication. Learn how to ensure your messaging is resonating with your intended audience.
And much more…
Ready to unlock the true potential of your content marketing strategy?
Leave this webinar knowing how to effectively measure content performance and optimize your resources by focusing on what works.
Sign up now and unveil the secrets to high-quality content that truly makes an impact.
AI is a hot topic in the content marketing world right now – some marketers swear by it, while others are leery of its potential impact.
So, how do you find the middle ground? How do you utilize AI to your advantage, while remaining cautious and avoiding common pitfalls?
Can you use AI to enhance your SEO and content strategy? And what’s the right way to do it?
Join us on September 13, and learn how you can start using AI to create high-ranking, effective content for your business.
We’ll share practical tips for successful AI usage, as well as real-life case studies from marketers leveraging AI for SEO and content creation.
Get an overview of the key concepts, and have your questions answered by industry experts.
In this webinar, you’ll discover:
Ways to combine SEO & AI: Learn how to supercharge your SEO efforts by seamlessly merging the power of SEO data with AI technology.
How to think outside the box with AI: Explore unconventional, yet impactful, applications of AI in content creation that will set your strategies apart from the competition.
Case studies that inspire: Dive into real-world examples that showcase the remarkable impact of AI on content creation, optimization, and SEO performance.
Join Andy Crestodina, a globally recognized content marketing expert and the founder of Orbit Media, and Margarita Loktionova, Content Marketing Lead at Semrush, as they discuss how AI can redefine your approach to digital marketing.
Whether you’re aiming to create compelling content, enhance your SEO strategies, or simply stay ahead of the curve, incorporating AI into your process could be the key to unlocking success.
Don’t miss out on this opportunity to gain the AI insights and inspiration you need to upgrade your content marketing efforts.
We don’t have to tell you that the world of SEO is always evolving. You know that.
While the overarching goal of SEO remains the same, year-over-year, the obstacles and challenges, best practices and tactics, and metrics for success in the industry are often shifting.
So, what are SEO pros most focused on in 2023 and into 2024?
Content creation and strategy.
According to our third annual State Of SEO (SOS) report, content strategy and production have become the most difficult aspect of SEO jobs, the top focus of work for SEO pros, and the most effective overall strategy.
Let’s wrap our heads around that result for a moment: SEO pros say content and content strategy are both the hardest part of their jobs and the most effective strategies they employ.
Generative AI As An SEO Content Solution
It should come as no surprise then, that AI – particularly generative AI – is causing major disruption in the SEO industry.
Over 81% of respondents in our SOS survey said that generative AI has impacted their SEO strategy at least somewhat.
While generative AI has some SEO experts worried about the future of organic traffic, many see it as a powerful tool to help automate the content development and production process.
68% of SEO professionals are looking to automate tasks or use an AI-powered service, according to our SOS report. And plenty are already doing so.
But it has its limitations, of which you should stay hyper-aware.
And now that your competitors are all using it, standing out from the crowd will be an everyday challenge.
How To Leverage AI Effectively For Content & Content Strategy
Here are some ways to leverage AI to make your content and content strategy processes more efficient without sacrificing quality.
Important reminder: For each of the strategies we cover in this post, we recommend reviewing the generated content for accuracy and editing it to make it unique and authentic to your voice.
1. Repurposing Existing Content
If you’ve got a compelling piece of content, generative AI tools can help you get even more juice out of it.
All it takes is feeding the content to the AI tool and having it present the right information in a new format.
Let’s say you have a new research report that you’d like to promote (like our SOS report!).
If you want to be more hands-on but want a little help getting started, ask it to pull out a number of quotes and then provide a bullet-point summary.
Here are some examples of AI tools you can use to repurpose existing content:
OpenAI’s ChatGPT: Maybe you’ve heard of this one? If you’re looking to use AI to boost your content process, ChatGPT is a great starting point. You can present it with your existing content and ask it to generate a summary, a simplification, or even a new angle. This is a great time-saving tool for you if you want to turn a long article into something shorter and engaging.
Wavve: If you’ve got a podcast or audio clips that you’d love to leverage on social media, you might want to try Wavve. Wave leverages AI to scan your audio and find the best highlights for you, then creates audiograms with captions and visuals for social. So you get content that’s optimized for social audiences with a fraction of the effort.
2. Automated Keyword Research
Did you know you can use AI to automate your keyword research?
AI can analyze a ton of data at one time, so it can be a helpful tool for identifying keywords that fit with your content strategy, and have the search volumes and competition you’re looking for.
Remember, chatbots can’t actually perform keyword research themselves. You need to provide the data. However, the tool can help you work with the data you provide.
Here are some examples of AI tools you can use to help you with your keyword research:
Surfer SEO: This tool uses AI and machine learning to help you save time on researching and grouping keywords. Based on the data you provide, Surfer analyzes huge amounts of data to offer suggestions for things like content ideas tied to keywords, content structure, and topic clusters.
INK: Another tool to help you get the best results with more efficiency, INK has dedicated features for both keyword research and keyword clustering. Simply provide it with data like a primary topic, target audience, and audience objective, and INK will give you a downloadable list of related keywords, their volume, trends over time, CPC, difficulty, etc.
3. Content Analysis
Why spend time combing through data sets when AI can do it for you?
Imagine you want to analyze the performance of your social media content over the past six months. You can input the raw performance data into an AI tool and have it analyzed for you.
Perhaps you want to see the highest-performing post types in a table format or know which social platform is providing the best return on investment (ROI).
AI can pull out these data points or highlight important trends for you in the blink of an eye.
Here are some examples of AI tools you can use to help you with your content analysis:
Polymer: Sifting through content data and deciding what story to tell – and how to tell it – can be overwhelming. Polymer is an AI-powered tool that gives customers “the power to explore, visualize, and present their data confidently.” It can import data from many different sources, and then help you identify which creative is performing the best and even how to optimize ad budgets. It can also create data visualizations and build custom dashboards for you based on your information.
4. Optimizing Your Content
Marketers understand that SEO optimization is key to success – but they don’t always have the time, the resources, or even the knowledge to make it happen.
That’s where AI comes in.
It can analyze a piece of content you’ve already created and suggest how to optimize it for better results. You could ask it to suggest appropriate places for internal links, opportunities to use certain words or ways to rephrase text to better suit a specific audience.
Here are some examples of AI tools you can use to help you with optimizing your content:
Yoast SEO: Yoast is a mega-popular WordPress plugin, and for good reason. With help from AI, Yoast can analyze your content and give you data on readability, keyword usage, and overall SEO optimization – so you can put your best foot forward when it comes to your content.
Semrush’s SEO Writing Assistant: If you want to create SEO-optimized content to blow your competition out of the water, this tool can help. It uses AI to analyze your content and give you tips on making copy more SEO-friendly, maintaining a consistent tone of voice, and improving engagement.
5. Personalization & Segmentation
Need help with audience segmentation? AI is your friend.
Provide your AI tool of choice with your audience data and the parameters you’re looking for, and it can segment your audience for you.
Then, you can leverage that information to improve your personalization efforts by creating content tailored to your target audience.
So, if you want to alter a blog post to speak to people in the UK (rather than the US), you can ask generative AI to help you make it more relevant for that audience.
Here are some examples of AI tools you can use to help you with personalization and segmentation:
Copy.ai: If you’ve ever manually translated something, you know it’s time-consuming and complicated. Copy.ai can translate marketing content from product descriptions to ebooks to ads. By leveraging AI, the tool can help you create translations that are SEO-friendly, optimized for search engines, and consistent with your brand voice – all while considering the nuances of each language.
Dynamic Yield: If you want to get the most out of your audience data, Dynamic Yield can help. The tool brings together your customer data from a variety of sources, both digital and offline. From there, it can help you with complex segmentation, audience management, content personalization, targeting, and more – everything you need to optimize the customer experience.
AI And Content: How To Stand Out From The Crowd
As we mentioned earlier in the article, an increasing number of marketers are turning to AI for assistance in the content strategy and creation process.
Over time, it will only get harder to rise above the noise of AI content.
So, how can you do that? Here are a few best practices.
Lead With Authenticity
It may seem obvious, but this is too often overlooked. AI can do many things, but it cannot replicate the human touch.
To stand out from the crowd of automated content, focus on bringing authenticity to every piece of content you put out into the world.
Infuse everything you create with unique insights, anecdotes, and personal stories. This is where AI is limited and where you can excel.
Highlight Your Expertise
You’re an expert in your industry or niche and should lean into that.
No matter what kind of content you create, focus on ensuring your knowledge and experience shine through, and position yourself as an authority in that space.
Ensure you’ve identified your specific target audience, and create content specifically for them.
Show them that you have the know-how in that area and that they can come to you for advice and guidance.
Keep Experimenting
With SEO – and marketing in general – it’s important to stay one step ahead of the pack. So be sure to keep experimenting with different content types and formats.
Whether you’re using AI to help with your content process, try your hand at different strategies to see what engages your audience – and then double down on the things that do.
Stay adaptable and push yourself to keep innovating in your content – and keep pushing AI to find new ways it can help you.
In Summary
There’s no question that AI has disrupted the SEO and marketing industries at large – and this is just the beginning.
The good news is that, as yet, most SEO professionals are feeling optimistic about AI’s potential impact.
Among respondents to our SOS report, the majority (72.4%) believe it will help their business either a lot or a little this year.
So, as you approach content and content strategy this year, know this: Generative AI is here to help you automate things.
Focus on maintaining quality in your content and staying one step ahead of the competition, and you just might find yourself with a little extra time in your day!
Staying ahead of the curve is essential for agencies and brands looking to succeed in 2023.
With Google’s algorithm constantly updating and AI technology quickly advancing, how can you use these changes to your advantage?
How can you stay up-to-date and streamline and maximize your online reputation?
In order to thrive in the world of search and SEO, it’s important to know what to expect so you can adapt accordingly.
So, if you’re ready to elevate your service offerings and boost your search rankings, our upcoming webinar has all the insights you need.
Join industry experts Morrissey Balsamides and Cynthia Sener of Chatmeter as they delve into five crucial Google Algorithm & AI changes that you need to know to remain competitive.
Discover the strategic advantages of AI integration, how it impacts your website, and what lies ahead in the realm of artificial intelligence in SEO.
This insightful session also explores the positive effects of AI on multi-location reputation management – where it stands today, and where it may go in the future.
You’ll learn about:
Strengthening Multi-Location Partnerships & Enhancing Client Relationships: Uncover the strategies your agency can implement to become a better partner to your multi-location clients, foster stronger relationships, and drive lasting success.
Mastering Page One Presence & Navigating Google SERPs: Explore techniques to ensure your clients’ websites consistently appear on page one of Google’s Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), in spite of constantly changing algorithms. Plus, learn how SEO optimization can help your clients achieve maximum visibility in an increasingly competitive digital marketplace.
Unlocking The Potential Of AI In Online Reputation Management: Understand why AI is perfectly suited for online reputation management and what it can do for you and your clients. Discover best practices for streamlining and maximizing your online reputation to stay ahead of the curve.
Are you determined to thrive amidst Google’s constant changes and evolving technologies?
Ready to step up your search and SEO game?
Sign up for the webinar to learn more about how you can better support multi-location clients, ensure page one visibility on SERPs, and optimize your online reputation.
Not able to attend the live event? Don’t worry – we’ve got you covered!
Register now to secure your spot, and we’ll ensure you receive a copy of the recording and presentation deck after the webinar.
Make sure you stay informed and adaptive to navigate the future of SEO with confidence!
There’s no doubt that ChatGPT has emerged as a powerful, ground-breaking tool for marketers and business owners around the world.
In fact, ChatGPT has been heralded as one of the leading AI tools of today, with capabilities that include generating complex programming code, creating marketing templates, and writing content.
With all its capabilities, ChatGPT has become a popular tool for business owners, particularly when it comes to content writing. ChatGPT can create blog post outlines, write social media copy, draft emails, and so much much more, saving business money and time on content creation.
But when it comes to more complex and regulated industries – like the legal industry – some questions emerge.
Is ChatGPT capable of providing accurate and reliable legal content? Can ChatGPT be “trusted” to write good website content for law firms?
In this guide, we’ll cover some of the risks of using ChatGPT for law firm website content writing – and what to use instead.
ChatGPT And Law Firm Marketing: A Recipe For Disaster?
Conduct a Google search for anything pertaining to “ChatGPT” and “lawyers,” and you’re likely to see some troubling results.
Queries like “Will ChatGPT replace lawyers?” and “Is it legal to use ChatGPT for legal work?” are common phrases.
The fact is, ChatGPT can be a valuable tool when it comes to streamlining business operations, creating templates, drafting outlines, and otherwise supporting the more administrative work that legal professionals do every day.
However, it is not a viable replacement for great legal content – which often requires a trained professional and legal review to confirm the validity and accuracy of its subject matter.
So, while the combination of ChatGPT and law firm marketing are not necessarily a recipe for disaster, close consideration should be taken to how ChatGPT is used when it comes to writing content, producing “information”, generating marketing copy, and the like.
Here are some reasons you shouldn’t use ChatGPT (or other AI tools) to write your law firm website content.
1. ChatGPT Is (Often) Wrong
ChatGPT often produces inaccurate information with confidence. You might ask ChatGPT a question, and it will generate a response, but there is no way of verifying the accuracy of its answer.
This can be super dangerous when it comes to legal content. People seeking legal content must be able to rely on the accuracy of this information in order to make decisions about their legal case, seek legal services, file documents, etc.
ChatGPT’s algorithm is simply based on patterns in its existing training data, which may fall out of date or not be based on accurate information to begin with. Anyone relying on ChatGPT for content creation must fact-check all outputs and validate any claims themselves.
Thus, it is important not to take ChatGPT as the ultimate source of truth but rather review all outputs closely before considering using this content on your website.
2. ChatGPT Lacks Depth, Insight, And Creativity
Inaccuracies aside, ChatGPT simply lacks depth, insight, and creativity in its content outputs.
Even if you enter a super detailed prompt – outlining your brand voice, target audience, etc. – it can still miss the mark. It just isn’t as engaging as human-written content.
Part of this is because ChatGPT can’t produce original ideas and stories. It’s only as strong as the data it already has access to, which is based on existing content. It is extremely limited when it comes to providing unique, engaging content.
Further, even when ChatGPT does produce some impressive content, it is not always consistent. The exact prompt may produce a completely different output the next day. This makes it difficult to provide website copy that’s wholly consistent and on-brand.
Finally, ChatGPT lacks the human experience to highlight personal stories or convey emotion. These elements are critically important for law firms that want to connect with their target audience.
Potential clients want to connect to that human touch and feel that your law firm understands their needs and pain points.
ChatGPT is great at producing generic, somewhat robotic content. It is not great at crafting original copy that incorporates your law firm’s tone of voice or connects with prospects on an emotional level.
This can have a significant impact on the effectiveness of your website copy.
3. Ownership Over AI Content Is… Questionable
As stated, ChatGPT is only as powerful as the training data it already has access to. That means that this content could already exist elsewhere on the web – if not as the original source, then as a publication of already ChatGPT-generated content.
For example, say you prompt ChatGPT to “Write a blog article about the 5 steps to file for divorce.” Another law firm, anywhere else in the world, could input a similar prompt and get an identical output. And if both law firms publish this content, who’s to say who “owns” it?
This all raises the question, is all AI content fair use? Or is it stealing?
As a legal professional, you must be particularly careful regarding copyright laws and duplicate content. It’s simply not worth it to publish ChatGPT content on your website and risk being slapped with copyright infringement.
Ownership over AI content is still new territory. And while a few articles have been published on this topic, it’s still a subject of debate. For legal professionals, this may not be a safe area to play in.
4. ChatGPT Content May Reflect Biases
ChatGPT may inadvertently reflect biases in its content, as there may be inherent biases in its training data.
To date, we don’t fully know the source(s) of ChatGPT’s data, to what degree it has been reviewed for biases, or to what degree it has been fact-checked.
The result is that some ChatGPT content may reflect certain viewpoints or biases. For example:
If the training data contains gender imbalances, the model might produce biased responses. It may exhibit stereotypes when discussing gender-related topics.
ChatGPT may inadvertently reinforce racial or ethnic stereotypes or exhibit discriminatory language when discussing certain groups or topics.
It may produce content that makes assumptions or provides inaccurate information as it related to socioeconomic groups.
ChatGPT might favor certain cultural perspectives or exhibit a lack of understanding of diverse cultural contexts, leading to biased or insensitive content.
Overall, biased data inputs can lead to biased content. ChatGPT is not equipped to challenge these biases to provide a truly balanced perspective in this case.
This could lead to all types of issues, most notably deterring potential clients due to biased, discriminatory content.
5. ChatGPT Cannot Crawl The Web And Validate Information
While ChatGPT is based on an extensive database, it doesn’t have information about every possible industry or topic. It also cannot crawl the web to source new information, so it may not be up to date with recent laws, studies, research, and legal processes.
Further, it may not have the niche knowledge to accurately convey information to your target audience. So, for example, if you ask ChatGPT about a complex legal issue, it might not have a response at all, or may produce incorrect information.
When writing content on specialized topics, it’s best to rely on your own professional knowledge or the experience of other trained legal professionals.
You can also access accurate information such as case files and research from the web. This is the best way to ensure your content is accurate and up to date.
In case it wasn’t obvious, there are some very real issues regarding the accuracy and validity of ChatGPT content.
With this in mind, legal professionals should be wary of using this content as is. Always take ChatGPT outputs with a grain of salt and do your own due diligence to fact-check its content.
Skip The ChatGPT Content. Do This Instead.
While there are many amazing use cases for ChatGPT (which Search Engine Journal has covered extensively here, here, and here), closer consideration must be taken when it comes to ChatGPT’s application to the legal industry.
It’s not worth the risk to publish inaccurate or compromised legal content that might hurt your business or land you in legal hot water.
Instead of using ChatGPT to write content for your law firm website, consider hiring a skilled content writer and incorporating AI tools into the planning and formatting stages of the content process.
A copywriter will be able to understand your brand voice and messaging far better than any AI tool. Then, they can use tools like ChatGPT for topic ideation, drafting outlines, and structuring content.
However, the bulk of the content will be written by a human writer and then reviewed by a legal professional on your team.
It’s amazing what we can do with AI technology today. Law firms can use AI tools to their advantage, but should always adhere to the standards and regulations of their industry.
This is the best way to protect the business and provide the most accurate information to users.
