You’ve completed your audience analysis – you know exactly who you’re targeting.

You’ve done your keyword research – you’ve mapped out your blog topics and what keywords to include in those posts.

You’ve completed your competitive research – you know which pages are ranking in the top three positions of Google, what information they cover within them and their word count.

You’ve outlined your blog post – you know what you want to say to your audience.

These few steps lead the way for reputable blog creators.

But sometimes, even the most effective blog writers fail to focus on sales data – where are these visitors in the sales funnel?

These visitors typically represent three levels:

• Newbies (at the top of the sales funnel) don’t know much about your product, services, industry or business.
• Intermediates (in the middle of the sales funnel) are educated but crave more knowledge.
• Experts (at the bottom of the sales funnel) are, well, experts and seek something new.

Before the writing begins, you need a blogging strategy that targets these different levels. A three-tier blogging strategy can help influence and persuade the basic levels of prospective customers within the sales funnel.

A tale of three buyers

Consider where your prospective customers are at in the sales cycle when formulating your blog strategy and creating content for each buyer’s persona tier. When creating content for your business, regardless if it’s product- or service-based, the blog strategy will do best initially by representing content rationed as follows:

• 50% created for newbies at the top of the sales funnel who need as much education as possible.
• 25% for intermediates who have some base knowledge but are seeking more.
• 25% for experts ready to buy but thirsty for an innovative look at your industry, products, or services.

Here’s a quick example of how this would work for a ghostwriting agency:

• 50% for those who know nothing or little about ghostwriting, including how it works. This content is built to get these readers into the business universe and influence them to learn more.
• 25% for those who have a deeper understanding of ghostwriting but search for new techniques and reputable help.
• 25% for those who have used ghostwriters in the past are looking for one with a particular edge over the competition.

Again the 50/25/25 is common. But if you have an exclusive product directed toward knowledgeable people, you may want to focus on intermediates and experts. You’ll learn more as you collect data and test.

This blogging strategy is not just for prospective customers. You can also use this information to continue influencing and building your reputation for existing clients – something that is especially effective for your intermediate- and export-focused blogs highlighted in newsletters sent to existing customers.

How to create a three-tier blogging strategy

To create this three-tier blogging strategy, begin with a deep analysis of your current traffic and sales demographics, which hopefully your company or client’s company has available.

Imagine someone who sells only high-performance parts for Ducati motorcycles, primarily for racers but used by Ducati enthusiasts. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll call it the Ducati Shop. The target audience consists of professional race teams with a higher budget and Ducati owners who like to splurge on their exclusive machines.

Regarding traffic demographics, Google Analytics provides much to get you started, such as age, gender, location, and acquisition metrics (e.g., which social network did visitors come from).

With this knowledge available, you can then tweak the focus of your blog strategy on your most frequent visitors.

In our Ducati Shop example, say 80% of the traffic was males in their 40s located in California, and most of them are arriving on your website through Facebook traffic.

That provides some baselines for topic ideas that will influence, which you can explore deeply. For example, the research would include motorcycle-specific events or locations in California that would attract a Ducati owner. And the place to find them? Facebook.

That would start some high-level thinking of topics, such as:

• Top Nine California events for Ducati owners in 2022
• Are you prepared for your next Laguna Seca Track Day? (Laguna Seca is a track in California)
• Follow these five Ducati Facebook groups if you live in California

Next would be some sales data. For example, what are the highest ROI services/products you sell? And what is the top-selling product, and how can you market it better?

You can then mention those products/services within your blogs with various anchor text pointing toward your main selling pages. This will naturally help your overall SEO strategy and influence the readers about what you’re marketing without making a direct selling statement.

Much more data will be available as you monitor your content, including what type of messaging/voice, length, or CTAs convert best within each piece of content. This is where it’s wise to set up goals in analytics to track your blogging strategy’s progress directly.

More data helps you better influence future blogging strategies and tweak older blogs based on this new knowledge. And a bonus exists with tweaking older content: search engines want to provide searchers with fresh, useful information. If it’s good for searchers, it’s good for your audience.

You can split your content into the 50/25/25 blend, which again may change based on your testing of ongoing content strategies.

Tier 1: Blog strategy tips for newbies

When writing for the newbies’ portion of your content, begin with a 50% share of your blogging strategy. Create a sharp focus here on creating pillar or skyscraper pieces that you can continuously use as a focus for internal and external links.

This content is for those just entering the sales funnel, which means you want to educate them and influence them to return to you for information. Most of these readers won’t be first-time buyers, but your influence as the authority on the subject will influence them – a reason why you must create much high-level content that talks to these beginners.

You want to chase rankings for long-tail keywords on the broader spectrum. Businesses with a sharp focus will have easier ranking due to the lack of search volume in the “broader” target keywords. Rather than “Ducati Parts,” which would be tough to rank for due to its 1,000 monthly search volume (according to Semrush data) and some established websites owning the top positions, including Ducati itself holding the top spot.

Instead, optimize the 50% of newbie blogs on longer-tail but still broad keywords such as  “Ducati parts online” (390), “Ducati scrambler aftermarket parts” (320), and “Ducati performance parts” (210).

This is also where an attractive title will help influence click-throughs, especially when these blogs are amplified through social media, newsletters and paid ads.

For these blogs targeting newbies, “how-to” titles work, and those that show a promise, such as increasing revenue by using a three-tier buyer’s persona blog strategy.

Tier 2: Blog strategy tips for intermediates

Next, focus 25% of your blogging strategy on creating content for the intermediate crowd in the sales funnel. These readers are educated but not experts and need that extra boost of influential content to either return to your website for more or become a client.

When creating these topics, you can dig deeper into your knowledge base as a content creator. Here’s where you can exploit the meaning behind a case study that relates to your business or take a deep look into your industry’s history or past successes.

Here the Ducati Shop would create content around a deep history of a particular motorcycle model, such as a 916 Superbike or a Monster. This blogging strategy would help provide reputable and quality content about these models and soft-sell the performance parts available for the models through both internal links and in-text CTAs.

Here you can get more granular on keywords, chasing even longer-tail keywords. The strategy would be to add extensions for each motorcycle model for the Ducati Shop, such as “Ducati Panigale parts online” or “Ducati Monster parts online,” etc.

It’s all about adding value to the reader’s intent. This 25% of readers know the subject matter and want deeper knowledge. Giving this audience what they want may influence them to return to your website or (even better) become a customer or client.

Tier 3: Blog strategy tips for experts

Here’s where you can focus on super long-tail keywords – only ones that typical experts within a field would know. These readers are ready to buy now. They are knowledgeable but are looking for the perfect product or partners, contingent on your business.

If the online Ducati shop sells complete racing parts that only expert mechanics or racers would understand, such as flashing an ECU for a V4 Panigale, offer content that explains the available benefits and options. Those low-volume keywords can drive thousands in sales with less effort than ranking a blog for newbies.

Here’s a wise place to expose your highest-priced items. If you’re an SEO agency with a $25,000 monthly enterprise campaign with proven case studies, use those case studies to find a super-focused audience searching for longer-tail, super low-volume keywords.

Summary

Understanding your audience demographics and sales data is the first step to driving the three-tier blogging strategy. Visualize these clients. Separate them by their education about your industry and products/services.

• Are they newbies who know nothing?
• Are they well educated but crave more knowledge to join your universe of frequent content?
• Or are they experts looking to buy now?

Experiment with creating a three-tier blogging strategy with a 50/25/25 blend of focuses. Influence at each of these stages in the sales funnel. Continually test to see where you’re most successful. The 50/25/25 blend is only a starting point; keep tweaking as your revenue grows.

The post How to create a three-tier blog strategy to increase revenue appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Interest Category targeting in Facebook may be up to 33% inaccurate, according to new study from North Carolina State University. The NC State researchers conducted two separate experiments, the first to find out which activities were associated with “interest” on Facebook and the second to analyze the accuracy of user interests from participants around the world. The results were far from comforting.

Experiment 1. The first experiment involved setup of 14 accounts, a small sample size, that merely viewed or scrolled through a page in order to see if those topics within the content consumed would be pulled into the “Interest Categories” accounts. The goal was to see what interests would then be associated with the newly formed account and to qualitatively infer how accurate the newly assigned interests were. 

The findings show 33.22% of the inferred interests were either inaccurate or irrelevant. “The key finding here is that Facebook takes an aggressive approach to interest inference,” Aafaq Sabir, lead author of a paper on the work and a Ph.D. student at NC State, said.

Experiment 2. To get even deeper, the NC State team wanted to see if the findings would hold true for a more diverse group of users. The 146 study participants were selected by Amazon Mechanical Turk from “different parts of the world”. A browser extension would then extract data from the participants’ Facebook accounts and question the participant about the validity of the interest data.

This study found 29.3% of the interests that Facebook had listed for participants were not actually of interest. “That’s comparable to what we saw in our controlled experiments,” said Anupam Das, co-author of the paper and an assistant professor of computer science at NC State.

What’s unclear. With samples sizes this small, we should take this study with a grain of salt. While the data is unflattering to Facebook’s targeting, much of the experiment is unclear on the parameters used to determine what is of interest and what is not of interest. Additionally, the second experiment in this study relies on user feedback that does not appear to have quantitative parameters in place for reporting, which may muddy results. Lastly, the participants selected in the survey were in different locations, but sourced similarly using a very specific platform – Amazon Mechanical Turk. By choosing participants tied to one source, it may not be a truly accurate representation of Facebook users as a whole. 

Why we care. Most ad targeting isn’t perfect. For example, if logged in, you can see what Google targets your ads to and see what Facebook thinks that you are interested in. The reality is that no targeting is perfect, but the 30-33% inaccuracy found in the study is concerning. Before pulling ad spends to different platforms, it is worthwhile to assess the current account performance and make adjustments from that data instead of a study. Finally, the first portion of this study does show that basic content consumption can influence interests, so again check your results to ensure that your targeting is in fact working for you.

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All of Meta’s automated ad products will exist together under the name of Meta Advantage, the company announced. Five of its existing ad products are getting a new name and will be joined by a sixth new-ish product – Shopping Campaigns – set to roll out to all advertisers sometime later this year. 

According to Meta, the suite will actually consist of two types of Advantage products:

• Advantage: This lets you automate a specific part of a manual campaign.
• Advantage+: This lets you automate a campaign from beginning to end or part of a manual campaign (e.g., placements or creative).

Same tools, new names. Here’s a quick recap of what Meta announced is changing: 

• Lookalike Expansion becomes Advantage Lookalike. This tool helps advertisers reach a broader audience than what is defined in their Lookalike audience. 
• Detailed Targeting Expansion becomes Advantage Detailed Targeting. This tool finds additional audiences based on the advertiser’s targeting preferences (e.g., interests).
• Automated App Ads become Advantage+ App Campaigns. This tool uses real-time data to adjust ads across audience, placement and creative.
• Automatic Placements become Advantage+ Placements. This tool decides where your ad will show on Meta (e.g., Facebook Feed, Instagram Stories, Reels), with the goal of delivering better results.
• Dynamic Experiences becomes Advantage+ Creative. This tool creates multiple variations of an ad using a single image or video.

Coming soon: Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns. Currently known as Automated Shopping Ads, this is in beta testing. Meta said the goal of these ads is to help advertisers drive conversions by automating the optimization of ad creative, targeting, placements and budget. 

Why we care. The push toward automating everything continues. Most of this is a simple rebrand and making clear which of its products are automated – somewhat reminiscent of Google’s attempts at simplifying its ad offerings when it rebranded as Google Ads in 2018. In particular, the Shopping campaign rollout later this year will be one to watch for marketers. Meta made sure to highlight that all of these products can improve conversions, increase return on ad spend (ROAS) and reduce costs. However, as always, test for yourself. 

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Have you ever found yourself thinking:

• I hope I’ll get the job.
• I hope I’ll get a raise.
• I hope that I’ll get a promotion.
• I hope that I won’t be out of a job if layoffs come around.

I certainly thought this way for the first half of my 25+ years in digital marketing. People would advise me to set goals and make things happen for myself. But I didn’t follow their advice. The result? I fell behind my peers. People I trained were promoted ahead of me. 

If you take nothing else away from this article, remember this: Your career is your own. Read on to learn four tips that should help you take charge of it.

Tip 1: Grow your professional network

As the old saying goes, “It’s not what you know, but who you know.” And it’s true: people tend to work with those they know and trust. That’s why networking is so important, both online and in-person. 

Referrals can be a tremendous asset, not just when you’re looking for a job. All three of my agency jobs resulted from referrals from people I met at conferences.

LinkedIn is the go-to online resource for professional networking. Hiring managers and recruiters often go there first when looking for potential candidates or researching potential candidates. At least one or two recruiters view my profile every week.

So keep your LinkedIn profile up-to-date. Use a professional-looking headshot. Make sure to fill out every field you possibly can, from your job history to your training and other experience. Optimize your profile like you would optimize any website you work on for a client.

In-person networking can be a bit more challenging these days, but certainly not impossible. Take advantage of local professional groups and more general groups (e.g., Chamber of Commerce, business development). Public service groups like Elks or American Legion can be a great source of friendships and networking.

Tip 2: Continue your education

Change is constant. This is undoubtedly true in digital marketing, where search engine algorithms are updated almost daily, paid search techniques continue to evolve, website technology changes regularly. If you aren’t a perpetual student of your craft, you will fall behind. 

Reading is essential. It not only helps you learn more about your work, but it also helps you expand your mind to think in different ways. 

Many stats cite that most people stop reading non-fiction books after finishing their formal education. Some of those claims may be a bit exaggerated. Still, Pew Research found that roughly a quarter of American adults did not read a book during the previous year. Don’t be a member of that group! 

Read about more than just work stuff, too. Biographies, self-help, and other works can be beneficial.

Part of my reading program is going through digital marketing websites. I have the Feedly app set up on my tablet to go through the RSS feeds of Search Engine Land, Search Engine Roundtable, and other digital marketing-related websites. The news and opinions I read from those sources are invaluable to my continuing education.

Professional conferences are a great way to continue your education and build your networking skills. Many conferences have continued in virtual mode, while others are starting to return to in-person. When you’re just starting, it is beneficial to stick to conferences with sessions that will help you get better at your work.

Later, though, when you have more experience, learn about other aspects of your trade as well. One of the things that have helped me in my career is knowing at least the basics of how different areas of digital marketing work. Being able to help knit an overall strategy is extremely valuable.

Digital marketing expert Joe Hall recently asked on Twitter: “Have you ever been to an SEO conference? If so, tell me about your favorite presentation you saw. What was it about? And what did you like about it?”

My answer: “There have been many. The ones I enjoy the most are the ones that make me think about things differently that I can apply to the work I do.”

I meant that sincerely. There have been far too many people to list out in tweets whose conference presentations have helped me do my work better.

Lastly, set up your own website if you’re doing SEO or website development work. It’s amazing what you can learn just playing around with a website that doesn’t carry as much risk as playing around with a client’s website. All you need to do is invest a couple of hundred dollars a year. Another way to have a website is to volunteer to help out a charity you support. They will appreciate the assistance, and you get a platform on which you can hone your skills.

Tip 3: Always be ready for your next job

Looking for a job can feel like a full-time job itself, and you never know when you will need to look for a job. Having an up-to-date resume at the ready will help you if that time ever comes. 

Avoid using fancy templates for your resumes. Many automated recruiting systems use a parsing system to pull the resume into their applicant management system. Some fancy formatting will completely throw off the importing of the data. It’s OK to have a nicely-formatted version to email, but if asked to upload a copy, use a plain format.

Read the full job description before you apply for a job. Never rely on the job title alone to guide you. Otherwise, you will waste the recruiting manager’s time and your own. 

At some agencies, SEO people are called “analysts.” I can’t tell you how many resumes I would get from people who specialized in data analytics because of the job title, regardless of how carefully I worded the job description in the posting to make it clear it was an SEO job. I finally told our recruiter to do a text search on any resumes. If neither “SEO” nor “search engine optimization” were found, then I didn’t want the person forwarded to me for consideration.

Tip 4: Find a job that fulfills you

It’s incredible how many people work jobs they hate just because they need a paycheck. I understand that sometimes it’s necessary to do so, but if you hate your job, you have the freedom to go and find something else. 

I know many people who have completely reinvented themselves and moved from one career to another. It’s OK to do that. You need to find a job that pays the bills and makes you want to get up in the morning and not dread Mondays. 

While we all can’t make money working on our hobbies, it’s always possible to apply something you enjoy doing to a job that can earn you a living. Part of this formula, I believe, is learning to work on your strengths. While it’s good to identify weak areas in your work and improve upon those, always working in a job where you struggle is bad for your long-term mental health.

Being fulfilled at work is being part of a team with a great culture. You’ve probably read or heard about “The Great Resignation.” Sesil Pir opined in a recent Forbes article that what’s happening is something she termed “The Great Awakening.” People are awakening to the realization that they don’t have to work in a crappy, dead-end job for companies that don’t value them. 

While progressions of salary and titles are great, they shouldn’t be the focus of your career. Yes, you should be compensated for the value you bring to an organization, but money and titles aren’t everything. 

In the end, it’s wonderful to be able to look at yourself in the mirror and know that you’re doing great work that is helpful and fulfilling.

Summary: Make yourself indispensable

If you haven’t heard this saying yet, remember it: hope isn’t a strategy. Now is the perfect time to take your career destiny into your own hands. You want to make yourself, as Seth Godin expressed it in his book of a similar title, “indispensable.”

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