In The Rush to Remain Relevant: Brands Must Reevaluate ROI

If a brand is irrelevant in our lives—it is a brand on the decline. Some brands have to work harder than others to remain relevant. Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and other brands that we interact with on an hourly, daily or weekly basis are easily made relevant in our lives given our interactions as users. Other brands often have to work harder to remain relevant. 

This year’s Super Bowl is a good gut check for brands who will be working to remain highly relevant in the hearts and minds of consumers already in a committed relationship with the brand as well as those who aren’t. Advertising and brand storytelling often reflects the culture, trends and increasingly the societal issues of the day. But in bringing the three together it also presents a tall order for today’s brands who will likely hit the target with some and totally miss with others:

Culture:
The context of which we live in often reflected by entertainment, news, media etc. 

Trends: 
What’s getting our attention at the time—things that impact how we live and work ranging from technology to art, music etc. 

Societal Issues:
The topics of our time reflecting social-economical and cultural context. The things we debate or deem critical to society. 

Source: NPR

Many advertisers during this year’s big game find themselves at the intersection of culture, trends and societal issues. As a result, they are going to need to answer the question of «was it worth it» in a more nuanced ways. On face value—measuring the effectiveness by a Super Bowl ad in terms of views is the most traditional way to do it. But for brands who are dialed up at the intersection of culture, trends and societal issues—measuring views will not be enough. They must also break down sentiment indicators such as:

• Likes/Dislikes
• Positive Responses (media, social, search)
• Negative Responses media, social, search)
• New Subscriptions and Followers
• Lost Subscriptions and Followers

One of this year’s Superbowl Ads which is operating at the intersection of culture, trends and societal issues is Audi—taking on equal pay through its ad and subsequent hashtag #Driveprogess. From Adweek:

The 60-second spot, posted Wednesday to YouTube and Facebook and closing in on 5 million views as of noon Friday, has a remarkably high ratio of negative sentiment—almost 40,000 dislikes to just 4,000 likes. There are two separate criticisms—one, that the ad is simply leftist propaganda; and two, that it is hypocritical because of the company’s heavily male leadership team. (Audi AG’s board of directors, too, has six men and no women.)

The Pressure to Remain Relevant for Brands In a Politically Charged Culture is High
2017’s Superbowl advertising is a reflection of today’s culture in that brands increasingly feel the need to be a part of the dialogue despite societal divisions—so we’re likely to see more brands attempting to be relevant at the intersection of culture, trends and societal issues. As a bonus—it also demonstrates a level of «responsibility» especially if the brand feels like it’s taking the right stance on the right issues. However, success in this space cannot be discerned by reach alone. Sentiment metrics will become increasingly important for brands asking the question:

«Was it worth it’? 

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In The Rush to Remain Relevant: Brands Must Reevaluate ROI

Must Have SEO Toolbars and How to Use Them

When you’re just starting out with your online marketing efforts, you need to hustle like crazy to get your product and content in front of the right people, including your audience. That’s why, especially in the beginning of your website’s lifetime, you’ll need to mimic your competitors.

Think about it. Pretty much any niche in the internet is saturated now. And for most new websites, even one competitor that does proper SEO is a death sentence. But fear not—you can analyze your competition, do a better job, and end up on top.

Having a heavy load tool where you can find tons of data is great and will help you out a lot. But most often you need to check things on the go. That’s where you can rely on an SEO browser toolbar.

9 Most Commonly Used SEO Toolbars

1. Open SEO Stats
2. Ahrefs SEO Toolbar
3. SEO Site Tools
4. Alexa Toolbar
5. SEOquake
6. Majestic
7. SimilarWeb
8. SEO & Website Analysis
9. MozBar

There are a wide variety of SEO toolbars to choose from, but for your browser to work fast and smooth, you probably will need to limit yourself to one or two extensions at a time. So let’s dive right in and see which of them deserve your attention.

1. Open SEO Stats

This toolset collects and shows you open data about a website you’re on. It looks a bit outdated, yet you can get a general idea from it about the state of a website.

As a website owner, you can check out the kind of links there are on a website, the site’s approximate page load speed, regular on-page SEO info, and some traffic stats.

But upon testing, I noticed that quite a few of the metrics of Open SEO Stats are off. For example, the toolbar shows incorrect pagespeed and Alexa’s traffic stats, which aren’t as accurate as, say, SimilarWeb’s.

2. Ahrefs SEO Toolbar

Ahrefs is well known for its huge index size and a super fast crawler that sometimes finds links even faster than Google itself. With this toolbar, you get fast access to this exclusive data.

To use it, you need to have an Ahrefs account (which can be a free trial).

The most beneficial ways to use Ahrefs SEO Toolbar are for competitive analysis and for link building.

You can see the rank of a domain, a page, what pages backlink to this post or website, etc.

With this bar, you also get information under each URL on the SERP. This way you can quickly check who ranks for needed keywords and if you can outrank them, depending on their domain ranking and page ranking.

The bar itself is fully customizable. You can choose which metrics to show and which to hide.

And if you need more data of any kind, just click on any number and you’ll be redirected to the Ahrefs interface with full reports on backlinks, keywords, referring domains, etc.

3. SEO Site Tools

As of January 11th 2017, this toolbar was updated last in 2011, which isn’t a good sign in the dynamic world of SEO.

When it was created, it was probably an awesome tool. And it still has some competitive and nice features even compared to younger opponents.

With this toolbar, you can check the on-page optimization elements, see the rankings according to several indexes, and use links to WhoIs services to find out who owns the website.

But many features, such as the social media tab, didn’t work once for me. Also, I found several broken links in the tool itself. So there is an expiration date on web products after all.

4. Alexa Toolbar

Alexa is also one of the older players in the SEO toolbars world. Yet some still refer to Alexa ranking as an important metric for a website. However, at first glance I noticed that for GrowMap Alexa found 2.5 times fewer referring domains than Ahrefs found.

You can’t get much data on the go from this toolbar. For most of your info, you need to go on Alexa’s website and see the details there.

5. SEOquake

SEOquake was recently revamped and now looks and feels a lot better than it used to look. You need an active SEMrush account to use it to full capacity though.

As with Ahrefs, you get a toolbar with data in the top of your browser window, information on SERP, and options to customize the way your toolbar works and what it shows you.

From SEOquake you can see pretty accurate social media, bounce rate, traffic and advertisement analysis.

It can be a bit confusing that for some info you’re redirected to the SEOquake interface and for some to SEMrush, but overall this tool can become a strong asset in your online endeavours.

6. Majestic

The Majestic toolbar can only be used with the paid subscription to Majestic, which isn’t that advantageous since you don’t get a chance to test it out to decide if you like it or not.

Majestic also has its own crawling index and a couple of custom metrics like Trust Flow and Citation Flow. Those features are Majestic’s way of showing you the

Must Have SEO Toolbars and How to Use Them

The Death of Content Marketing: Why Brands Must Become Cultural Currency

Before there was social media—before there was mobile and the video revolution, there was blogging. Once heralded as a revolution in communications and to a degree, marketing—self expression and direct publishing of the written word became an influential force to be dealt with.

Blogging, in written word form of has been a commodity for some time.

Even as I write this on the reality is less people are taking in the written word, opting instead for “junk food” media which comes in highly shareable and snackable bits of sticky, mobile optimized content.

Today however, it is content itself that has and will continue to become the commodity. Content in all forms—even mobile optimized and snackable content. There’s simply too much of it. Most of it is not very good and even if it is—the amount of effort it takes to make sure that content will travel far and wide makes for considerable effort. Many will do this well but more will fail.

So what is value in today’s connected marketing and media landscape?

Culture

The ability to create it, influence it, co-create it and integrate a brand so seamlessly in culture and relevant sub cultures. This is the next frontier of marketing and communications and while it has much to do with things like social, mobile and content—it is the cultural aspect that must lead while everything else follows. A very excellent article in Harvard Business Review reflects some of this shift, labeling it within the context of something Douglas Holt calls “Crowdculture”:

“While companies have put their faith in branded content for the past decade, brute empirical evidence is now forcing them to reconsider. In YouTube or Instagram rankings of channels by number of subscribers, corporate brands barely appear. Only three have cracked the YouTube Top 500. Instead you’ll find entertainers you’ve never heard of, appearing as if from nowhere.

YouTube’s greatest success by far is PewDiePie, a Swede who posts barely edited films with snarky voice-over commentary on the video games he plays. By January 2016 he had racked up nearly 11 billion views, and his YouTube channel had more than 41 million subscribers.”

The challenge for brands is that they often times cannot create culture by themselves. Today’s culture creators often thrive in “sub cultures”—niche groups that exist under more mainstream areas whether it be food, sports, fashion—lest you think this only applies to “consumer brands” it does not.Subcultures exist in business as well and continue to diversify as business itself becomes more specialized and niche.

Brands and Organizations Must Become Collaborators and Co-Creators of Culture

Today and tomorrow’s challenge for brands and organizations is to tweak their marketing and communications infrastructure so they can effectively collaborate with influencers of culture across the spectrum. If brands cannot create culture from scratch—they can co-create it with the right partners across the paid, owned, earned and social spectrum. But to do this at scale, they must understand the ecosystem of influence and re-structure internally to connect that ecosystem and approach peer to peer influence from all sides.

The Influencer Ecosystem

Brands and organizations who wish to influence culture and become co-creators of it, must begin to coordinate how they approach working with those who wield influence, coming at it from different directions. For example, TIME magazine featured a cover telling us that we should “eat butter”. While earned in nature, the story and the journalists behind it are playing a key role in the resurgence of butter and how Americans are re-thinking fat. It’s an example of media influencing culture—in this particular example, this kind of influence cannot be bought—it must be earned, however, increasingly cultural influencers such as “YouTubers” require paid means to collaborate with. The influencer ecosystem can be broken down as such:

Cultural Influencers
These can be celebrities but increasingly, it is the influencers of subcultures—those who are building audiences via Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube etc. that are becoming today’s trusted voices. In 2015, Variety reported on a survey which displayed a trend where digital celebrities (YouTubers etc.) began eclipsing traditional celebrities in terms of popularity:

“Sehdev predicts that within five years, YouTube stars will consume the entire top-20 celebrity influencer list, and aging teens will grow into a sizable fanbase for online talent overall. But that will require YouTube stars to remain genuine and relatable as they gain in popularity.”

However despite this trend, there are significant implications for brands. As stated above, the digital stars must remain genuine and relatable which makes working with them a challenge as brands must learn to collaborate vs. dictate heavy handed marketing. Also, brands must develop repeatable ways they can work with all levels of these types of influencers. As it is an emerging space often requiring complex contracts, disclaimers and transparency—it brings new operational dynamics to the table.

Reputational Influencers
These can range from employees to thought leaders to analysts and experts and while they often influence consumers or customers who are highly informed and connected themselves. The challenge here for brands is that much of what they do in this space is often times disconnected from what they do with cultural influencers—but should be more integrated. Not long ago, Edelman (my employer) announced a strategic partnership with a start up called Dynamic Signal. One of the key benefits of their platform Voicestream is the ability to harness the networks of either cultural or reputational influencers acting as amplifiers of content that a brand places in front of them. Integration and accountability in terms of performance is now becoming possible, but brands must first connect efforts here.

Media Influencers 
As the TIME example illustrates—media in all its forms led by journalists and the media companies they work with can often influence culture and sub

The Death of Content Marketing: Why Brands Must Become Cultural Currency