3 Marketing Lessons Learned in 3 Weeks
If you’ve been keeping up with KoMarketing, you know we’ve been traveling, speaking, writing, and continuing to create and drive awesome online marketing programs for our clients. And though it’s been hectic, for me, it’s provided another way to learn and improve my skills as a marketer.
While I can’t possibly capture everything in one post, I thought I’d focus on three of the lessons I’ve learned through these various trips over the past three weeks. Enjoy!
1. Tom Brady….
Just kidding. Living here in Boston, Tom Brady is all I’ve heard about in the past week. I’ll let you decide what the lesson is there.
Let’s try again.
1. Search Queries are Shifting
As I was doing research for my SearchLove presentation, I came across an interesting study from Blue Nile Research that looked at how users search. It offered a lot of interesting details but most notably, it showed 27% of search queries were questions.
I wrote a little bit about this over on Search Engine Land but the takeaway for me was this – how users search is changing and as search marketers, we must adjust our keyword and content strategy accordingly.
Interestingly enough, as I was writing this post, a report was released from Google that looked at YouTube searches. The biggest thing…how-to queries:
“Searches related to “how-to” on YouTube are growing 70% year over year, with more than 100M hours of how-to content watched in North America so far this year.”
Users are looking for answers to their questions and businesses must give it to them.
The YouTube stat in my mind presents a really interesting opportunity for businesses to create short videos offering answers to questions the customer might encounter using your products or services.
Need an example? Lowes does an awesome job of this on their YouTube channel and through their Vine account.
2. Google is Serious About Mobile
We heard all about Mobilegeddon and how all of our non-friendly mobile sites were going to crash, burn, and you’d never see the light of search result day again.
Ok…it might have been a case of everyone overreacting but on April 21st Google did release their new algorithm and it turns out some sites have been affected in a negative manner. However, it wasn’t the disaster some thought it might be.
That being said, mobile is important to Google because mobile is where your users are and where search is moving to. In fact, for the first time, Google publicly acknowledged mobile has overtaken desktop in search.
As I was pulling a client report last week, I saw something really interesting. A client launched a responsive site at the end of February and in March and April, mobile traffic to their blog skyrocketed:
What’s important to keep in mind is that their main site didn’t see the same drastic changes. To me, this shows a couple things:
- What users are searching/reading on their phones vs. what they’re searching on their desktops is very different. The main site, though it has higher traffic volume than the blog, is built around products and sees a lower percentage of traffic coming from mobile. People on their phones are likely looking for something to read vs. searching for a product (keep in mind this is B2B).
- Mobile organic traffic was up substantially from February to March to April and while it’s hard to compare month to month numbers, the numbers were significant and beyond traditional seasonality/length of month. It’s also hard to look at the launch timing and the graph above and not correlate the two. To me, Google is serious about mobile and if you are one of the “early adopters” in your industry, you will be rewarded.
Want more information on the mobile update? Bryson Meunier wrote a good post on the current impact the potential future impact that’s worth checking out.
3. People Really Hate Comcast
This was certainly no surprise to me but it is pretty amazing how many people you will find talking about how much they hate Comcast on Twitter. Go ahead…see for yourself.
The point of this isn’t really that people hate Comcast but that they are extremely vocal about their hate on social media. This is bad news for companies.
If your customer has a bad experience, they are going to tell their friends and their social networks. And when 80% of people trust the recommendation of a stranger, that’s a big deal.
How can you make sure you are giving your customers a great experience? [Warning: Shameless Plug] Check out my presentation on The Customer Experience and It’s Impact on Search:
I can’t wait to see what the next three weeks bring! Have something you learned in the past few weeks you think is worthwhile? Let us know in the comments!