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The 7 Best WordPress Email Plugins in 2019

If your business has a blog, sending out an email newsletter is essential. Not only is it a simple way to distribute your content, but it can also help you better understand what type of content is resonating with your target audience so you can optimize your content strategy.

Beyond content distribution, an email newsletter can also help generate paying customers for your business. An email newsletter brings engaged customers back to your site on a regular basis -- which can increase your revenue by up to 23%.

WordPress is quickly becoming a one-stop-shop for businesses looking to establish their presence online. Roughly 75 million websites active today are built on WordPress, meaning that WordPress alone powers about 27% of the internet.

So, you're cranking out content on your WordPress blog, and you know you can grow your business through an email newsletter ... Wouldn't it be great if you could send this newsletter directly within Wordpress?

Fortunately, with plugins, you can. Using plugins, you can extend the functionality of WordPress beyond just a website building tool. You can install plugins to help you with SEO, protect your email from SPAM, and much, much more.

Some of the most popular plugins available on WordPress are for email marketing and newsletters. With an email plugin, you can generate leads, segment your contacts, and nurture them into customers -- all within WordPress.

To ensure you're able to use WordPress for all your content distribution and email marketing needs, we've cultivated this list of the seven best WordPress email plugins.

1. MailPoet

MailPoet is the most popular free newsletter plugin on WordPress. To manage your subscribers, you can easily import an existing list from your CRM or another marketing automation tool, or create forms and add them to your site using widgets. Plus, their drag-and-drop email editor lets you quickly create responsive emails that look great on any device or email service.

MailPoet is free for anyone with less than 2,000 subscribers, but becomes more powerful upon upgrading. Premium users can see exactly which subscribers have opened an email and what links people are clicking on within your email, among a number of other advanced features.

Image courtesy of MailPoet

2. Newsletter

Newsletter is an email marketing tool built specifically for WordPress, and everything you need to get started is included. The plugin allows you to add a subscription form or pop-up to your site, segment your leads using multi-list targeting, and send newsletters to distribute your blog content.

Additionally, the tool has built-in reporting, so you can see exactly how your emails are performing. You can even automate newsletters to go out on a regular cadence to ensure you are consistently engaging with your subscribers. Newsletter also integrates with other tools, such as Mailgun and Spark Post, so you can optimize your email strategy based on your needs.

Image courtesy of Newsletter

3. SendinBlue

SendinBlue offers cloud-based digital marketing tools to over 50,000 growing companies around the world, and their plugin brings the power of their platform directly into WordPress. With the SendinBlue WordPress plugin, you can create forms, manage lists of subscribers, create and send email marketing campaigns, and measure your success over time using the included reports. The plugin features a drag-and-drop email editor, and you're able to personalize components of your email to increase engagement with your subscribers.

The SendinBlue WordPress plugin also includes transactional email. Using the wp_mail function, you'll be able to send transactional emails using SendinBlue's SMTP. This feature is great for sending order confirmations, or updating your customers on important changes to their accounts.
Image courtesy of SendinBlue

4. Sumo

Sumo has over 100,000 active installations within WordPress -- and for good reason. Beyond just pop-ups, welcome emails, and automated drip campaigns, they also have a number of other features to help you grow your business.

The plugin also features a "share" button that you can add anywhere on your site, which allows your site visitors to easily share your content on social. The plugin integrates directly with WooCommerce so you can create discounts and unique offers to increase your order value, and minimize the amount of abandoned carts you have.

On top of all the plugin's features, Sumo offers free customer support, and even one-on-one onboarding for all customers (free and paid) to ensure you're getting the most out of the plugin.

Image courtesy of Sumo

5. Email Subscribers and Newsletters

Email Subscribers and Newsletters is a plugin that lets you easily notify your subscribers when you have new blog content available. With it, you can add a subscription box to your site, and get notified every time someone signs up for your newsletter. You can then notify your subscribers whenever a new post is published, or create a custom newsletter to share your content.

Email Subscribers and Newsletters is also serious about the health of your email lists. They offer double opt-in functionality so you can ensure that you're only reaching out to people interested in what your company has to offer. You have the option to add captchas to your subscription box to prevent bots from ruining your email lists. The tool offers list cleanup and spam testing services, as well.

Image courtesy of Email Subscribers and Newsletters

6. Subscribe2

Subscribe2 lets you send either simple notifications to your blog subscribers whenever you post new content, or a recurring digest of posts. Through their plugin, you can also exclude specific categories of posts from being included in your emails, or even exclude posts on an individual basis. The tool lets you create simple plain text emails, or create custom HTML emails. You can also upgrade to their paid service (MailOptin) to send emails to your contact lists in Mailchimp, AWeber, or other email service providers.

Image courtesy of Subscribe2

7. SendPress

SendPress is an easy-to-use email newsletter plugin. With SendPress, you can import contacts and content from your WordPress site directly into the plugin, making it easy to create a blog notification email. The plugin features a number of styling and editing options so you can send professional emails without any coding skills. They also have a service called AutoCron, which will check your site on a regular schedule to make sure your scheduled emails are being sent. Image courtesy of SendPress

Ultimately, it's critical you choose the WordPress email plugin that works best for your business, and your audience's needs. Ideally, one of these tools will have the features you need to nurture leads into prospects, and cultivate a more powerful content marketing strategy for 2019.

How HubSpot's Recruitment Team Aims to Use Greenhouse to Mitigate Interview Bias

Diversity, inclusion, and belonging are major points of growth for most businesses right now, and for good reason -- diverse teams can help companies increase revenue by 19% and enable companies to outperform industry norms by 35%.

In the tech industry, we're seeing a particularly strong focus on diversity and inclusion, particularly since both women and people of color are largely underrepresented in the tech space.

However, making a meaningful impact isn't easy -- it requires taking a microscope to a business's embedded culture and structure and being open to some major changes.

As recruiters at HubSpot, we tend to be on the "front line" for bringing in remarkable talent. So, in 2019, we knew we needed to step up our game when it came to ensuring our recruitment process was fair, consistent, and inclusive of a truly diverse candidate pool.

If you're a recruiter, you know that recruiting is both art and science. So enabling our teams through technology to decrease the opportunity for bias was critical for creating scalable solutions.

Ultimately, we needed to incorporate scientific guardrails to help our recruiters, hiring managers, and interviewers decrease mental shortcuts -- while still innovating and excelling in what they do best. No small task, right?

That's where Greenhouse Inclusion and HubSpot meet.

Why choose a pilot program?

HubSpot is one of the first companies to pilot the new Greenhouse Inclusion technology. The platform allows us to reduce mental shortcuts, mitigate bias, identify problem areas, and measure success -- all big changes. But the prospect of implementing thought-process change across our entire global organization was beyond daunting.

Ultimately, to reduce risk, we decided to initially run two pilot programs for specific departments so we could refine the process before sharing it with everyone at HubSpot. We needed a few test cases to help uncover flaws, get stakeholder buy-ins, and evaluate if using the tool was the right decision for the team.

How We Ran Our Pilot Program

This was an exciting time to get some of our teammates into the sandbox to play around with the new process and technology. However, we recognized early that setting some clear expectations and goals was critical to ensure we stuck to a timeline and didn't disrupt too many of our day-to-day operations.

When meeting with the pilot teams, we were open, honest and transparent on what we predicted could be road bumps and difficult muscles to stretch in implementing a new process to their hiring teams. First, we explained this was going to be time-consuming and could take multiple meetings with stakeholders to get off the ground.

Additionally, we told these pilot teams that the value these changes could bring wouldn't be immediately visible, but would ultimately impact our hiring processes long-term. We wanted teams to go in with eyes wide open.

We also wanted to remain transparent about the inner-workings of the process with HubSpot employees. Since we want to use Greenhouse Inclusion as a global tool in the near future, it was imperative we socialize the technology with the non-pilot teams early.

To do this, we embarked on a marketing roadshow and shared the "coming attractions" with business leaders, interview teams, front-line teams, and our employee resource groups. We decided it was imperative to start sharing the 'why' behind this technology early to help grease the wheels for future roll-outs.

Three Things We Learned

1. Sharing the "why" with your team is critical.

Ultimately, the Greenhouse tool is good leverage, but the learning curve extends beyond just showing users how to build scorecards in Greenhouse.

When implementing change with a new piece of technology for a recruitment team, sharing the 'why' behind your method is really important.

Both interviewers and our recruitment team yearned for additional conversations on the root cause of biases, how they could personally work to mitigate them in their day-to-day, and how they could track whether the tool was working.

2. Put your pilot teams in the driver's seat.

We purposefully avoided being overly prescriptive on the step-by-step formula for using some of the structure scorecard tools. By sharing the 'why' (as mentioned above), we gave our pilot teams the destination while depending on them to build the best path there.

We found we got much better output when the pilot groups got their hands dirty and tried things first. This helped us build out training materials for the global launch.

3. Be diligent about quality assurance.

It's understandable and easy for users to lean back onto muscle memory when launching into a new tool. We could have been better about reviewing scorecards immediately, and course-correcting any errors quickly. This would have allowed us to catch confusion with the tool early, before it snowballed.

Ultimately, we realized we needed to be more diligent about holding ourselves accountable to the new process, and ensuring data integrity.

Whether or not you choose to implement bias-mitigating technology at your own company, it's critical you dedicate time and resources to train your interviewers to be more thoughtful about the role they play in driving an effective and empathetic hiring process for candidates. This will help your company build a stronger employer brand, and attract better talent down the road.

If you're not a part of your company's recruitment team, take a look at 53 Little Things You Can Do to Impact Diversity at Your Company for other ways you can help.

Why Customer-Centric Brands Should Avoid Stealth Marketing

If there’s something that can unexpectedly evoke some of your fondest childhood memories, it’s the shopping cart. Whether it reminds you of shopping with your parents at the grocery store or riding one down the parking lot, the shopping cart can trigger some major nostalgia.

But what if told you the widespread use of the shopping cart and, in turn, some of your memories associated with the supermarket staple never would’ve happened if it weren’t for some cunning marketing?

In the mid-1930s, Sylvan Goldman, the owner of the Humpty Dumpty supermarket chain in Oklahoma City, noticed his customers would stop shopping once their basket got too heavy. To lighten his customer’s load and, in turn, grow his company’s profits, Goldman teamed up with a mechanic to develop the first shopping cart, and in 1937, he introduced his invention to all of his stores.

But initially, the shopping cart didn’t explode in popularity like Goldman thought it would. It actually repelled some of Goldman’s customers from his supermarket chain. According to his male customers, the idea of pushing a cart around turned them off because they didn’t think it was masculine enough. And it offended women because they thought his shopping carts looked like a baby carriage.

Instead of banishing his invention from his stores to win back his miffed customers, though, Goldman started thinking outside of the box (or the cart) and devised one of the slyest yet most successful stealth marketing plans in history.

At each of his stores, he hired attractive male and female models to push his carts around and pretend to shop for groceries. When a real customer would spurn a shopping cart near each entrance, he directed one of his employees to peer pressure them to use one by focusing the customer’s attention to all the “people” pushing the carts around and telling them that “everyone else” was using one.

Three years later, the shopping cart became a supermarket staple and store owners even catered the design of their stores for them by widening their aisles and check-out counters. Since Goldman licensed his shopping cart design, he became a multi-millionaire.

Needless to say, the shopping cart’s origin story is incredibly interesting. But, for customer-centric marketers who value authenticity and integrity, it’s more of a cautionary tale than an inspiring one. Because even though stealth marketing might seem like a clever tactic to subtly promote your product or service, being honest and genuine is the only way to win over consumers, especially when only 4% of them believe marketers practice integrity.

Stealth Marketing Examples (And Why They’re Bad)

1. Sony Ericsson 

In 2002, Sony Ericsson released their first camera phone and hired actors to pretend to be tourists and ask passersby to take their picture. The actors would then boast about the camera phone’s features to the tourists, essentially giving them a demo of the product without them consenting to or being aware of it.

2. BlackBerry

Image Credit: New York Daily News

In 2010, BlackBerry hired actresses to flirt with men at bars and tell the clueless bachelors to put their numbers in BlackBerry phones that the company gave to the actresses. No actress ever called any of the men.

BlackBerry pulled this stunt because they wanted the sight of their phones to trigger the emotions the men felt when they were interacting with the actresses. And by manufacturing a positive brand association that would compel the men to buy their product, they essentially manipulated their feelings to peddle a phone.

3. Wal-Mart

When Jim Thresher and Laura St. Claire hiked the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, and Slot Canyon in 2006, they learned that RVs could stay overnight in Wal-Mart parking lots for free. So when the couple decided to road trip across America, they wanted to spend every night in a different Wal-Mart parking lot and write about their adventures. They called their blog “Wal-Marting Across America”, and in each entry, they interviewed Wal-Mart employees about how much they loved their jobs and raved about their friendly interactions with them.

However, Walmart Watch, a non-profit organization that studies Wal-Mart’s impact on society and challenges the corporation to practice better corporate social responsibility, investigated Jim and Laura's blog and discovered that they were actually freelance journalists and Wal-Mart’s public relations agency paid for their RV, meals, and all other expenses. In a nutshell, the blog was fake.

After Wal-Mart's "flog" or fake blog was exposed, the corporation and their public relations agency, Edelman Worldwide, faced harsh backlash -- many bloggers demanded that Edleman’s CEO resign and Wal-Mart’s reputation was tarnished.

4. Whole Foods Market

Image Credit: Wikipedia

In 2007, John Mackey, the co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market, was caught criticizing Whole Food’s rival, Wild Oats Markets, on Yahoo Finance forums for over seven years under a pseudonym.

When he was caught, Whole Foods was actually in the process of acquiring Wild Oats Markets for around $670 million. The Federal Trade Commission wanted to terminate the deal. However, Whole Foods ended up winning a federal appeals court case and acquired their rival.

Who knows what would’ve happened if Mackey wasn’t able to biasedly smear Wild Oats Market for so long or at all. Maybe they would still be a standalone company.

5. Fyre Festival

in 2017, entrepreneur Billy McFarland and rapper Ja Rule organized a music festival called Fyre Festival in the Bahamas. To generate as much buzz as possible for the event, they paid some of the most notable social media influencers, like Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid, and Emily Ratajkowski, to fly down to the Bahamas, act in their promo video, and post the video to their Instagram profiles. But none of the influencers disclosed the fact that their Fyre Festival posts were actually ads. With the help of some promotion of the festival’s stellar acts, luxury villas, and gourmet meals, Fyre Festival sold over 4,000 tickets.

Unfortunately for the attendees, Fyre Festival's marketing materials and the event itself were a complete scam. Instead of the luxury villas and gourmet meals their guests paid thousands of dollars for, McFarland and Ja Rule gave them tents and cheese sandwiches. Worst of all, there was no cell phone service, portable toilets, or running water at the festival, so thousands of people were basically left stranded on the island. And once the truth about Fyre Festival started circulating throughout social media, all of the festival’s acts cancelled.

Shortly after Fyre Festival's epic failure, its parent company, Fyre Media, shut down and Billy McFarland was sentenced to six years in prison and forced to repay $26 million to his company’s investors.

What Is Digital Marketing?

With how accessible the internet is today, would you believe me if I told you the number of people who go online every day is still increasing?

It is. In fact, "constant" internet usage among adults increased by 5% in just the last three years, according to Pew Research. And although we say it a lot, the way people shop and buy really has changed along with it -- meaning offline marketing isn't as effective as it used to be.

Marketing has always been about connecting with your audience in the right place and at the right time. Today, that means you need to meet them where they are already spending time: on the internet.

Enter digital marketing -- in other words, any form of marketing that exists online.

At HubSpot, we talk a lot about inbound marketing as a really effective way to attract, engage, and delight customers online. But we still get a lot of questions from people all around the world about digital marketing. So, we decided to answer them. Click the links below to jump to each question, or keep reading to see how digital marketing is carries out today.

• What is digital marketing?
• Digital Marketing Examples
• What does a digital marketer do?
• Inbound Marketing vs. Digital Marketing: Which is it?
• Does digital marketing work for all businesses?
• What is the role of digital marketing to a company?
• What types of digital content should I create?
• How long will it take to see results from my content?
• Do I need a big budget for digital marketing?
• How does mobile marketing fit into my digital marketing strategy?
• I'm ready to try digital marketing. Now what?

So, how do you define digital marketing today?

A seasoned inbound marketer might say inbound marketing and digital marketing are virtually the same thing, but there are some minor differences. And conversations with marketers and business owners in the U.S., U.K., Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, I've learned a lot about how those small differences are being observed across the world.

How does a business define digital marketing?

Digital marketing is defined by the use of numerous digital tactics and channels to connect with customers where they spend much of their time: online. From the website itself to a business's online branding assets -- digital advertising, email marketing, online brochures, and beyond -- there's a spectrum of tactics that fall under the umbrella of "digital marketing."

The best digital marketers have a clear picture of how each digital marketing campaign supports their overarching goals. And depending on the goals of their marketing strategy, marketers can support a larger campaign through the free and paid channels at their disposal.

A content marketer, for example, can create a series of blog posts that serve to generate leads from a new ebook the business recently created. The company's social media marketer might then help promote these blog posts through paid and organic posts on the business's social media accounts. Perhaps the email marketer creates an email campaign to send those who download the ebook more information on the company. We'll talk more about these specific digital marketers in a minute.

Here's a quick rundown of some of the most common digital marketing tactics and the channels involved in each one.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

This is the process of optimizing your website to "rank" higher in search engine results pages, thereby increasing the amount of organic (or free) traffic your website receives. The channels that benefit from SEO include websites, blogs, and infographics.

There are a number of ways to approach SEO in order to generate qualified traffic to your website. These include:

• On page SEO: This type of SEO focuses on all of the content that exists "on the page" when looking at a website. By researching keywords for their search volume and intent (or meaning), you can answer questions for readers and rank higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs) those questions produce.
• Off page SEO: This type of SEO focuses on all of the activity that takes place "off the page" when looking to optimize your website. "What activity not on my own website could affect my ranking?" You might ask. The answer is inbound links, also known as backlinks. The number of publishers that link to you, and the relative "authority" of those publishers, affect how highly you rank for the keywords you care about. By networking with other publishers, writing guest posts on these websites (and linking back to your website), and generating external attention, you can earn the backlinks you need to move your website up on all the right SERPs.
• Technical SEO: This type of SEO focuses on the backend of your website, and how your pages are coded. Image compression, structured data, and CSS file optimization are all forms of technical SEO that can increase your website's loading speed -- an important ranking factor in the eyes of search engines like Google.

Content Marketing

This term denotes the creation and promotion of content assets for the purpose of generating brand awareness, traffic growth, lead generation, and customers. The channels that can play a part in your content marketing strategy include:

• Blog posts: Writing and publishing articles on a company blog helps you demonstrate your industry expertise and generates organic search traffic for your business. This ultimately gives you more opportunities to convert website visitors into leads for your sales team.
• Ebooks and whitepapers: Ebooks, whitepapers, and similar long-form content helps further educate website visitors. It also allows you to exchange content for a reader's contact information, generating leads for your company and moving people through the buyer's journey.
• Infographics: Sometimes, readers want you to show, not tell. Infographics are a form of visual content that helps website visitors visualize a concept you want to help them learn.

Want to learn and apply content marketing to your business? Check out HubSpot Academy's free content marketing training resource page.

Social Media Marketing

This practice promotes your brand and your content on social media channels to increase brand awareness, drive traffic, and generate leads for your business. The channels you can use in social media marketing include:

• Facebook.
• Twitter.
• LinkedIn.
• Instagram.
• Snapchat.
• Pinterest.
• Google+.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

PPC is a method of driving traffic to your website by paying a publisher every time your ad is clicked. One of the most common types of PPC is Google Ads, which allows you to pay for top slots on Google's search engine results pages at a price "per click" of the links you place. Other channels where you can use PPC include:

• Paid ads on Facebook: Here, users can pay to customize a video, image post, or slideshow, which Facebook will publish to the newsfeeds of people who match your business's audience.
• Twitter Ads campaigns: Here, users can pay to place a series of posts or profile badges to the news feeds of a specific audience, all dedicated to accomplish a specific goal for your business. This goal can be website traffic, more Twitter followers, tweet engagement, or even app downloads.
• Sponsored Messages on LinkedIn: Here, users can pay to send messages directly to specific LinkedIn users based on their industry and background.

Affiliate Marketing

This is a type of performance-based advertising where you receive commission for promoting someone else's products or services on your website. Affiliate marketing channels include:

• Hosting video ads through the YouTube Partner Program.
• Posting affiliate links from your social media accounts.

Native Advertising

Native advertising refers to advertisements that are primarily content-led and featured on a platform alongside other, non-paid content. BuzzFeed-sponsored posts are a good example, but many people also consider social media advertising to be "native" -- Facebook advertising and Instagram advertising, for example.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation refers to the software that serves to automate your basic marketing operations. Many marketing departments can automate repetitive tasks they would otherwise do manually, such as:

• Email newsletters: Email automation doesn't just allow you to automatically send emails to your subscribers. It can also help you shrink and expand your contact list as needed so your newsletters are only going to the people who want to see them in their inboxes.
• Social media post scheduling: If you want to grow your organization's presence on a social network, you need to post frequently. This makes manual posting a bit of an unruly process. Social media scheduling tools push your content to your social media channels for you, so you can spend more time focusing on content strategy.
• Lead-nurturing workflows: Generating leads, and converting those leads into customers, can be a long process. You can automate that process by sending leads specific emails and content once they fit certain criteria, such as when they download and open an ebook.
• Campaign tracking and reporting: Marketing campaigns can include a ton of different people, emails, content, webpages, phone calls, and more. Marketing automation can help you sort everything you work on by the campaign it's serving, and then track the performance of that campaign based on the progress all of these components make over time.

Email Marketing

Companies use email marketing as a way of communicating with their audiences. Email is often used to promote content, discounts and events, as well as to direct people toward the business's website. The types of emails you might send in an email marketing campaign include:

• Blog subscription newsletters.
• Follow-up emails to website visitors who downloaded something.
• Customer welcome emails.
• Holiday promotions to loyalty program members.
• Tips or similar series emails for customer nurturing.

Online PR

Online PR is the practice of securing earned online coverage with digital publications, blogs, and other content-based websites. It's much like traditional PR, but in the online space. The channels you can use to maximize your PR efforts include:

• Reporter outreach via social media: Talking to journalists on Twitter, for example, is a great way to develop a relationship with the press that produces earned media opportunities for your company.
• Engaging online reviews of your company: When someone reviews your company online, whether that review is good or bad, your instinct might be not to touch it. On the contrary, engaging company reviews helps you humanize your brand and deliver powerful messaging that protects your reputation.
• Engaging comments on your personal website or blog: Similar to the way you'd respond to reviews of your company, responding to the people who are reading your content is the best way to generate productive conversation around your industry.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing refers to a marketing methodology wherein you attract, engage, and delight customers at every stage of the buyer's journey. You can use every digital marketing tactic listed above, throughout an inbound marketing strategy, to create a customer experience that works with the customer, not against them. Here are some classic examples of inbound marketing versus traditional marketing: 

• Blogging vs. pop-up ads
• Video marketing vs. commercial advertising
• Email contact lists vs. email spam

What does a digital marketer do?

Digital marketers are in charge of driving brand awareness and lead generation through all the digital channels -- both free and paid -- that are at a company's disposal. These channels include social media, the company's own website, search engine rankings, email, display advertising, and the company's blog.

The digital marketer usually focuses on a different key performance indicator (KPI) for each channel so they can properly measure the company's performance across each one. A digital marketer who's in charge of SEO, for example, measures their website's "organic traffic" -- of that traffic coming from website visitors who found a page of the business's website via a Google search.

Digital marketing is carried out across many marketing roles today. In small companies, one generalist might own many of the digital marketing tactics described above at the same time. In larger companies, these tactics have multiple specialists that each focus on just one or two of the brand's digital channels.

Here are some examples of these specialists:

SEO Manager

Main KPIs: Organic traffic

In short, SEO managers get the business to rank on Google. Using a variety of approaches to search engine optimization, this person might work directly with content creators to ensure the content they produce performs well on Google -- even if the company also posts this content on social media.

Content Marketing Specialist

Main KPIs: Time on page, overall blog traffic, YouTube channel subscribers

Content marketing specialists are the digital content creators. They frequently keep track of the company's blogging calendar, and come up with a content strategy that includes video as well. These professionals often work with people in other departments to ensure the products and campaigns the business launches are supported with promotional content on each digital channel.

Social Media Manager

Main KPIs: Follows, Impressions, Shares

The role of a social media manager is easy to infer from the title, but which social networks they manage for the company depends on the industry. Above all, social media managers establish a posting schedule for the company's written and visual content. This employee might also work with the content marketing specialist to develop a strategy for which content to post on which social network.

(Note: Per the KPIs above, "impressions" refers to the number of times a business's posts appear on the newsfeed of a user.)

Marketing Automation Coordinator

Main KPIs: Email open rate, campaign click-through rate, lead-generation (conversion) rate

The marketing automation coordinator helps choose and manage the software that allows the whole marketing team to understand their customers' behavior and measure the growth of their business. Because many of the marketing operations described above might be executed separately from one another, it's important for there to be someone who can group these digital activities into individual campaigns and track each campaign's performance.

Inbound Marketing vs. Digital Marketing: Which Is It?

On the surface, the two seem similar: Both occur primarily online, and both focus on creating digital content for people to consume. So what's the difference?

The term "digital marketing" doesn't differentiate between push and pull marketing tactics (or what we might now refer to as ‘inbound' and ‘outbound' methods). Both can still fall under the umbrella of digital marketing.

Digital outbound tactics aim to put a marketing message directly in front of as many people as possible in the online space -- regardless of whether it's relevant or welcomed. For example, the garish banner ads you see at the top of many websites try to push a product or promotion onto people who aren't necessarily ready to receive it.

On the other hand, marketers who employ digital inbound tactics use online content to attract their target customers onto their websites by providing assets that are helpful to them. One of the simplest yet most powerful inbound digital marketing assets is a blog, which allows your website to capitalize on the terms which your ideal customers are searching for.

Ultimately, inbound marketing is a methodology that uses digital marketing assets to attract, engage, and delight customers online. Digital marketing, on the other hand, is simply an umbrella term to describe online marketing tactics of any kind, regardless of whether they're considered inbound or outbound.

Does digital marketing work for all businesses?

Digital marketing can work for any business in any industry. Regardless of what your company sells, digital marketing still involves building out buyer personas to identify your audience's needs, and creating valuable online content. However, that's not to say all businesses should implement a digital marketing strategy in the same way.

B2B Digital Marketing

If your company is business-to-business (B2B), your digital marketing efforts are likely to be centered around online lead generation, with the end goal being for someone to speak to a salesperson. For that reason, the role of your marketing strategy is to attract and convert the highest quality leads for your salespeople via your website and supporting digital channels.

Beyond your website, you'll probably choose to focus your efforts on business-focused channels like LinkedIn where your demographic is spending their time online.

B2C Digital Marketing

If your company is business-to-consumer (B2C), depending on the price point of your products, it's likely that the goal of your digital marketing efforts is to attract people to your website and have them become customers without ever needing to speak to a salesperson.

For that reason, you're probably less likely to focus on ‘leads' in their traditional sense, and more likely to focus on building an accelerated buyer's journey, from the moment someone lands on your website, to the moment that they make a purchase. This will often mean your product features in your content higher up in the marketing funnel than it might for a B2B business, and you might need to use stronger calls-to-action (CTAs).

For B2C companies, channels like Instagram and Pinterest can often be more valuable than business-focused platforms LinkedIn.

What is the role of digital marketing to a company?

Unlike most offline marketing efforts, digital marketing allows marketers to see accurate results in real time. If you've ever put an advert in a newspaper, you'll know how difficult it is to estimate how many people actually flipped to that page and paid attention to your ad. There's no surefire way to know if that ad was responsible for any sales at all.

On the other hand, with digital marketing, you can measure the ROI of pretty much any aspect of your marketing efforts.

Here are some examples:

Website Traffic

With digital marketing, you can see the exact number of people who have viewed your website's homepage in real time by using digital analytics software, available in marketing platforms like HubSpot.

You can also see how many pages they visited, what device they were using, and where they came from, amongst other digital analytics data.

This intelligence helps you to prioritize which marketing channels to spend more or less time on, based on the number of people those channels are driving to your website. For example, if only 10% of your traffic is coming from organic search, you know that you probably need to spend some time on SEO to increase that percentage.

With offline marketing, it's very difficult to tell how people are interacting with your brand before they have an interaction with a salesperson or make a purchase. With digital marketing, you can identify trends and patterns in people's behavior before they've reached the final stage in their buyer's journey, meaning you can make more informed decisions about how to attract them to your website right at the top of the marketing funnel.

Content Performance and Lead Generation

Imagine you've created a product brochure and posted it through people's letterboxes -- that brochure is a form of content, albeit offline. The problem is that you have no idea how many people opened your brochure or how many people threw it straight into the trash.

Now imagine you had that brochure on your website instead. You can measure exactly how many people viewed the page where it's hosted, and you can collect the contact details of those who download it by using forms. Not only can you measure how many people are engaging with your content, but you're also generating qualified leads when people download it.

Attribution Modeling

An effective digital marketing strategy combined with the right tools and technologies allows you to trace all of your sales back to a customer's first digital touchpoint with your business.

We call this attribution modeling, and it allows you to identify trends in the way people research and buy your product, helping you to make more informed decisions about what parts of your marketing strategy deserve more attention, and what parts of your sales cycle need refining.

Connecting the dots between marketing and sales is hugely important -- according to Aberdeen Group, companies with strong sales and marketing alignment achieve a 20% annual growth rate, compared to a 4% decline in revenue for companies with poor alignment. If you can improve your customer's' journey through the buying cycle by using digital technologies, then it's likely to reflect positively on your business's bottom line.

What types of digital content should I create?

The kind of content you create depends on your audience's needs at different stages in the buyer's journey. You should start by creating buyer personas (use these free templates, or try makemypersona.com) to identify what your audience's goals and challenges are in relation to your business. On a basic level, your online content should aim to help them meet these goals, and overcome their challenges.

Then, you'll need to think about when they're most likely to be ready to consume this content in relation to what stage they're at in their buyer's journey. We call this content mapping.

With content mapping, the goal is to target content according to:

1. The characteristics of the person who will be consuming it (that's where buyer personas come in).
2. How close that person is to making a purchase (i.e., their lifecycle stage).

In terms of the format of your content, there are a lot of different things to try. Here are some options we'd recommend using at each stage of the buyer's journey:

Awareness Stage

• Blog posts. Great for increasing your organic traffic when paired with a strong SEO and keyword strategy.
• Infographics. Very shareable, meaning they increase your chances of being found via social media when others share your content. (Check out these free infographic templates to get you started.)
• Short videos. Again, these are very shareable and can help your brand get found by new audiences by hosting them on platforms like YouTube.

Consideration Stage

• Ebooks. Great for lead generation as they're generally more comprehensive than a blog post or infographic, meaning someone is more likely to exchange their contact information to receive it.
• Research reports. Again, this is a high value content piece which is great for lead generation. Research reports and new data for your industry can also work for the awareness stage though, as they're often picked-up by the media or industry press.
• Webinars. As they're a more detailed, interactive form of video content, webinars are an effective consideration stage content format as they offer more comprehensive content than a blog post or short video.

Decision Stage

• Case studies. Having detailed case studies on your website can be an effective form of content for those who are ready to make a purchasing decision, as it helps you positively influence their decision.
• Testimonials. If case studies aren't a good fit for your business, having short testimonials around your website is a good alternative. For B2C brands, think of testimonials a little more loosely. If you're a clothing brand, these might take the form of photos of how other people styled a shirt or dress, pulled from a branded hashtag where people can contribute.

How long will it take to see results from my content?

With digital marketing, it can often feel like you're able to see results much faster than you might with offline marketing due to the fact it's easier to measure ROI. However, it ultimately depends on the scale and effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy.

If you spend time building comprehensive buyer personas to identify the needs of your audience, and you focus on creating quality online content to attract and convert them, then you're likely to see strong results within the first six months.

If paid advertising is part of your digital strategy, then the results come even quicker -- but it's recommended to focus on building your organic (or ‘free') reach using content, SEO, and social media for long-term, sustainable success.

Do I need a big budget for digital marketing?

As with anything, it really depends on what elements of digital marketing you're looking to add to your strategy.

If you're focusing on inbound techniques like SEO, social media, and content creation for a preexisting website, the good news is you don't need very much budget at all. With inbound marketing, the main focus is on creating high quality content that your audience will want to consume, which unless you're planning to outsource the work, the only investment you'll need is your time.

You can get started by hosting a website and creating content using HubSpot's CMS. For those on a tight budget, you can get started using WordPress hosted on WP Engine and using a simple them from StudioPress.

With outbound techniques like online advertising and purchasing email lists, there is undoubtedly some expense. What it costs comes down to what kind of visibility you want to receive as a result of the advertising.

For example, to implement PPC using Google AdWords, you'll bid against other companies in your industry to appear at the top of Google's search results for keywords associated with your business. Depending on the competitiveness of the keyword, this can be reasonably affordable, or extremely expensive, which is why it's a good idea to focus building your organic reach, too.

How does mobile marketing fit into my digital marketing strategy?

Another key component of digital marketing is mobile marketing. In fact, smartphone usage as a whole accounts for 69% of time spent consuming digital media in the U.S., while desktop-based digital media consumption makes up less than half -- and the U.S. still isn't mobile's biggest fan compared to other countries.

This means it's essential to optimize your digital ads, web pages, social media images, and other digital assets for mobile devices. If your company has a mobile app that enables users to engage with your brand or shop your products, your app falls under the digital marketing umbrella, too.

Those engaging with your company online via mobile devices need to have the same positive experience as they would on desktop. This means implementing a mobile-friendly or responsive website design to make browsing user-friendly for those on mobile devices. It might also mean reducing the length of your lead generation forms to create a hassle-free experience for people downloading your content on-the-go. As for your social media images, it's important to always have a mobile user in mind when creating them as image dimensions are smaller on mobile devices, meaning text can be cut-off.

There are lots of ways you can optimize your digital marketing assets for mobile users, and when implementing any digital marketing strategy, it's hugely important to consider how the experience will translate on mobile devices. By ensuring this is always front-of-mind, you'll be creating digital experiences that work for your audience, and consequently achieve the results you're hoping for.

I'm ready to try digital marketing. Now what?

If you're already doing digital marketing, it's likely that you're at least reaching some segments of your audience online. No doubt you can think of some areas of your strategy that could use a little improvement, though.

That's why we created Why Digital Marketing? The Essential Guide to Marketing Your Brand Online -- a step-by-step guide to help you build a digital marketing strategy that's truly effective, whether you're a complete beginner or have a little more experience. You can download it for free here.

What is Google’s Knowledge Graph?

Announcing the New Moz SEO Essentials Certificate: What It Is & How to Get Certified

Posted by BrianChilds

“Does Moz offer a certification?”

Educating the marketing community about SEO is one of our core values here at Moz. I worked at an agency prior to joining the team back in 2016, and much of what I learned about how to deliver SEO to our clients came from reading the Moz Blog and watching MozCon videos.

In 2016, one of Moz’s entrepreneurial product managers, Rachel Moore, launched a new catalog of SEO coursework called Moz Academy. This initiative enabled our community to learn faster through structured, interactive workshops. Since 2017, the team has taught SEO to almost 2,500 students through our various class offerings (I looked it up prior to writing this. That number made me really proud).

Across all these interactions, one question asked by our students kept surfacing: 

Can I get a certificate for completing this coursework? 

For agencies, the ability to show a certificate of completion is a way to differentiate themselves amongst a crowded market. I knew from my own experience how valuable having “HubSpot Inbound Certified” and “Adwords Certified” on my LinkedIn profile was — they allowed our team to show proficiency to our prospective clients. For our friends working as in-house marketers, showing a certificate of completion is a way of showing that the student made good on the investment they requested from their managers.

I’m proud to announce that Moz has put in a tremendous amount of effort to create a certificate program that meets this consistent customer demand. Today, Moz is launching the SEO Essentials Certificate through our Moz Academy platform. Check it out below:

I'm ready to check it out!

What is an SEO Certificate?

An SEO Certificate from Moz is all about developing familiarization with Moz tools and covering some of the essential types of projects you can use to hit the ground running. Though attendees of the Moz Academy come from a variety of backgrounds, we built the certification coursework with an Agency or freelance SEO in mind. However, I believe this material is valuable for anyone interested in learning SEO.

The certificate is focused on five core competency areas:

1. Fundamental SEO Concepts (Understand the Fundamentals)
2. Keyword research (Develop Keyword Strategies)
3. Page optimization (Apply On-Page Optimization Strategies)
4. Link building essentials (Build Effective Link Strategies)
5. Reporting on SEO (Create Efficient Reporting Strategies)

By completing this certificate, attendees should be able to articulate for their stakeholders where SEO fits in a digital strategy, how to find and target search engine results pages (SERPs) based on the competitive landscape, and how to approach delivering basic SEO tactics using the Moz toolset.

With this foundation, you'll be able to jump off into more advanced topics such as technical SEO fixes, local SEO, and how to set up your agency for success.

Check out just what's included in the coursework for the Moz SEO Essentials certificate:

1. Understand the Fundamentals

One challenge we observed in the development of SEO coursework: our users often started delivering organic traffic improvements without having a foundational understanding of where SEO tactics fit into a broader digital strategy. Often people will initiate optimization efforts without first conducting effective keyword research. Or, if keyword research was being done, it wasn’t framed within a repeatable, scalable process.

The Understand the Fundamentals course sets the stage for delivering SEO in a way that can be repeated efficiently. In addition to defining essential terminology used in the following classes, you learn how to organize keyword research in a way that produces insight about competition. This relatively simple framework can radically improve targeting of your SEO activities, especially for large enterprises that may compete in several different markets simultaneously.

2. Develop Keyword Strategies

After introducing a framework for conducting keyword research, the certificate program dives into a step-by-step process for creating large keyword clusters and identifying the keywords that will produce the best results. In the development of this coursework, we recognized that many articles and resources talk about keyword research but don’t define a repeatable, scalable process for actually doing it. So many articles about SEO promote hacks that may work for a particular use case, but lack step-by-step instructions. We developed this course to provide you with a practical process that can scale alongside your work.

You’ll learn the importance of mapping keyword clusters to the typical sales funnel customers follow as they move from exploration of solutions to purchase. I’ve presented this material in workshops to large enterprises and small companies — every marketing team that's used this process found it valuable.

By the end of the class, you’ll be familiar with the most valuable features of Moz Keyword Explorer and how to organize lists to help you identify and target the best keywords for your stakeholders.

3. Apply On-Page Optimization Strategies

For many websites, you can find quick wins simply by optimizing page attributes that target strategic keywords. For as much as search has evolved in recent years, we still operate primarily in a world where the text on a page defines the value of that page. This course provides an overview of those attributes and their relative importance.

You'll have a clear understanding of how to use site crawl and page optimization tools to identify, prioritize, and begin optimizing pages based on the keyword strategy they developed in the previous class. Often one of the challenges our students have discovered is that they moved too quickly into optimization without first having their strategy defined. This class will show how strategy and implementation fit together.

4. Build Effective Link Strategies

Link building is another practice that, as an agency marketer, I found difficult to scale. Many articles describe the importance of how relevant links relate to ranking, or hacks that produced a particular result for a page, but not how to create a repeatable process.

As you'll discover in the class, link building is more about process than tools. You’ll understand how to use Moz Link Explorer to isolate the best domains to target amongst the thousands you might consider. I use this process myself whenever launching new websites and it turns a week-long project into a few hours of work. For any agency, where time is literally money, driving down the cost of link analysis with Moz tools can be a big windfall.

5. Create Efficient Reporting Strategies

Whether you're working at an enterprise brand or providing digital marketing services, reporting on outcomes is a big part of your job. Because of the challenges inherent in reporting on attribution with SEO strategies, it's vital to understand both how to set up your data and some common ways to tie SEO projects to broader digital marketing initiatives. This course provides a framework for reporting on SEO that you can adjust to suit your needs. You’ll learn how to use Google Analytics and Moz tools to create actionable reports you can share with your team and stakeholders.

SEO Essentials Certificate FAQs

Here are some of the common questions our community has asked us about the SEO Essentials Certificate during the development process.

How do I get SEO Certified?

Moz offers the SEO Essentials Certificate program via the Moz Academy platform. When you visit Moz Academy, you will see the SEO Essentials Certificate program listed in the catalog. All you have to do is select the course and proceed through the login process.

How long does the SEO Essentials Certificate take?

The Moz SEO Essentials coursework consists of several hours of online instruction, as well as a few quizzes and a final exam. The coursework is developed to be completed within a week of starting. Some attendees have completed the coursework in two days, but for most folks, it takes about a week.

Will I get an SEO certificate and LinkedIn badge?

Yes! We've developed a way for you to get both a SEO certificate you can print and a LinkedIn badge to show you've completed the program. When you pass the final exam, you'll find links to both of these assets and instructions on how to generate them.

How long is the SEO Essentials Certificate valid?

The Moz SEO Essentials Certificate is valid for one year after registration. When the certificate expires, you'll need to retake the coursework to maintain your certification. We set the expiration at one year because SEO changes a lot! (Seriously — just take a look at the Google Algorithm Change History.) We want to make sure that you have the most up-to-date information when displaying your credentials online and to stakeholders.

Sign me up!

Find yourself with questions not addressed in this post? Drop them in the comments and we'll do our best to get them answered.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

5 Marketing Channels to Focus On In 2019

Even though Field of Dreams is one of my favorite movies, the saying “If you build it, they will come” sadly doesn’t apply to content marketing. Too often, we forget that content marketing consists of two keywords -- content and marketing. Creating content is usually the most fulfilling and enjoyable part of a marketer’s job. But distributing that content is just as crucial for your marketing success because if no one sees your content, they definitely won’t come.

To help you determine which marketing channels you should distribute your content through, we’ve put together a list of the marketing channels to focus on in 2019. Read on to learn about the marketing channels that can amplify your reach, resonance, and revenue.

1. Word of Mouth

Only 4% of consumers believe marketers practice integrity. So what’s a marketer to do when the very people they need to persuade don’t trust them? They need to rely on their customers’ recommendation of their brand.

People trust customers over marketers because marketers have an agenda -- they promote their product or service to generate sales. On the other hand, customers will only rave about a product or service if it truly benefited them.

To create as much word of mouth marketing as possible, you need to stay laser-focused on developing the best product or service possible and providing top-notch customer service. In other words, you need to serve your customers needs before your own. Only then will your customers turn into a loyal, passionate tribe that will recommend your brand to their friends and family.

2. Podcasts

According to a content format study conducted by Edison Research and Triton Digital, people age 12 and older are listening to online audio content at unprecedented levels. On average, people spend 17 hours per week tuning into their favorite podcasts, online radio shows, and audiobooks. There are also 14 million more weekly podcast listeners this year compared to last year, which is more than Guinea’s entire population.

The demand for audio content has exploded, but that doesn’t mean people will listen to your branded podcast just because it’s a podcast. In reality, they’ll only listen to it if it can hold their attention and, ultimately, entertain them. Otherwise, producing yet another interview-an-expert podcast like everyone else will only add to the noise flooding the internet.

One of the best ways to slice through all that corporate clutter is by creating a show that has a unique concept and tells stories of real professionals in your industry. According to researchers in the neuroscience field, storytelling is the best way to capture people’s attention, bake information into their memories, and resonate emotionally with them. The human brain is programmed to crave, seek out, and respond to well-crafted narrative -- that’ll never change.

3. Email

Wasn’t email supposed to die this year? And last year? And the year before that? As much as marketing gurus claim the final nail of email’s coffin is forthcoming, the data tells us it’s not even close. In the U.S., email usage has grown every single year since 2012 and 91% of American internet users use email.

As of now, subscribing to your favorite online publications through email is the best way to keep up with their latest stories and news. And since it takes an average of six to eight touch points to generate a qualified sales lead, persuading people to subscribe to your emails and, in turn, constantly consume your content will generate more leads and revenue for your business.

Growing an engaged, loyal subscriber base also speaks volumes about the quality of your content and its emotional resonance. Even though hoards of content saturate the internet and most people’s inboxes today, people are still actively engaging with your content, which is a clear sign that they actually value it.

4. Social Media

Most people surf social media to escape everyday life, entertain themselves, and connect with others. Sometimes, though, brands forget why people use social media in the first place, blindly pushing their content to as many people as possible.

With over 2.7 billion social media users across the globe today, millions of brands have promoted their content on these platforms for years. But the popularity of social media has flooded each platform with heaps of articles, photos, and videos, skyrocketing the supply of content while the demand for it has plateaued.

So how can brands cut through the noise? One strategy is to publish engaging videos, interact with fans as much as possible, and post content that doesn’t direct users to another website, like insightful status updates instead of links.

5. SEO

Search engines are arguably the best marketing channel for acquiring attention -- most people discover new brands and publications through Google. In fact, according to Google, 89% of B2B buyers and 81% of online shoppers use search engines to research new products and services.

Search engines are also one of the highest converting marketing channels. Since people actively search for answers to their questions and solutions to their problems on Google, they’re likely to download your offer or sign up for a free trial if you can provide them with what they’re looking for.

To build a thriving organic presence online, consider implementing the pillar-cluster model into your blog. Using this strategy, you’ll create a single pillar page that provides a high-level overview of a topic and hyperlinks to cluster pages that delve into the topic’s subtopics. This signals to Google that your pillar page is an authority on the topic.

Hyperlinking all of the cluster pages to the pillar page also spreads domain authority across the cluster, so your cluster pages get an organic boost if your pillar page ranks higher, and your cluster pages can even help your pillar page rank higher if they start ranking for the specific keyword they’re targeting.

 

 

Reputation Management: How to Protect Your Brand Online in 2019

A positive brand image can undoubtedly influence a consumer's decision to buy a product -- and, for virtually every business, a positive brand image starts online.

Nowadays, your reputation is largely dependent on social media and online review sites. For instance, consumers need to read an average of 10 online reviews before they feel they can trust a local business.

Since brand image makes such an impression on someone's decision to purchase, it's critical you regularly monitor your reputation online.

Additionally, an unfavorable online reputation can have an extremely negative impact on your company's bottom line -- in fact, businesses risk losing up to 22% of their customers when users find just one negative article about the company.

However, monitoring and influencing your reputation can feel like a daunting task, particularly when so much of it -- including online reviews -- is out of your control. Fortunately, there are plenty of tools and strategies you can implement to ensure you're protecting your brand in 2019.

Here, let's explore reputation management software you can use to monitor your brand's reputation online, as well as strategies you can implement to manage your corporate reputation.

Reputation Management Software

To start managing your reputation online, it's helpful to use reputation management software. Particularly if you work for a small-to-medium sized business with limited PR resources, software can help you keep track of what people are saying online about your brand.

By using one of these software systems, you're able to mitigate negative reviews by responding to customers online, and even use their feedback as an opportunity to make your brand or product better.

1. Yext Reviews

Since inconsistent information can negatively affect your local SEO, it's critical you ensure your business's information is listed consistently across each site. Fortunately, Yext lets you fix any inconsistent business information in one place.

Additionally, the software enables you to manage your social media accounts and respond to authentic customer reviews, ensuring you have a good grasp on your brand's true online reputation. Yext is ideal for small-to-medium sized businesses as well as major enterprise companies -- some of its impressive customers include Marriott Hotels and T-Mobile.

Price: Starts at $199/year

Image courtesy of Yext.

2. ReviewTrackers

ReviewTrackers collects online reviews from over 100 third-party review sites, including Google, TripAdvisor, and Facebook -- best of all, you get a notification whenever a customer leaves a review, ensuring you're up-to-speed on customer feedback. The cloud-based reputation and review management software also allows you to track trending issues and topics to show you the bigger picture regarding customer issues, and provides competitor tracking and performance analytics.

The tool, used by customers such as Sears and Triple A, is available for enterprise companies as well as small-to-medium sized businesses.

Price: Custom depending on your size and business needs (request a demo here).

Image courtesy of ReviewTrackers.

3. Podium

More than likely, the idea of managing your reputation on different sites ranging from Facebook to Google to Yelp is a stressful and overwhelming one -- fortunately, software like Podium allows you to see all customer interactions and online reviews in a single dashboard. Your employees can use Podium to request reviews, respond to reviews in real-time, and even send text messages with potential customers.

Podium's support team is available via phone, online chat, or email, ensuring you have the help you need to properly implement their tool. The software works best for small-to-medium local businesses who have the time and resources to manually send texts to customers or leads.

Podium is a customer interaction platform that utilizes text messaging to help businesses manage customer relationships and build an online reputation on a variety of websites.

Price: Custom depending on your size and business needs. (Ask for quote here).

Image courtesy of Podium.

4. BirdEye

BirdEye, a SaaS reputation management tool used by more than 50,000 businesses, collects feedback from over 150 online review sources to ensure you have the full-picture regarding your brand's online reputation. You can monitor, promote, and respond to reviews within one dashboard -- additionally, you can use BirdEye to request reviews from customers on both desktop and mobile devices, or on BirdEye's own messenger tool.

Along with review monitoring, BirdEye provides features to manage your social accounts, gain insight into your competitors' customers, and create surveys and tickets to further improve your customer's overall experience with your brand.

Price: Custom depending on your size and business needs. (Ask for quote here).

Image courtesy of BirdEye.

5. Cision

Cision Communications Cloud lets you track your brand mentions across millions of online stories, as well as any social media mentions. Best of all, Cision helps you reach audiences across traditional, digital, and social platforms, ensuring your brand is consistently successful across all marketing channels.

While Cision provides tools to ensure you're able to monitor and protect your online brand, its features are particularly impressive for strategic, proactive PR outreach. For instance, Cision helps you find media outlets and specific contacts within the industry to reach out with pitches, or figure out which industry influencers can best help spread your message and positively impact your brand's image.

Cision also provides automated analysis to help you translate your campaigns into valuable global insights. The tool is used by companies such as Comcast and Bayer.

Price: Custom depending on your size and business needs. (Ask for quote here).

Image courtesy of Cision

Corporate Reputation Management

To understand how a business might implement a reputation management strategy, I spoke with Ellie Flanagan, Senior Corporate Communications Manager at HubSpot.

She told me -- "The first step in shoring up your brand's presence online is making sure that all of your owned channels reflect your current imagery, messaging, and values. Check for out-dated logos, company descriptions, or mission statements. It's also helpful to do regular audits of other places where your logo or brand might be in use -- such as on partner or customer websites."

To conduct regular audits, you might use one of the software tools listed above. Additionally, you can use a reputation management software to check for inconsistencies, such as Yext. Alternatively, there are tools such as Express Update or My Business Listing Manager that help you monitor for out-dated information (check out A Comprehensive Guide to Local SEO in 2019 to learn more).

Flanagan also suggested, "Make sure you have clear language on your own website that outlines your company's trademarks and sets guidelines for how others can use your brand assets. That will be a helpful reference in the event that you need to reach out to someone who's using your brand incorrectly or without permission."

I also spoke with Alice Sol, a Public Relations Specialist at HubSpot. She told me -- "Protecting your brand has never been more important, and that goes hand-in-hand with customer trust. We live in a world where information travels rapidly and we can get a response in seconds at the touch of a button. Technology has enabled us, as consumers, to get in-touch with brands quickly -- at the same time, it's given brands the ability to form deeper connections and resolve issues faster."

Ultimately, it's critical you respond to negative feedback to ensure high customer satisfaction. Responding to negative reviews will help you maintain trust and loyalty among your customers. Additionally, it could actually help you grow your business -- 45 percent of consumers say that they're more likely to visit a business if it responds to negative reviews.

When responding to a negative review, it's important you provide actionable, helpful solutions whenever possible. Avoid getting defensive or making excuses -- at best, tell your customer you're sorry they were disappointed in the service you provided.

Sol also advises businesses to do their best to meet customer needs and ensure a seamless experience, start-to-finish. She says, "The stakes [on delivering a good experience] are getting higher. 80% of consumers say they have stopped doing business with a company because of a poor experience. If a customer has a bad experience, technology allows information about that experience to travel quickly. At the same time, if a customer has a very positive experience, that creates a strong brand reputation and forms trust."

"Your customers are your biggest asset and it's critical to take those needs very seriously by responding in a timely manner and communicating effectively."

To sum it up, when protecting your online reputation, you'll want to focus on the following tactics:

• Make sure all your owned channels reflect your current imagery, messaging, and values
• Ensure all online information regarding your business is up-to-date and consistent
• Use clear language on your own website to outline your company's trademarks and set guidelines
• Cultivate a positive user experience, start-to-finish
• Listen to customer feedback and respond to negative feedback with helpful, actionable solutions when possible

If you want further information regarding how to cultivate a comprehensive, cohesive customer experience, take a look at How to Define a Customer Experience (CX) Strategy, which provides you with the six areas of a successful digital customer strategy.

Give it up for Your MozCon 2019 Community Speakers!

Posted by cheryldraper

High fives and fist bumps for each and every person who took the time to pitch their hearts out for this years’ six community speaker spots — a whopping 130 entries were submitted!

Our selection committee read, watched, and researched, whittling things down to a shortlist of top contenders and then read, watched, and researched some more to determine if a potential speaker and their talk would be a perfect fit for the MozCon stage.

We take lots of things into account during our review, but ultimately there are three main factors that determine our final selections:

• Strength of the pitch (e.g., value, relevance to the audience, etc.)
• Can the content reasonably be delivered in the time allotted?
• Does it fit with overall programming and agenda?

After much deliberation, we’re confident these six community speakers are going to be a great addition to the MozCon Stage.

Grab a seat and see for yourself!

Ready to meet your MozCon Community Speakers?

Areej AbuAli, Head of SEO at Verve Search

Fixing the Indexability Challenge: A Data-Based Framework

How do you turn an unwieldy 2.5 million-URL website into a manageable and indexable site of just 20,000 pages? Areej will share the methodology and takeaways used to restructure a job aggregator site which, like many large websites, had huge problems with indexability and the rules used to direct robot crawl. This talk will tackle tough crawling and indexing issues, diving into the case study with flow charts to explain the full approach and how to implement it.

Christi Olson, Head of Evangelism, Search at Microsoft

What Voice Means for Search Marketers: Top Findings from the 2019 Report

How can search marketers take advantage of the strengths and weaknesses of today's voice assistants? Diving into three scenarios for informational, navigational, and transactional queries, Christi will share how to use language semantics for better content creation and paid targeting, how to optimize existing content to be voice-friendly (including the new voice schema markup!), and what to expect from future algorithm updates as they adapt to assistants that read responses aloud, no screen required. Highlighting takeaways around voice commerce from the report, this talk will ultimately provide a breakdown on how search marketers can begin to adapt their shopping experience for v-commerce.

Emily Triplett Lentz, Content Strategy Lead at Help Scout

How to Audit for Inclusive Content

Digital marketers have a responsibility to learn to spot the biases that frequently find their way into online copy, replacing them with alternatives that lead to stronger, clearer messaging and that cultivate wider, more loyal and enthusiastic audiences. Last year, Help Scout audited several years of content for unintentionally exclusionary language that associated physical disabilities or mental illness with negative-sounding terms, resulting in improved writing clarity and a stronger brand. You'll learn what inclusive content is, how it helps to engage a larger and more loyal audience, how to conduct an audit of potentially problematic language on a site, and how to optimize for inclusive, welcoming language.

Greg Gifford, Vice President of Search at DealerOn

Dark Helmet's Guide to Local Domination with Google Posts and Q&A

Google Posts and Questions & Answers are two incredibly powerful features of Google My Business, yet most people don't even know they exist. Greg will walk through Google Posts in detail, sharing how they work, how to use them, and tips for optimization based on testing with hundreds of clients. He'll also cover the Q&A section of GMB (a terrifying feature that lets anyone in the community speak for your business), share the results of a research project covering hundreds of clients, share some hilarious examples of Q&A run wild, and explain exactly how to use Q&A the right way to win more local business.

Joelle Irvine, Director, Marketing & Growth at Bookmark Content and Communications

Image & Visual Search Optimization Opportunities

With voice, local, and rich results only rising in importance, how do image and visual search fit into the online shopping ecosystem? Using examples from Google Images, Google Lens, and Pinterest Lens, Joelle will show how image optimization can improve overall customer experience and play a key role in discoverability, product evaluation, and purchase decisions for online shoppers, while at the same time accepting that image recognition technology is not yet perfect. Learn actionable tactics around image optimization, including image framing, categorizing, structured data, and indexing to better optimize for visual search.

Marie Haynes, Owner at Marie Haynes Consulting Inc.

Super-Practical Tips for Improving Your Site's E-A-T

Google has admitted that they measure the concept of "Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness" in their algorithms. If your site is categorized under YMYL (Your Money or Your Life), you absolutely must have good E-A-T in order to rank well. In this talk, you'll learn how Google measures E-A-T and what changes you can make both on site and off in order to outrank your competitors. Using real-life examples, Marie will answer what E-A-T is and how Google measures it, what changes you can make on your site to improve how E-A-T is displayed, and what you can do off-site to improve E-A-T.

Be sure to check out the initial agenda here to get a taste of all the MozCon goodness we've got in store for you.

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