Author: George Nguyen
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Branding can be the all-important differentiator, which is especially true in high-competition sectors like digital marketing services. While there are countless ways you can bolster your brand, the infinite options can also lead you to indecision, inertia, and scattered messaging.
To give you a peak at the values and strategies that some of the search marketing industry’s top experts rely to keep them (and their businesses) relevant year after year, Wix and Search Engine Journal hosted a digital marketing meetup on July 22, 2024, at the Wix Playground in NYC.
Keep on reading for some of the top takeaways from the event, including:
Special thanks to the live attendees, as well as the expert panelists and hosts:
Claudio Cabrera, The Athletic
Domenica D’Ottavio, Journey Further
Nick Eubanks, Semrush/Traffic Think Tank
Ray Martinez, Archer Education
Katie Morton, Search Engine Journal
Mordy Oberstein, Wix
Lily Ray, Amsive
Terry Rice, Good People Digital
Carrie Rose, Rise at Seven
Erica Schneider, Cut the Fluff
John Shehata, Newzdash
Get growing with an editorial-first focus
Many publications try to maintain separation between editorial and the business side of things. This is noble, but if the business that funds your publication relies on the search visibility of your content to support its marketing funnel, then you’re already aware of how important it is that you attract users.
During the editorial-focused session of the event, the expert panelists shared the tactics they use to make editorial and search work together to bring in users without sacrificing the quality that publications have worked so hard to be known for.
Convert your ‘one and dones’ to regular users
If you know why someone came to your website, then you can leverage editorial to create a direct relationship with that person and potentially turn them into a regular user.
“People read or come to your site for three reasons: they are interested in the topic, interested in the author, or interested in the brand,” said John Shehata, CEO and founder of NewzDash.
“So, how can I convert someone who is coming to read about chicken recipes into a regular user? Remember the three reasons,” Shehata said, pointing to the topic (not the brand or the author) as the driver behind user intent.
“So instead of saying, ‘Hey, would you like to subscribe to our newsletter?’ I said, ‘Hey, would you like to get more chicken recipes?’—I increased conversions by 20%. Why? Because people were interested in the topic,” he explained.
This pivot in positioning helps move users downward from the top of your funnel and it enables you to move them to channels that you own (i.e., email newsletters, SMS, your app) so that you’re somewhat sheltered from Google or social media algorithm updates.
Editorial-first publications should focus on ‘reader service,’ not ‘SEO’
A lot of SEO implementation comes down to convincing your peers that it’s worth their time, which can be very challenging when it comes to asking writers or reporters to reflect SEO best practices in their work.
“I try to stay away from the word ‘SEO’. At organizations like The [New York] Times or The Athletic, where there’s such a focus on original content on a daily basis, I like to call it a ‘reader service’ and that kind of changes the mindset for a lot of editors and reporters, because at that point, they’re thinking about it more like serving the reader, when initially a lot of them think about it as serving clicks.” — Claudio Cabrera, VP of Newsroom Strategy and Audience at The Athletic
While a lot of it centers around language, ‘reader service’ isn’t simply a white labeling of SEO. “A lot of times when editors see something that’s trending, they say ‘We would never write that,’” Cabrera said, “But my thinking is, ‘How can we talk to you in a way that you feel like you can write it in a way that is native to The New York Times, or to The Athletic, or wherever it may be.”
This approach can also apply to your writers’ content strategy. “I think a lot of times when people think of owning a storyline, owning a coverage line, driving subscriptions, these writers produce 20 articles,” Cabrera said, “[But] you can produce six really, really good [articles] that target everything that people are looking for: Who is this candidate? What do they stand for? All those types of things versus tackling the 20 things that may not necessarily bring it to a quality level.”
Pull in your sales teams and business KPIs for continuous improvement
Low quality content often translates to lost lead opportunities. For editors, content marketing managers, and SEOs, meeting with your sales teams can be a treasure trove of user-first content ideas.
“I have the privilege of working with an admissions team that acts as an active sales team, so I’m able to actually incorporate live feedback directly into my content strategy to address a lot of problems beforehand.” — Ray Martinez, Vice President SEO at Archer Education
Improving the content is only one component of the challenge, though. The other part is proving that your optimizations moved the needle for the audience and the brand—an absolute necessity if you need to get stakeholder buy-in for more of your recommendations. To that end, Martinez advocates for understanding your business’s KPIs to see what success should look like and how your content plays into it.
While this will look different for every organization, “For me, I can understand the quality of my organic traffic by looking at my cost per action,” he said, “So I look at cost for enrollment (in higher ed) and I can tell you that by the cost of a program, if my cost per enrollment exceeds more than a third, then I am not doing my job from an organic standpoint.”
Leverage community for growth opportunities
Places where communities engage online, like Reddit or brand forums, have surged in search visibility as Google prioritizes the ‘experience’ in E-E-A-T and as a potential counterbalance for AI overviews.
![The search demand for [Reddit] from 2009 to March 2024.](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/a484d4_5f30e99f117d405fb4b6206501d7e442~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_980,h_258,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/a484d4_5f30e99f117d405fb4b6206501d7e442~mv2.png)
But, building your own brand or industry-related community won’t get resources from stakeholders if that community doesn’t yield ROI. To that end, Erica Schneider, founder at Cut the Fluff, and Nick Eubanks, vice president of owned media at Semrush and co-founder of Traffic Think Tank, shared how they balance selling with branding.
Trust is the foundation of your community as well as your sales pitch
Schneider attracts leads by addressing “some amorphous idea that is bothering my audience.” She identifies what that audience’s challenges are through engaging with them on social media (LinkedIn and X/Twitter).
“I went through a phase of serving people a lot at one point,” she said, “And so I got a lot of big answers to the question people were struggling with and then all you are doing is projecting that back to [the audience] in a way where they can see themselves in a mirror through your content.”
“The most common response that I get to anything that I write is, ‘I feel like you’re two steps ahead of what I’m thinking and you articulated it before I could,’ and so when you can do that really well people believe that when you say, ‘I have something that’s going to help you,’ or ‘I have something worth joining,’ or ‘I have something to buy,’ they believe you and believing you is most of the hurdle.” — Erica Schneider, Founder at Cut the Fluff
Taking another trust-based approach, Eubanks prefers the ‘anti-sell,’ where he contextualizes the other solutions available for the potential prospect.
“So the intention of Traffic Think Tank was never to generate leads for my agency, but it did end up generating a lot of leads for the agency and it was from just trying to be solution-forward. People would ask questions or they would present a problem and people would weigh in and I would just try to be useful.” — Nick Eubanks, Vice President of Owned Media at Semrush and Co-founder of Traffic Think Tank
If your audience sees you, your community, and your brand as someone/something they can trust, then you’re more likely to be top-of-mind when they’re further down the funnel and looking for services you provide.
Take your audience from community platform to email newsletter ASAP
Wherever you build your community (e.g., Facebook, Slack), it’s crucial that you move those community members into an audience that you own—namely your email newsletter audience.
“If you have somebody’s email address or their phone number, you actually have complete control of that communication. There’s a lot of people that just put a ton of time and energy into Quora and generated a lot of traffic and leads with it—until it didn’t. And people are doing the same thing with Reddit right now and it’s going to work until it doesn’t and I would rather be in their inbox.” — Nick Eubanks, Vice President of Owned Media at Semrush and Co-founder of Traffic Think Tank
“When I send an email and there is a CTA in it, people click on it and buy way more than anywhere else,” Schneider said. This means that you can build your community wherever the audience happens to frequent—be it a social platform, a forum, or something different altogether—and insulate your lead pipeline from trends and updates that affect the platform the community is hosted on.
“There's no guarantee that [your community members] are going to stay and so I would say, build your home base, which is your email, as soon as you can,” Schneider said, recommending that “If you don’t have a newsletter, start one and then put your little beacons everywhere else and move as the market moves.”
Personal branding has a huge impact—if you do it correctly
“The thing that I wasn't really expecting when I started to do this was how beneficial it is for the agency. Oh my goodness, this puts our agency on the map so much, and we’ve gotten so many clients from it—so much visibility from it.” — Lily Ray, Vice President, SEO Strategy & Research at Amsive
Thought leadership elevates professionals as well as the businesses they work for—and the benefits can be lucrative. Achieving that status and getting it to actually bring in business, however, requires commitment and consideration.
During the personal branding for agency and consultancy growth session, Lily Ray, vice president, SEO strategy & research at Amsive, Carrie Rose, CEO and founder of Rise at Seven, and Katie Morton, editor-in-chief at Search Engine Journal, shared how they became some of the most sought-out voices in the search industry.
Engage your audience: What, how much, and where to share
“Most people have a problem within their brands and I just talked about that problem every single day—so much that when they had that problem or they thought about that problem, they thought about me and they called me up.” — Carrie Rose, CEO & Founder of Rise at Seven
Sharing commentary, tips, and engaging in discussions relevant to your target audience (as Rose advises above) helps you filter the audience and appeal to higher-intent leads.
But even within that bucket of relevant topics, there’s a lot an aspiring influencer can discuss. In search marketing alone, you could post about the latest Google algorithm update, the state of third-party cookies, or generative AI. To that end, monitor your engagement as you share about various topics and make note of where those conversations go. This can help you better understand your audience and their concerns, as well as which topics are hotter for leads.
If you’re wondering how much of your best tips and workflows to share, both Rose and Ray say they’re open with nearly everything.
“Eighty percent of the people in this room won’t see [what you share] because they haven’t got the time, they haven’t got the skill signs, they haven’t got the team to do it,” Rose said, suggesting that sharing your best tips is unlikely to devalue you as a professional. “Well, 20% will see it, and that's okay, because ultimately what we are doing is also building an industry and if we grow the market, then we make more money because there’s more for everybody,” she added.
“I share everything, to be honest … I found that sharing all these things just brings more and more attention and people asking you questions and interest. It definitely isn't the case that people take what you know and then just go steal it and do it themselves—they can’t.” — Lily Ray, Vice President, SEO Strategy & Research at Amsive
While both Ray and Rose cite authenticity as a cornerstone of their online presence, they equally embrace curation. “I’m not trying to build a million followers on TikTok, I’m not trying to build a million followers on YouTube, I’m just trying to get in front of potential clients and so I don’t need to share what I ate for breakfast,” Ray said.
At numerous points during the event, both speakers and attendees commented on the diminished quality of engagement on X (formerly Twitter), with Rose and Ray advocating for LinkedIn as the current go-to platform for B2B influencers. “[In the last year,] the ROI of posting on LinkedIn, the amount of visibility you can get to clients has skyrocketed,” Ray said. “So, we have a form on our website and essentially we ask, ‘How did you find us?’ and it’s like, 85% are LinkedIn,” Rose added.
Cover the entire funnel with your brand influencers
“With anything you teach, don’t leave your audience behind.” — Katie Morton, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Journal
Education and support are foundational for all brands looking to leverage influencers and thought leaders. If bringing attention to your company is the goal, then it only makes sense to address users at every level of expertise to maximize your audience size (and potential leads). It’s the same reason why this publication, the SEO Learning Hub, covers both SEO basics and advanced SEO strategies and tactics.
While this is generally true, there are certain brands that cater specifically to expert-level users. But, no one is born an expert, so you can still adapt a top-of-funnel influencer strategy to ‘speak up’ to the audience that you may eventually sell to without diluting your USP.
Avoid the potential drawbacks of your influencer marketing
Just like how relying on one channel for all your marketing is risky, so too is hitching your entire business’s marketing to one or two people.
“It’s very dangerous and I’ve definitely seen that in the past. I think the message that I try to send to people, especially my staff, is that this isn’t an ego thing and often it is—let’s all admit, some people get likes and followers and, you know, community that listens to them. The thing that a lot of people miss is the branding part—the brand part of that message is ‘why?’ Why Rise at Seven? Come on, you guys have got competitors, I’ve got competitors. Why them versus us? And I think, ultimately, what we've got to do is teach our own employees to understand that ‘why?’” — Carrie Rose, CEO & Founder of Rise at Seven
Educating your influencers on how to properly represent your brand enables them to differentiate you from competitors at every opportunity and turn more prospects into leads.
Ray’s team also approaches this issue proactively by cultivating the agency’s next generation of experts. This includes referring them for speaking opportunities, interviews, and public speaking coaching.
Convert branding into actual leads: Micro moments and character branding
Typically, marketers and stakeholders approach branding as a top-of-funnel initiative—more effective for the awareness stage, but less important than other factors when it’s finally decision time. This mindset may leave opportunities on the table, as many of the event speakers shared how branding generated important leads for their businesses.
“Most of our best leads and our best new clients were word-of-mouth referrals, based on relationships that our staff had or that they nurtured over time. I think it’s all about these micro moments that build up his momentum.” — Domenica D’Ottavio, Associate Director of Digital PR at Journey Further
Micro moments refer to the numerous touchpoints that a potential lead has with your brand and how those interactions convey what it’s like to work with your business and the value you provide (i.e., a glimpse at what it’s like to be your client). Putting your best foot forward during these instances makes a big difference as “sometimes people come to you and you don’t really know exactly where the moment was that they decided to convert,” Domenica D’Ottavio, associate director of digital PR at Journey Further, said.
But, how do you treat every opportunity like it could be a client-winning micro moment? This goes beyond the traditional ‘branding’ that many of us immediately think of (i.e., fonts and colors) and touches on character branding.
“Character branding is far more important, especially with the rise of AI—we can all have a cool looking video, cool looking content, so on and so forth—but you’re talking about the character of the community that you’re working with as well as your brand. I think that’s really what stands out, because you’re going above the fluff, you’re going to the substance of what you're about.” — Terry Rice, Managing Director: Growth & Strategic Partnerships at Good People Digital
Unlike some other levers in marketing, character branding is not something you can just turn on for more leads right now. “So the things that you’re doing today, which may seem fruitless, may seem like, ‘Why am I even doing this?’—Years later, someone will say, ‘Oh yeah, I saw that one post you did on LinkedIn,’” said Terry Rice, managing director: growth and strategic partnerships at Good People Digital.
Your branding is worth its weight in gold, but not if you rush it
Branding can persuade potential clients at every point in the customer journey. Some of the event speakers even mentioned that their branding-based leads were their best clients. But, the experts also agreed that it’s a long-term strategy, so if you want to maximize ROI from your branding, you’ll need to commit and show consistency so that prospects can gain enough familiarity that they begin to trust you.
“Brand is like SEO: It all compounds on each other and what you're looking for is long-term, stable growth and loyal audiences—and that doesn't happen overnight.” — Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Brand at Wix
Don’t rush it. As my esteemed colleague Mordy Oberstein said to cap off the event, “Unlike SEO, if you make a mistake, you redo the title tag, you redo the H1, you redo the content; if you mess with people, it's very hard to get them back on your side.”
For more coverage from digital marketing events at the Wix Playground, check out our other articles:
George Nguyen is the Director of SEO Editorial at Wix. He creates content to help users and marketers better understand how search works. He was formerly a search news journalist and is known to speak at the occasional industry event.