Bobz Notes

Weekly Reading Picks| Volume 43

bobzhang

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: 

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

What are the machine learning possibilities in SEO?

Sources

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.

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?

Integrated marketing is the process of arranging your different marketing channels to work in tandem to promote your products or services, typically through a strategic campaign. 

How to Build an Integrated Marketing Campaign

  • Establish your overarching campaign goal
  • Choose your marketing channels and set goals for each one
  • Define your buyer personas by channel
  • Identify your channel managers
  • Create adaptable marketing assets and messaging
  • Establish your plan for collecting leads
  • Launch, measure, and iterate your campaign

Smart Goal

KPI RELATED METRICS
Traffic/reach Unique page views by channel and source
Engagement Bounce rate; average time on page
Top (and falling) content Top page views; top exits
Impact Click-throughs; conversions; backlinks
Sentiment Comments; social shares
Lead generation Total leads; total sessions; session to lead conversion rate
Sales Lead to marketing qualified lead (MQL); MQL to sales qualified lead (SQL); customer purchase/closed-won business

 

10 major marketing “channels” 

Brand Guideline

6.American business schools are reinventing the MBA

7.50 Companies to Watch in 2020