Conversations with Women in Tech:Humanize Your Marketing & Drive SEO

Helen Fang

Our Next 30 Minutes:

• It’s tough to be a marketer today.• What does it mean to humanize your marketing?• How does humanizing your marketing impact SEO?• What my company is doing about.• What you can do tomorrow.

Consumers are inundated with ads.

Emails I received in a span of two hours, during “non-peak” time.

As a result, consumers are disengaging.

Around the world, two blogs are created every second via bryankramer

Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — 90% of the world’s data has been created in the last two yearsvia ibm

Consumers are exposed to 1,500 – 5,000 ads per dayvia multiple sources

Un-following brands on social channels

Opting out from the majority of company email communications

Deleting apps because of push notifications

Closing accounts and subscriptions because individuals don't like the communications they are receiving

via aimia research

Humanize Your Marketing

=

What’s a marketer to do?

The answer? Humanize your marketing. Or cute dogs.

Speak to humans, not users.(How would you describe what you do to your friend?)

Tell a story, drop the jargon.(What’s the problem you’re trying to solve? Why does your company exist?)

Focus on being helpful, not self-promotional.(What are your customers curious about? Provide solutions, tips, and resources.)

AND FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS GOOD IN MARKETING: USE BETTER STOCK IMAGES.

(What types of image will cause a positive emotional response from your customer?)

How to human in 3.5 easy steps:

Humanizing your marketing will also benefit SEO because they both solve for the same problem: understanding what your customers may want and delivering the information they’re seeking.

SEO has evolved from keywords to topics. Search engines looks at other factors, such as search intent and context to deliver better relevancy.

SEO for bots. SEO for humans.VS

To succeed in SEO, you have to understand not just WHAT but WHY your customer is searching.

Lily is more than just a user seeking grocery coupons for cereal and yogurt. She’s a working mom with an affinity for wrap dresses, trying to find healthy meals for her kids, and trying to plan her family’s summer vacation.

The more I know about my customer, the more opportunities I have to relate to her (and others like her).

This greatly increases the number of opportunities to produce content that generates organic search.

Saving money on travel, grocery, meals, clothes

(millions)

Healthy Recipes(thousands)

Greek YogurtCoupo

ns(hundred

s)

MonthlyKeyword Volume

By humanizing your marketing, brands of all sizes can compete on a level playing field.

Start-up

Personal Blog

MARTHASTEWART!

Coupons.com Case StudyChallenges we face as an established brand:• Wide breadth of highly

commoditized offers• Large syndication network • Website is optimized for

transactions • Hard to build links for niche

content

Without the human element, how do we stand out?

A Solution: Savings Related Content Topics

The Good Stuff Inform: Practical, easy savings tips for readers

Inspire: Make it sexy through easy DIY solutions that look/taste/feel good, recipe and deal content on trending topics/brands

Lessons From the Trenches:• Creating authentic, on-brand content,

that people care about, is REALLY hard.• Conversing with your audience trumps

any survey.• Driving traffic shouldn’t be the end

goal. • Engagement metrics are worth more in

the long run.• Tools I love:

– Google (Related search links, Trends)– Keywordtool.io– BuzzSumo– PopUrls– Moz– Canva

Early Signs are Positive!

Results: • Triple digit year-over-year growth in organic traffic• Content that outranked Google News in search results • Organically grew a base of email subscribers from zero to tens

of thousands in less than six months

What’s Next: • Continue the conversation with our readers • Fight the generic and find our voice • One piece of content, multiple ways• Promote, promote, promote

3 Things to Do Tomorrow: 1. Talk to your audience. What is their day like? How do they make decisions?

What matters to them? 2. Build out the key moments when a customer could be interacting with

your product or brand. 3. Be the (authentic) answer. Create content topics that will help them during

these moments. Solve a problem. Tell a story. Make their lives easier/better/momentarily happier.

Additional Benefits: • Competitive insight to pre-sales support to customer sentiment• Meaningful customer relationships & conversations creating brand

advocates• Get wind of early signs – e.g. Facebook advertising is saturated, where else

is your audience hanging out online? What language do they use to describe what they’re looking for?

Stock Image Resources

• http://jaymantri.com/• http://unsplash.com/• http://magdeleine.co/browse/ • http://www.gratisography.com/• https://stocksnap.io/• https://videos.pexels.com/ (images & video)• http://www.imcreator.com/free • http://splitshire.com/ • http://www.lifeofpix.com/

Thank YouHELEN FANGGENERAL MANAGER, ECOMMERCE QUOTIENT TECHNOLOGY (FKA COUPONS.COM)

LINKEDIN.COM/IN/FANGHELEN