WEBSITES • EMAIL MARKETING • SEO • SOCIAL MEDIA

The Content Connection

The Impact of Image Recognition on SEO

We’ve all heard that a picture says a thousand words and that can truly be the case, especially when it comes to art. But what about the computer world where code, and not human eyes, determines what an image is and how much value it has? In short, image recognition SEO helps computers recognize the value of pictures and you don’t need a thousand words to get credit.

 

Let’s take a minute to look back at the relatively short history of image recognition SEO and the huge leaps we’ve already seen so we can understand the future and the impact this can have on your web presence.

 

Initially people started adding images (and when we say images we mean still as well as video) to their web pages because they discovered it increased viewer (human viewer) engagement. The problem then was that the search bots could not see or interpret images so basic keyword SEO was suggested. It was also realized that the visually impaired were not getting the value of these images and keywords were pushed in the forms of alt attribute tags and captions that could be read by page reader programs so the value wasn’t lost. This is an important aspect of image SEO because adding this data to your website not only helps your website but it makes the experience better for people with visual impairments, and the search engines want to actively promote accessibility and usability. While we do not have information on the specifics of what SEO elements are most important, we do know that this one ranks way up there because of the human element.

 

For years SEO experts have been pushing keyword optimization and alt tags because your images had little to no value to search engine as they couldn’t understand them. This is changing and it’s changing quickly. In fact, Facebook has a pretty nifty artificial intelligence (AI ) program that helps them identify what’s in an image. If you’re a regular Facebook user you may have already seen the data when an image is slow to load. Google is racing Facebook to perfect its AI and create a system that will help with searches. At this point, identifying easily recognizable images (i.e. a giraffe or a house) is not only mastered but with the AI element, once a giraffe is identified it will be more easily recognized and labeled in the future. The interpretation of video is more difficult and that technology is slower to roll out but it most definitely will get there.

 

Now, don’t jump to the conclusion that while the search bots will eventually be able to read your images and classify them that you need to be hands off. In fact, it actually means the complete opposite—it is more important than ever to use keywords, captions, alt attribute tags, etc. for your images. When creating this data remember to describe what the image is, use your keyword/keyphrase and create short file names that are descriptive. Control the value of your images by properly labeling them to your advantage.

 

What else can we glean from this trend? Use more images! It’s not a wave of the future, we’re way beyond that. You need to use images to capture and hold onto your audience or risk losing out to the competition. Our advice, use images but pay attention to file size because if your images take too long to load you not only lose your audience, you lose SEO value.

 

Spend some time familiarizing yourself with image recognition SEO and how you can use it to your advantage. Filament is always here to help you optimize your web images so you can reap the rewards of attracting more people to your page and holding their interest longer. Contact us for more information on how we can help.

Is Facial Recognition the Future of Email?

Facial recognition is one of the latest technologies on the verge of advancing digital marketing capabilities. Brands have experimented with facial-recognition software for shopping online, reuniting pets with their owners and helping people with blindness “see” smiles with a mobile app that detects when people are smiling.

Most of us are familiar with face-detection software that can recognize a face. We’ve experienced it with the software in our smartphone cameras that can auto-focus on faces. Facial-recognition software, on the other hand, can identify an unknown person. At present, Facebook uses this technology to identify people in photos with remarkable accuracy.

When it comes to email marketing, the number one value of facial recognition is convenience for customers. When entering a store that’s using facial-recognition software, subscribers could automatically receive an email that alerts them to recommended products or special deals, with the ability to redeem promotions digitally.

Facial-recognition email marketing also has the potential to drive customers back into brick-and-mortar stores. If they know entering a store will trigger an email with a great deal, there’s incentive to make in-store purchases.

Facial-recognition software offers the opportunity for better personalization, too. For example, imagine walking into a store and getting an email with product recommendations related to recent purchases you made at the store’s site online. Facial-recognition technology can connect your customer’s digital behavior with in-store behavior to give you a more accurate picture of what they want.

However, facial-recognition email marketing is not without its hurdles. In a 2015 consumer survey by First Insight, a maker of predictive analytics that helps businesses understand how new products will perform across retailers, retail classes, and buyer segments, 75% of consumers said they wouldn’t shop at a store using facial recognition for marketing purposes. That said, 55% reported that they’d be open to the technology if they knew what was in it for them, such as an exclusive discount.

Whatever the challenges, the data suggest that consumers could embrace facial recognition in email marketing as long as they understand how it’ll be used and what the benefits to them will be. Certainly, facial-recognition email marketing could be a boon to both parties—if businesses focus on thinking creatively about using this technology to serve customers, provide education about its benefits, and offer clear guidelines and transparency as regards the policies that govern its use.

Need help thinking creatively about the next steps for your email marketing? Contact Filament today to get help creating and implementing effective email marketing strategies.

Artificial Intelligence & Content Marketing

Artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t new, but in the past few years its use in the business world has grown exponentially. Google uses AI to help with search queries. IBM’s supercomputer Watson has most recently been learning how to stop cyber attacks. In the coming months and years, we’re going to see AI affect every area of digital marketing. So what does this mean for content marketing?

Better Audience Understanding

Big tech companies like Google, Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, and Facebook have been investing money in machine learning and artificial intelligence for several years in order to predict what their customers want—even before they know. Machine learning platforms can apply deep learning to large data sets to identify trends or common occurrences and then effectively predict typical responses. For example, let’s say you roll out a message to your audience. These platforms can conduct tests to see what’s working and what’s not in order to discern what’s truly driving behavior. This data can then be used to adapt content in real time to get the right message to the right person on the right platform at the right time.

Better Experience

AI offers a data goldmine with the capacity to analyze that data faster than ever before. It looks at real-time interactions between our messaging and the resulting customer behaviors in order to draw useful insights about what works and what doesn’t. We can take that knowledge and translate it into an experience that feels personal to our customers. Brands are already doing this on a small scale, such as in the case of product recommendations from online retailers, Netflix’s content curation, and virtual assistants like Siri, Cortana, and Google Now.

Better Engagement

What follows a better user experience? Better engagement. When you know your audience well and can create experiences expertly tailored to them, you can reach them in a more impactful way and keep them coming back for more.

Better Productivity

Some have feared that artificial intelligence technology will cost folks their jobs, but it’s more likely that it will give people the opportunity to focus on things like strategy and qualitative data interpretation—things that AI can’t do. AI will cause a shift in our day-to-day work since computers can now carry out rote functions and straightforward analytics that have historically taken up so much time. We’ve already seen the advent of companies like Automated Insights, which helps businesses produce annual reports, financial stories, brand management reports and more at a rate of 2,000 articles per second. Leveraging this technology will free up time for marketers to focus on higher-value tasks and may even help them do those tasks better.

Artificial intelligence technology is bound to have a lasting impact on content marketing in the years to come. In it lies a powerful opportunity to create better experiences for our customers because the combination of AI plus human is a much more potent platform than AI alone.

Ready to take your content marketing to the next level? Contact Filament for help putting the latest digital marketing trends to work for your business.

Social Marketing Listening for Real-Time Marketing

One of the key benefits to having a strong social media presence is the opportunity to generate immediate feedback from your customers. With social marketing listening you have the ability to collect up-to-the-minute market research and in turn use that feedback in real-time to drive your overall marketing strategy.

So what is social marketing listening? It goes beyond simply monitoring your social channels for reactions and questions from your customers. With a strong social listening strategy in place you have the ability to identify keywords, search terms, hashtags and now even images that include mentions of your brand across all social media platforms.

Actively searching for what customers are saying about your brand on a deeper level provides invaluable insights into how your customer is truly perceiving your brand, allowing you the opportunity to react.

Listen First, then React with a Plan

First and foremost, listen and pay attention to the feedback your audience is giving you.  With social listening it is imperative not to just jump into conversations but instead sit back, collect data, monitor the conversations, formulate a plan, and then react to what you are hearing from customers.  

Use this as an additional opportunity to provide excellence customer service and build on brand loyalty by reminding your audience that there is a person behind the brand.  This is a rare occasion to market to individuals one-on-one in real-time, so don’t just copy and paste responses but instead take the time to personalize the engagement and respond according to their needs.

Perception Is Reality

Social marketing listening provides instant feedback on how your brand is being perceived across all of social media. It allows you to see what your competitors are doing in the social space and how their audience is reacting as well.    

And now with revolutionary tools like image recognition as a next-level form of social listening, new opportunities are emerging for insight into measuring sponsorship and event ROI that weren’t readily available in the past.

Identify Influencers and Brand Advocates

Use social marketing listening tools to identify new influencers and brand advocates who are talking about your brand. Then leverage the user-generated content you discover in your next post and throughout your on-going marketing campaign to continue to bring social engagement with your customers to the next level.

 

Benefits of social listening can be huge. Instant feedback from customers on a daily basis, real-time intelligence on your competitors and collecting user-generated content to leverage in your next marketing campaign are just a few of the benefits.  

Need help taking your social listening strategy to the next level?  Contact the Filament team today.

Conversational Search: the Next Generation of SEO

The impact voice search is having on SEO is big and getting bigger. According to Sundar Pichai, Google CEO, voice searches account for 20% of mobile queries. In October 2014, 41% of adults and 55% of teens said they use voice search at least once a day. Some projections suggest that voice search could grow to 50% of all queries by 2020. If you’re a marketer, optimizing for voice search is clearly the future of SEO.

In our last SEO blog post, we provided a few tips to help you align your optimization plan to fit with the growing popularity of voice search. But what’s next? Whether your customers are using Google’s voice recognition app, Apple’s Siri or Microsoft’s Cortana, voice search makes online browsing more convenient by allowing people to search by speaking rather than typing. As the technology continues to evolve, we’re moving a step up from simple voice recognition to conversational search — voice understanding: search that responds to natural phrases by interpreting the meaning and context behind the words used.

Voice search by its very nature is more conversational, using natural language (generally 5 words or more) vs shorter text queries (1-3 words). As such, artificial intelligence (AI) technology is evolving to understand user intent and context, such as previous search queries and past user behavior and actions, to better anticipate your search needs.

For marketers, the longer queries from voice search provide richer user intent data because they tend to explicitly ask a question. In the new SEO model, content that can meet users where they’re at by answering these questions will give sites a clear advantage. It’s experience vs information architecture, content vs isolated keywords.

The future of SEO is all about overall content optimization, and a new definition: “Subject Experience Optimization”—delivering the best possible experience for the subject — the guest. To keep up, marketers need to provide content that helps create the connection the modern online guest craves and expects.

 

At Filament we are very strong believers that your content is a vital part of your website SEO, be it mobile or stationary, voice or keyboard. While some tips, tricks and techniques evolve and change in the world of search, content will always play a vital role in reaching the right audience and holding their interest. Great content will even transform visitors into brand representatives. Contact us if you’re interested in hiring content creation leaders to help you with voice search SEO.

Email Artificial Intelligence Has Arrived

The shift from manual, mass email–based email marketing to personalized marketing automation is already well underway. In fact, we’re heading into the next generation of marketing automation with tools that learn as they interact with subscribers.

We’ve been seeing new services pop up in the email marketing world, from predictive content like automatically generated, persuasive subject lines to artificial intelligence (AI) email software that reaches out to inbound marketing leads, interprets email responses, and qualifies leads. Some of the top names in tech are calling AI the next big thing since mobile and social.

Taking your email marketing from marketing automation to cognitive computing will, it’s said, make life a lot easier since smart computers are able to aid us in how we’re interacting with customers. For example, Conversica’s automated sales assistant contacts every single lead, engages them in what seems like human conversation, and then puts them in contact with someone in your sales department. As a marketer, you’ll know every single lead is being followed up on. Plus, you get feedback about engagement. This kind of smart automation helps brands better connect with their customers. And it frees up valuable time to focus on strategy.

Another benefit of AI is intelligence-driven personalization that’s mapped to the customer journey. The newest incarnation of marketing platforms takes the basic if/then model (e.g. if a customer takes this action, then send this email) and replaces it with a customer-journey model guided by machine intelligence that monitors every email interaction with subscribers and learns from them to create personalized experiences. These machine learning–based systems personalize based on where the subscriber is in the decision-making process, offering the opportunity for more effective messaging.

In addition, machine learning–based systems allow marketers to set more useful goals, like optimizing for engagement. The software finds the engagement tactics that worked to turn similar subscribers into customers and then recommends or undertakes those tactics. They collect valuable feedback, too, since they’re able to handle both traditional structured data, such as your email list, and unstructured data, such as social data.

Email artificial intelligence is the next step in marketing automation. It has the potential to optimize email engagement and ROI. With the revolution in data science, machine-informed campaigns let your business connect in a personal way with every singe subscriber for segment-of-one personalization. Marketers need to be watching for these developments to stay on the cutting edge of email marketing.

Looking to take your email marketing to the next level? Contact Filament today.

Optimize Your Content for Voice Recognition

Voice recognition is not new, but with the latest improvements to this voice-activated technology and the advent of digital personal assistants like Siri and Cortana, its use is on the rise, especially when it comes to search. According to a report by Thrive Analytics in late 2014, use of voice recognition for search is prevalent across most age groups, with 71% of people ages 18–29 using voice search, 59% of ages 30–43, 39% of ages 44–53, and 38% of ages 54+. Plus, as of May 2016, a third of all Cortana queries come from voice.

What does this mean for content marketing? Content marketers need to change the way they think about content and SEO, ensuring that the purpose and value of that content is understood by search engines and customers alike with the changing nature of search technologies.

1. Optimize for conversational language.

Since Google’s speech recognition error rate dropped to 8% in 2015 (from 25% in 2013), people are using natural, whole sentences instead of query language, such as “How do you make lasagna?” vs. “lasagna recipe.” As a result, instead of structuring content around keywords, content marketers must optimize content by building content around the conversational language used in voice searches. Test voice-friendly keywords and longer keyword phrases based on the way people talk to their phones. A positive side effect of this change is that your content will automatically be more personalized to your target audience since you’re using the language they use to search for your products and services.

2. Optimize for question keyword phrases.

As follows from our point above, marketers need to test and optimize for the highest-value question keyword phrases, particularly questions that begin with where, when, why, how, who, and what. Brainstorm the open-ended questions that will drive your customers to the content they want. Remember that the type of question asked signals the degree of your customer’s intent, and this intent can be mapped to the buyer journey. For example, the person who asks, “Where’s the nearest bookstore?” has a stronger intention to buy than the person asking “What’s on the New York Times bestseller list right now?

3. Optimize your local SEO strategy.

Since common Google voice searches begin with “where” or end with “near me,” it’s key for businesses with local clientele to refine their SEO strategy by identifying keyword phrases relevant to their neighborhood. A large portion of these searches are conducted by mobile users who need quick answers because they’re on the go. If your business is in this category, be sure to keep your local listing, business listing and crowd-sources sites up to date and active so that your customers don’t even have to leave SERPs to take action.

Technologies inevitably change the way we create, consume and promote content. Our job as content marketers is to continually adapt in order to keep connecting customers with what they want via relevant, useful, and findable content. With voice recognition, that means situating content in the context of natural speech, intent and location.

Connect with Filament for help creating relevant, useful, and findable content for your business today.

How Image Recognition Can Help Your Brand

Image recognition is the new kid on the block that’s about to revolutionize social media listening. Fusing the visual dominance of social media—think Instagram and Facebook—with artificial intelligence, image recognition sets the stage for brands to track customer conversations without having to rely on brand mentions in captions, comments or hashtags.

How does it work? Back in April Facebook introduced Automatic Alternative which was initially developed as an accessibility tool for the visually impaired by providing an audio description of photos. By being able to scan images with object recognition technology and find relevant brand products and logos, Automatic Alternative proved to be a treasure trove of customer data for marketers as well.

Currently 80% of images featuring brands are never tracked if the user doesn’t include a tag or mention in the caption. With image recognition being able to identify brands, or their competitors, without the explicitness of a tag provides new data opportunities for brands to mine for consumer information, track sentiments and engage on a different level.

At this point it sounds intriguing but how can you apply this new level of social listening to your brand? Here are a few ways that image recognition can work within your social strategy.  

Tap Into Unbranded Conversations

Visual intelligence grants the opportunity to see how people are using your products without explicitly mentioning the brand. This provides new insight into the everyday lives of your customers measuring their brand awareness and purchase intent.  

Identifying how your product fits into your customers’ lives not only allows you to engage with them but also helps to discover new customers and start to build upon the foundation of brand loyalty for both.  

Identify influencers

By having fresh insight into discovering new customers you are also able to pinpoint how influential people are talking about your brand. Not only are you apt to tap into unbranded conversation but you are able to see the level of engagement from the followers of those influencers and identity authentic user generated content to utilize across your social channels and marketing.

Monitor the Visual Identity of Your Brand

Image recognition allows you to control more of the visual identity of your brand across social media. Armed with this new social listening tool you’ll be able to monitor the usage of your logo and product to see how it is being used, or possibly misused on social. You will also be able to hone in on both the positive and negative unbranded conversations that you were not privy to before.

Measure ROI of Offline Sponsorships & Events

In the past it’s been a struggle to monitor ROI of sponsorships and special events. With image recognition you are now able to track photos from the event featuring your logo in the background and monitor the engagements and mentions visually.  

With this added data businesses will be able to utilize the effectiveness of sponsorships and apply these findings to drive future campaigns. This technology will also allow you to track competitors and see how their sponsorships are performing as well.

 

With so many social listening platforms launching image recognition products and with Facebook testing the waters this year, visual intelligence is poised to revolutionize how your brand is represented on social.

Need help implementing a social strategy to start the conversation?  Contact Filament to find out how your brand can begin to utilize the benefits of image recognition today.

Voice Search & SEO

Google’s voice search is on the rise, but that probably doesn’t surprise you as you find yourself going for the ease of voice commands over the pain of typing on tiny phone screens. So how do voice search and SEO play together in this ever changing world of technology?

There will be some changes but there is an SEO foundation that will stay the same. Your company will retain a lot of its keywords that describe who you are and what you do but they may change a little bit. Filament wants you to stay on top of the SEO curve so we’ve come up with a few tips to help you align your optimization plan to fit with the growing popularity of voice search.

 

Keyword Revamp

Long tailed keywords are essential so it’s time to look at your keywords and analytics to see what people are actually using to find your website. Then start thinking about what they may use in the future and crafting some long tail keywords to fit.

 

Conversational Tone

It’s only natural that as people speak they tend to be more conversational. This means that your keywords and your content should be more relaxed and feel natural to both read and speak.

 

Answer Questions

A lot of voice queries are questions, which means that if you can tailor your content to provide answers, you’ll fare better in the search frenzy.

 

Mobile

You’re already mobile right? Mobilgeddon happened a while back and, like a good website owner, you hopped right on board and made sure your website was mobile ready. If you did, you’re where you need to be as most voice searches are done by mobile devices. If you haven’t then it’s really time to go mobile or you’ll be left in the dust.

 

Local

Mobile searches are three times more likely to be local as people often are on the go when they’re searching. This is a great opportunity for local businesses to reach new customers and take advantage of their location.

 

Become a Voice Searcher

Learn the technology yourself and analyze the way you search. What words and phrases do you use? The best way to manage your business is to think like a customer.

 

Learning how your target audience speaks to its mobile device will help you become better at answering their questions and becoming the source they return to. Remember that mobile devices remember which sites you use and are more likely to suggest those sites again. By answering the questions your mobile user asks, you’re apt to be the resource their device suggests in the future. The rewards from optimizing for voice search can show you a huge return.

Contact Filament for help optimizing your website content for voice search.

Get Personal with Email Personalization

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again, personalization is the future of email marketing. Depending on the industry, personalized subject lines can boost open rates by 41%, transaction rates by 49%, and revenue, per email, by 73%.1 Email personalization via segmentation brings dramatic results as well. In a study by MailChimp, segmented campaigns got 63.75% more clicks than non-segmented campaigns.2

Despite personalization’s clear impact on email marketing success, many marketers aren’t putting it into play. So today we’re going to offer some tips to help you start integrating personalization into your email marketing strategy today. If you’re already practicing email personalization, you’ll still find a few good rules of thumb as well as new best practices to put into place.

Data

You might think you don’t have enough information about your subscribers to create personalized emails. However, chances are you have data at your fingertips that you haven’t utilized. If a subscriber has bought something from you, you may well have their geographic location (via their shipping and/or billing address), interests based on past purchases, and their name, all of which can be useful in personalizing your campaigns. While you start collecting subscriber information, use what you have, even if it’s only your subscribers’ first names, as in this example from Sixt:

Sixt Email Personalization

Sixt Email Personalization

 

Email Sign-ups

If you don’t have a lot of information about your subscribers to begin with, update your email sign-up form to make sure you’re collecting information that’ll be useful for segmenting and creating content later on. Things like name, gender, geographic location, interests/concerns (depending on your industry) will be helpful down the road when you’re segmenting your list and crafting content for specific segments.

Segmentation

There are lots of different ways to segment your email list, from transactional data to job title. Check out the list below for a several ideas:

  • Geographic location
  • Gender
  • Age
  • Job title
  • Company size
  • Interests
  • Transactional data (past purchases, plan level, total amount spent in the last 6 months, etc.)
  • Behavioral data (active vs. inactive, customer vs. prospect, etc.)

Here’s an example from Williams-Sonoma that uses transactional data to create a personalized abandoned cart email:

Williams-Sonoma Email Personalization

Williams-Sonoma Email Personalization

Williams-Sonoma Email Personalization

 

Like many retailers, Crate and Barrel uses behavioral data to segment out active customers from the inactive ones in order to create personalized win-back email campaigns, as in the example below.

Crate & Barrel Email Personalization

Crate & Barrel Email Personalization

 

Email Content

While you’re working on sorting out your data and segmenting your list, you can start creating content that’s well tailored to your target persona. Do this by personalizing your tone and language in your email marketing. It’s just as important as apt use of dynamic tags and proper segmentation. Check out this example from Nasty Gal, which is expertly tailored to Nasty Gal’s target audience:

Nasty Gal Email Personalization

Nasty Gal Email Personalization

 

Conclusion

Email personalization is key for creating engaging email experiences and fostering loyalty. It leads to a deeper, more meaningful relationship with subscribers because you’re sending them more of what they want and because you’re putting a human face on both your emails and your brand. Thankfully, email personalization doesn’t have to be complicated. Today’s tools make it easy to send targeted, personal—and therefore engaging—emails.

What’s your favorite email personalization strategy? Share it in the comments section below.

Get in touch with Filament to learn innovative new ways to create personalized email campaigns for your subscribers.

 

1. http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/chart/personal-subject-lines

2. https://mailchimp.com/resources/research/effects-of-list-segmentation-on-email-marketing-stats/

Creative content from the Land of 10,000 Lakes.

Get in touch with us!

Verified by ExactMetrics