Bob’s Weekly Reading Picks

2019.11.3 volume 43

Content

1.How Can Affiliates Be Successful in 2020
2.Machine Learning 101
3.International SEO
4.Understanding searches better than ever before
5.The Ultimate Guide to Integrated Marketing
6.American business schools are reinventing the MBA
7.50 Companies to Watch in 2020

1.How Can Affiliates Be Successful in 2020

Deliver incremental sales

Affiliate can get closer to incrementality by assessing what it means to their brands and creating offers that feed into this definition. 

Fashion retailer needs to sell underperforming stock, affiliates should be looking for ways of promoting sale items and tracking the uplift in performance.

It’s the same for retailers that want to improve their margin, increase their profit or capture new customers. 

Take a data-dominated approach

Try using data at the following points: 

• To identify customers in the market to buy
• For better understanding your target audience
• To select the offer or message that is most likely to convert your customers

Make use of network innovation

Take the example of CJ and its Content Monetisation Suite: a gateway for premium opportunities. Our own platform has benefitted massively from Awin and Rakuten’s respective master tags, which have allowed brands to instantly “switch on” RevLifter for their programmes.

Harness the power of voice search

ComScore estimates that 50% of all searches will be made through voice command by 2020, while Gartner has them coming in at around 30%. Either way, if you don’t have voice search baked into your customer journey, you could miss at least one-third of all future search traffic.

Embed automation into your strategy

For advertisers, this could lead to a greater reliance on technology for tackling menial duties, like the paying of commission and uploading of product inventory. 

One example sees the pulling of product feed information, voucher codes, offers and creative elements straight onto an application programming interface (API) for use with their campaigns.

2.Machine Learning 101

Two primary types of ML

• You have supervised, which is where you’re basically feeding a model labeled training data, 
• And then unsupervised, which is where you’re feeding a program data and letting it create clusters or associations between data points. 

What are the machine learning possibilities in SEO?

• Automate meta descriptions
• Automate titles
• Automate image alt text
• Automate 301 redirects
• Automate content creation
• Automate product/page suggestions

Sources

• Google Codelabs 
• Kaggle.com 
• TensorFlow 
• Andrew Ng has an incredible machine learning course
• Algorithmia 

3.International SEO

Think of international SEO as geotargeting, but instead of optimizing your website to attract traffic from your city or state, you’re optimizing it for different countries and languages.

• Specify your target country and/or region with an international-friendly URL structure (country targeting).

• Establish which language your pages are targeting with the use of language tags (language targeting).

• Create and maintain content in your target users’ language(s). These are the raw materials with which you’ll actually rank.

• Other SEO signals

  • Hosting your site on a local IP

  • Linking to local content

  • Building links from local resources

  • Finding ways to rank on local search engines like Yandex in Russia and Baidu in China

4.Understanding searches better than ever before

Often times, we come to Search looking to learn–we don’t necessarily have the knowledge to begin with.

BERT: Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers.
BERT models can therefore consider the full context of a word by looking at the words that come before and after it—particularly useful for understanding the intent behind search queries.

For the first time we’re using the latest Cloud TPUs to serve search results and get you more relevant information quickly. 

5.The Ultimate Guide to Integrated Marketing

What is integrated marketing?

10 major marketing “channels” 

• Advertising (both print and PPC)
• Direct marketing
• Email marketing
• PR
• Personal selling
• Sales promotions
• Digital marketing (e.g. website, content marketing, and SEO)
• Social media
• Events and sponsorships
• Packaging

Brand Guideline

• Visual guidelines (logo, color palette, typography, etc.)
• Any developed and repurposed assets in multiple file formats
• Voice and tone guidelines (taglines, preferred language, words to avoid, etc.)
• Messaging guidelines (pain points, goals, types of content, resources, etc.)
• Buyer persona information and guidelines

6.American business schools are reinventing the MBA

7.50 Companies to Watch in 2020

 

• Financials: Aegon
• Financials: AIA
• Financials: AIG
• Media: Altice Europe
• Apparel: Anta Sports
• Health Care: AstraZeneca
• Media: AT&T
• Industrials: Bayer
• Food: Beyond Meat
• Telecommunications: BT
• Technology: CD Projekt
• Infrastructure: Cellnex
• Financials: China Evergrande
• Beverages/Cannabis: Constellation Brands
• Technology: Contemporary Amperex
• Industrials: Cree
• Health Care: CVS Health
• Health Care: Daiichi Sankyo
• Energy: Enterprise Products
• Technology: Facebook
• Autos: Fiat Chrysler
• Financials: Global Payments
• Financials: Goodman Group
• Health Care: Johnson & Johnson
• Food Technology: Just Eat
• Technology: Keyence
• Food: Kraft Heinz
• Apparel: Lululemon
• Technology: Motorola
• Energy: MPLX
• Media: Netflix
• Technology: Nidec
• Technology: Nutanix
• Energy: OMV
• Technology: Pinduoduo
• Financials: Ping An
• Media: Roku
• Industrials: SalMar
• Technology: Samsung
• Energy: Schlumberger
• Industrials: Siemens
• Financials: Standard Life Aberdeen
• Telecommunications: T-Mobile
• Autos: Toyota
• Industrials: Travis Perkins
• Energy: Tullow Oil
• Technology: Uber
• Autos: Volkswagen
• Financials: Wharf Reic
• Health Care: Zimmer Biomet