SEMRush CMO Olga Andrienko Discusses Latest Study on Voice Search

Voice search is rising in popularity on mobile devices. Once voice search is enabled on a device, you can use it hands-free and most people do when they’re out and about looking for something.

Semrush, a popular service SEO consultants use for keyword research and site audits. They recently released a study on Voice Search Optimization.

Olga Andrienko

I spoke with Olga Adrienko, their head of Global Head of Marketing about it and this podcast has everything you need to know to optimize your site for voice search.

About 25% of all searches are voice searches, with half are for local businesses. Optimizing your website to get found by Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant is a new and evolving SEO specialty skill. Different voice search engines use different algorithms and rely on different source material.

Most local businesses don’t realize it, but if you want to get featured in voice search, you need a presence known in Google’s Local Pack. The Local Pack is the graph that appears in search results listing local businesses. Local Pack powers voice search and look like this.

A Local Pack contains the top three local businesses relevant to your query and getting listed there is a local SEO specialty, which is why local SEO is voice SEO. Schema has no impact on local or voice search. 

Voice Search Algorithms

Since 1 in 4 searches are voice searches, voice search optimization is an opportunity for first movers. At this point, people tend to ask different questions to different voice search engines. 

Voice search on Google Assistant, Siri, and Alexa use different algorithms.

Google Assistant uses Google and Google Maps

Siri uses Google for text, Bing for images and Apple Maps

Alexa uses Bing  and Yext for location information

For voice searches about local business reviews, Google Assistant pulls from Local Pack, while Siri and Alexa pull from Yelp. 

Getting Featured in Voice Search Results

Local businesses that rank in the top three results Local Pack will appear in voice search results. 

When it comes to non local voice search, Google Assistant answers informational queries by reading out loud texts from Featured Snippets. About 12% of all voice search answers from the People Also Ask box. So voice search optimization for informational queries is driven by snippets.

Optimizing your content marketing for Google involves targeting long-tail keywords, Featured Snippets, and People Ask boxes.

For Siri, a local business can update its listing and include additional content to improve its Yelp profile.To learn more about how voice search assistants can drive customers to local businesses, listen to my interview with Olga and subscribe to the B2B Lead Gen Podcast.

If you want more from SEMrush, I spoke to them about their international B2B content marketing strategy as well.

The way things are headed, social media marketing courses could soon be a thing of the past. 

A new social media sharing startup for content marketing agencies called Lately uses artificial intelligence to generate and optimize social media posts automatically.

Lately CEO Kate Bradley Chernis

I spoke to Kate Bradley Chernis, the founder and CEO of Lately, a tool that’s doing wonders for content consultants who struggle to translate their written or multimedia content into engaging social media posts. 

Lately uses AI to automatically transform long-form content into dozens of smart social posts that optimize audience engagement. Kate talked to us about generating leads for B2Bs, how to successfully create a human-AI collaboration, and how to earn the trust of your customers.

The idea behind Lately is not to waste something we’ve spent a lot of effort creating by giving it just one shot at being viewed. This is especially true of long content marketing initiatives like blogs, podcasts, videos, reports, white papers, checklists and other lead magnets which aren’t so easily shareable in social media. 

When you load this content into Lately, the tool transforms it into dozens of posts you can schedule to go live on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Linkedin.

Lately uses AI and natural language processing to select the most shareable, conversation worthy snippets from your long form content based on what generates conversations with your community. 

Lately takes you three quarters of the way, but requires a human touch for the last stretch. Before Lately, this process had to be performed manually, which takes a lot of time and resources. Lately analyzes all of your past content, and treats past user engagement as a proxy for future performance, and automatically produces posts likely to generate similar responses.

Bradley recommends users start in Lately's Analytics section before the content creation process. "Why look at Twitter when we're telling you what's trending with your customers?" she says. "Emotion is what a purchase is all about",  says Kate. "The number one reason for loss of sales is lack of customer trust. That's why it's so important for you to like me and believe me."

Kate believes first and foremost in organic marketing, and she asserts that, for B2Bs and small businesses, this is the cheapest, easiest and most reliable way to make a dent. 

"The time and effort you put in is exponentially valuable,” says Kate.  Following that spirit, her company doesn't use paid media, cold calls or cold email to do their marketing. They use Lately. "When you know what your customer cares about, why would you guess?"

Lately can transcribe whole podcasts and webinars and automatically pull excerpts that your audience is likely to respond to, and is even able to turn those into shareable mini-movies. 

Bradley is a big advocate of “after the fact” marketing, now that people rarely consume content at fixed times. The process can work even for whole books, like David Allison’s “Valuegraphics”, which got to a number 1 slot at Amazon’s global best sellers list, thanks partly to social posts generated by Lately.

The last part of the conversation touched upon confidence issues, in these times where people have lost faith in news and social media. For Bradley, people now tend to believe more in trusted individuals than in organizations, but at the same time long-standing brands give a feel of security. 

https://youtu.be/tBL8Z6aKjR0

As I learned when I was handling social media communications at the US...

With the onslaught of a pandemic, startups are pitching investors these days via Zoom. COVID accelerated digital transformation, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

At least not for Blair Silverberg, CEO and co-founder of Capital, which uses a proprietary analytics platform to identify startups worth funding, and accelerates the fundraising process in stride.

Blair started investing young. He turned $5,000 in Bar Mitzvah money into $100K by value investing on the stock market. An impressive feat.

His grandmother gave him Beanie Babies when he was about 6. He sold them online for a modest profit. By the time he was 10 years old, he was reading John Burr Williams and Philip Fisher.

“Back then I think I was fascinated with business examples of the economy at work. So I thought every time I learned about a new business, I was learning about how the economy actually works.”

He’d go home after school and would order the physical annual reports in the investor relations sections of company websites. He still had these reports stacked up in giant boxes at his parents’ home.

Blair likes value investing.

Standing Out to Win the Game

“Pause. Take a breath. Think about things with first principles. Don’t follow the crowd instinctively.”

The biggest lesson Blair learned as a young investor stays with him today is monitoring performance. Monitor daily and respond instinctively.

Don't get swayed just by what others are doing. With this kind of thinking, you lose sight of your goals. You have to avoid distractions and focus on what you need to do and where you need to be.

There are great investors who think conservatively. But no matter how great they are, they miss opportunities. They get scared of financial bubbles and avoid tech investments as Warren Buffet did. 

Yet the times have changed. Buffet took the risk of investing in technology stocks. Now he’s winning the game.

Are We in a Financial Bubble?

We live in unprecedented times battling a global pandemic. Despite the crisis, the stock market is still high. Is this something that we have to be worried about?

The global stock market is worth $350 trillion and continues to rise. Every year, wealth continues to pile up. Asset prices are inflated. Not even a global pandemic can deflate these prices.

But there's a real tension between the US and China right now. And what could burst the bubble is the transition from the US to China the global financial leadership.

One day, we’re going to look back at how a Chinese company dominated the IPO list before making its debut on the New York Stock Exchange. Alibaba Group’s record-breaking initial public offering of $25 billion is a testament to this.

The three largest IPOs in history are Chinese-owned companies with zero involvement from the global financial superpower. These events have been to catalyze the shift of global financial power.

How the Pandemic Changed the Business Landscape

The pandemic took its toll on many businesses. But it has not killed the economy.

Some businesses are actually doing better because of the crisis. With the ongoing secular changes, they've benefitted tremendously from the shift to the new normal. Zoom and Slack are good examples.

Food delivery services are all rage. It's just some businesses that thrive on in-person activities are negatively affected. The healthcare industry,

How to Create, Earn, Share and Spread your Brand Messaging

B2B content marketing is the cornerstone of a brand’s online presence.

More than just being a vehicle for sharing your brand’s messaging, though, content marketing can be -- and is -- an effective way to meet your organization’s bottom-line goals.

With great content, you can attract new investors and customers, nurture cold leads and convert warm ones. 

Without it, your organization will become a ghost -- something that’s there, but not seen.

I recently talked about the difference between B2C and B2B content marketing, how to create content that effectively generates leads and how to develop content marketing skills with Christopher Null of Null Media.

Coming from a journalism background, Christopher is a 20-year veteran of magazine and internet trade, working with big names like Yahoo!, Intuit, McGraw Hill and other large companies in publishing and news media.

But while reporting is more about looking for the truth and sharing facts, content marketing requires you to have a clearly detailed end destination and objective in mind and work towards that. 

The differences between a B2C and B2B content marketing strategy

The answer to “what is content marketing?” can often be defined by the industry, the product being marketed, and the audience you are speaking to. 

In other words, it’s defined by the organization itself.

That being said, both B2C and B2B content creative needs to create a robust strategy with well-defined goals.

Your content marketing strategy also needs to address every part of the content marketing funnel. Top funnel content is typically more introductory in nature, while bottom funnel content is toplines information that drives conversions.

A good content marketing consultant executes on your content marketing strategy, bringing a pitch or outline to life and connecting you with your ideal audience. 

On the other hand, a digital marketing consultant like me works closely with decision makers and brand stakeholders to build strategies for owned, shared, and earned media outreach - as well as a methodology for how to measure the ROI of your content marketing program. 

Owned Media

While they do have clear differences, B2C and B2B content marketing begins when you learn owned media marketing. Owned media is media you own, and it's comprised of content marketing materials like blog posts, technical guides, white papers, checklists, and product reviews that live on your own website. Hence the term, owned media.

Consumer-facing organizations tend to produce more superficial content, but it still needs to be vibrantly written and come off the page to capture the attention of readers.

B2B content marketing is usually more research-focused, but it still needs to be compelling. Even though it’s written for a niche audience, B2B content should be nothing less than dead-on accurate with useful information  detailed specs. Targeting the right topics starts with researching the B2B keywords people search when they are looking for answers to problems you can solve.

Some brands overlook the importance of their owned content marketing channel. But I’ve seen multiple companies rapidly expand using smart growth marketing strategies and by leveraging SEO content. 

Earned Media

Earned media is the union of content marketing and digital PR. You can learn earned media marketing anytime,

If you are a content marketer at a product-led growth business, you need to know product-led marketing.

In the SaaS industry, there are two popular models:

enterprise-level price points with a sales-led approach to marketing and...

a product-led growth approach. 

Enterprise doesn’t need as much volume, but you need to account for a long sales cycle and the responsibility of closing deals will fall almost exclusively on the sales team. 

Product-led growth is more about volume and one-to-many.

It lets people interact with the product before buying in a freemium or limited-time, free trial format.

In product marketing, your marketing -- and the product itself -- will also bear the brunt of the work when it comes to new customer acquisition.

“With many SaaS companies, marketing is built into the product -- that’s what product marketing is.”

With that being said, product-led growth falls on a spectrum.

A pure product-led structure, is when the product is a channel, like Typeform or Zoom.

“Say, my friend or client uses Zoom. I now have to download it to use it, but can access it for free as long as I want. But, as I see the features, I’m now thinking about being a customer. Using the product itself generates leads.”

Another common approach is the freemium model.

“It’s still product-led growth. The product is still the marketing vehicle. But it’s not as pure because there’s a time frame. The user needs to activate it and see the whole value of it during the free trial period.”

This can present a problem for SaaS marketers because most are focused on monitoring the content marketing funnel. Instead, product-led marketers track how people use their products.

Derek Skaletsky, founder at Sherlo

To help SaaS companies master a product-led growth strategy that turns more leads into customers, I recently talked to Derek Skaletsky, Founder of Sherlock, a product engagement scoring solution that helps SaaS businesses track utilization. 

Here are just five valuable tips that came out of our conversation about product-led growth in the SaaS industry.

1. Know where you are as a company

Before getting into a product marketing strategy, remember not to think of all SaaS companies as the same. There’s a difference between go-to-market and the other steps along the line.

And each one requires a different approach to growth marketing.

So, start by evaluating what your goals are as a company and team before building a strategy or collecting data that will help you reach them.

2. Leverage data in all aspects of marketing

The next generation of technology and product-led growth marketers will be even more comfortable with cloud-based software, marketing and PR enablement technology. 

They’ll be dependent on data -- not just to make decisions, but to also drive messaging. 

“Cloud-only companies in the SaaS industry are actually still a small percentage. I think it will go more in that direction to the point that, in the next 5-10 year it will be majority SaaS -- but I don’t think it will (or should) ever be 100%.”

3. Create a strategy and environment that’s nimble

Effective product-led growth also means that marketers should continually be more aggressive and flexible.

Building a successful startup from the ground up will always involve some level of creative problem-solving and business savvy. But knowing how to build a startup that’s also an online marketplace comes with its own set of unique challenges.

When I asked how he engineered an online marketplace that fulfilled both supply and demand needs in the construction industry, Cofounder Jiyan Wei shared how he and his partner raised $25M for BuildZoom.

These are his most valuable tips for developing new technology platforms, what investors are asking and thinking when you pitch, and how to get into the world of tech startups in general and online marketplaces specifically.

The challenges of building an online marketplace

BuilZoom was born out of need. 

Jiyan and his cofounder had both had terrible experiences with past construction projects and came together to lament -- then solve -- their problems:

Quality identification and supply/demand matching.

However, before raising capital for their startup, they had to find a viable solution for this problem. And they initially built much of their online marketplace ecosystem themselves.

BuildZoom qualifies buyers with live sales development representatives.

They didn’t originally set out asking, “How do I build an online marketplace?” 

They started by creating a solution to the problems they encountered when doing their own construction projects.    

They intimately knew and understood where the gap was in the marketplace, and simply started by creating an index of licensed contractors in the United States.

Later, they expanded that to be a matching service.

Unlike other startups, an online marketplace needs to have a solution for both the supply and demand of a service or product in order to be successful. If that is executed well and works -- the concept will work.

You can build more sophisticated features and improve the user experience as your startup raises more capital and your team grows.

If your startup has already been through some funding rounds, one challenge might simply be remembering to go slow with development.

“There’s a temptation -- especially when you have engineers and capital -- to build everything out right away. But you can start with something very simple and see where your users are spending their time.”

And then there’s answering the question:

How does an online marketplace make money?

This is important to know not just when raising capital for a startup but also when knowing how and where to put your resources. All founders must make the decision of which features they want to spend time developing and which ones can wait for subsequent funding rounds or future product iterations.

For their online marketplace’s revenue model, BuildZoom focused on an important part of the construction process: pre-construction. 

BuildZoom has suppliers in most major US markets nationwide.

Being in their customers’ shoes themselves, they knew the value of having a project plan in place and a couple of very qualified contractors to choose from. 

They now have a paid service that delivers and manages this process. Their own in-house construction professionals work directly with building owners to manage the bidding process and vet contractors submitting bids.

How to build an online marketplace: Jiyan’s top tip

In the final episode of this 3-part series, you’ll hear how organizations can shift toward solution-based selling.

In part 1 we covered aligning goals. In part 2 we talked about a framework for approaching alignment. In this final episode, we discuss solution-based selling.

Most lost sales don’t go to the competitors, they go to no sale at all. That means the buyer was not able to effectively make a decision.

Jeff Davis, author of Create Togetherness shares actionable steps sales teams can take to help buyers make those purchasing decisions, moving from a scripted sales pitch to a strategic partner.

“They’ve already researched benefits and features by the time they’ve come to you. What they’re really asking is, “help me make a decision on how to move forward.” Don’t explain how your product gets them there, co-create a solution. Show the extreme value you’ll add and they’ll reward you with their business.”Jeff Davis

Make sure you listen to each episode in this 3-part series on the B2B Lead Gen Podcast, because we really delve into sales and marketing alignment. 

Jeff is a self-proclaimed “marketer with a soul of a sales guy” and has a lot to share with B2B organizations when it comes to transforming your sales and marketing teams from two arms of the same company into one revenue-generating machine.

And don’t forget to subscribe for more actionable tips like these from the best marketers in the B2B world.

In part 2 of this 3-part series, Jeff Davis, author of Create Togetherness  acknowledges that sales alignment is an evolution.

In part 1, we discussed aligning sales and marketing by aligning KPIs.

Today, we discuss the four stages companies typically advance through on the road to alignment. 

Hidden Marketing - There may be a sales leader, but the CEO/Founder is often the marketing leader. Efforts are often reactionary and there is a very small small team. Sales-driven marketing - The organization prioritizes and values sales while marketing is seen as order takers, not strategic partners. The marketing team is often still small or made of up of mostly junior members. Living apart, together - There isn’t marketing and sales alignment, but they acknowledge each other. You often have to be siloed here for a bit before moving on to #4.True sales alignment - Sales and marketing have shared resources and are communicating and learning from each other on a regular basis.

In this episode of the B2B Lead Gen Podcast, we discuss how to develop the marketing maturity to move through the 4 stages of sales and marketing alignment and co-create a strategic vision for the organization.

In the final episode in this series, we talk about solution based selling.

“I don’t want salespeople to be marketers or marketers to be salespeople. Instead, I want to help leverage each other to reach our goals. Jeff Davis

Learning how to master sales and marketing alignment is an ongoing process for many organizations. But, if you want to outperform your competitors and optimize your sales process, it’s essential.

You must first create aligned goals for your team, understand which sales and marketing configuration you currently have (and where you want to get to next), and transform your sales process from scripted calls to solution-based strategy sessions. 

To cover each of these steps in detail, I had a 3-part interview series with Jeff Davis, keynote speaker and author of Create Togetherness.

Death of MQLs and SQLs - Part 1

Marketing brings in leads and is celebrating a win, but sales can’t close those potential deals because they aren’t quality.

Why is this sales vs. marketing scenario so common -- and what can leadership do to change it?

In the first part of this series, Jeff explains how internal teams can stop the finger-pointing. He shares some steps leadership can take to establish incentivization that fosters sales and marketing alignment. 

Improve sales enablement by looking at sales and marketing as the same revenue-generating system.Make people feel like their work is connected to the overall success of the company.Create more empathy and connectivity between sales and marketing.Foster two-way communication that improves the entire sales process, with marketing offering the sales team customer buyer insights and the sales team offering marketing customer feedback.

Subscribe to the B2B Lead Gen Podcast to get all 3 episodes in this series.

In an always-on world, broadcast media monitoring services help you stay current on all on how your brand, industry, and competitors are being covered in broadcast and cable television.

This gives you a huge advantage when it comes to defending your brand and managing your reputation, particularly in the event of crisis or news media backlash of some kind.

As part of the research I did for my Guide to News Media Monitoring, I spoke to TVEyes CEO David Ives about his platform and the state of the broadcast media monitoring industry.

This post summarizes our discussion about: 

Leveraging artificial intelligence to monitor conversations on multiple different channels

The difference between predicting viral marketing vs. tracking viral content

Features and options you should consider when shopping for broadcast media monitoring services   

What are broadcast media monitoring services

Broadcast media monitoring services record and archive local and national news programs -- on broadcast television, cable television and radio --  to ensure that you have quick access to any news clips you may be interested in to protect the reputation of your company, brand, product or service. Many services monitor podcasts too.

News Media Monitoring vs Social Media Monitoring vs Broadcast Media Monitoring Services

If you want to monitor your Brand's reputation, you should be listening to coverage in the news media, what people are saying on social media, and what's being broadcast on television and cable news media.

That's a lot of ground to cover.  You need to monitor news, social and broadcast because all three channels impact your reputation.

The news media monitoring industry is crowded with providers that claim to do all three, but the truth is each one of them comes from one of those three categories and typically resells the other two channels through some sort of a partnership agreement.

So the major players in the news media monitoring category resell their feeds to the social media monitoring and the broadcast media monitoring services. And the broadcast media monitoring services resale their feeds to the social media monitoring and the news media monitoring service providers.

Nearly all social media monitoring and news media monitoring service providers white label and resell the TVEyes service when it comes to monitoring video.

What they don’t tell you though is that none of the partners that offer broadcast media monitoring coverage through reseller agreements with TVEyes allow for downloading of broadcast coverage. 

So while you can view them inside their platform, the downloading of video clips is only available to clients with a TVEyes subscription.

How the TVEyes Media Monitoring Suite came to be

As one of the first broadcast media monitoring services, TVEyes maintains a searchable index of the stories broadcast and cable news media going back 90-days. They’re able to do this in a matter of minutes, delivering their clients access to the news media coverage so they can better manage corporate and brand reputation.

Growing from a bootstrapped business in the early 2000’s to a B2B industry leader that’s currently offering broadcast media monitoring services in 16 countries and around 12 different languages, TVEyes has not just witnessed the digital transformation, it has effectively monitored and created an archive of the conversations we’ve been having online.

Today,