Brand Performance Unlocked: Advanced Strategies for SEO and Marketing Synergy via @sejournal, @sejournal

Balancing brand and performance marketing has nothing to do with giving each side its amount of time in the limelight.

There’s no magic harmony you’re going to create that delivers some sort of marketing tactic equilibrium and equality.

This is the most controversial article I have ever written. A lot of people reading this will not be happy about what I have to say. For the record, there’s a bit of irony in this, considering I have said way more controversial things about marketing and SEO in the past.

Yet, here we are as I am about to tell you that the only way to balance brand and performance marketing is to give brand supremacy.

Let the fireworks begin.

Balance Brand & Performance Marketing? Why Is There Even A Problem?

In keeping with espousing heresy I will not start this post with “What is brand marketing?” and/or “What is performance marketing?” nor will I dive right into how to balance the two.

Instead, I’m going to challenge the very premise of the article so that you can better understand why this question is even worth your time.

While I see the problem as basically being self-evident, let’s flush it out a bit. The way I see it, there are two fundamental issues at play here (there are more, but this post is going to be long enough as it is):

1. Mindset

The mindset required for good brand marketing is, at times, lightyears away from the performance mindset.

I’m not saying that they intrinsically have to be this way. As I’ll get into later, I think the two ways of thinking complement each other.

However, at the risk of generalizing, there does tend to be a strong divergence between how the two types of marketers think. At least, this has been my experience over the past decade or so as someone who straddles both marketing disciplines.

I often find performance marketers very focused on the immediate. What’s bringing traffic right now, and how do we get more of it?

For the record, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Nor is it unreasonable (I mean, it is, but it’s not).

This hyperfocus on immediate performance metrics is quite logical since performance marketers are graded on immediate ROI. Is it thus any surprise they focus on the immediate? (So, performance marketers, it’s not you…it’s the system.)

Brand has an entirely different goal. With brand building, the focus is on exactly that: building. Building an identity, associations and sentiment, messaging, positioning, etc.

All of that takes time. You don’t immediately leave an imprint on someone. If you want to create an impression with an audience, it’s pretty obvious it’s going to take time.

This process is also far more compounded and less linear than performance marketing is often perceived. It’s not like getting a page to rank well and driving in traffic who will convert.

You’re creating a reputation for yourself that involves micro-moments and micro-activities compounding over an extended period (like how any association is formed).

(For what it’s worth, I would argue that performance-based activities, such as SEO, also compound over time. You’re not going to rank for that meaty keyword on day one).

Brand marketing naturally lends itself to a bit more of a holistic long-term mindset whereas performance-based marketing lends itself to focusing more on the immediate impact of a given activity.

These divergent mindsets make it entirely difficult to properly balance brand and performance. They’re almost at war with each other.

To sum it all up: Performance marketing (to its detriment) looks at the end result and often doesn’t care about context, environment, and ecosystems. Brand, on the other hand, is all about contextualization and understanding the environment and ecosystem the brand is operating within.

Now, you might be thinking, well a lot of brand marketers also seem to care less about context, environment, and ecosystems and generally operate in the here and now much like a performance marketer might.

Which brings me to my next point.

2. Misunderstanding What Brand Is

Part of what makes balancing brand and performance marketing almost an inherent difficulty is the lack of understanding of what “brand” actually is.

Too often, what we call “brand marketing” is really performance or product marketing disguised as brand marketing.

What happens is that a company will put emphasis on brand when in reality it’s just another form of performance marketing. The net result is a lack of balance but without even realizing it.

Imagine a TV commercial that doesn’t have a message or any positioning but rather simply tells you what the product is and what it does. Is this brand marketing? I say no. This is just product marketing. It’s pure product awareness.

The web is filled with the equivalent of this.

You talking about your product or service across the internet is not brand marketing; it’s product marketing.

Brand marketing is entirely about who you are in the context of who your audience is and how you want to then be perceived. It is fundamentally associative. If it’s not associative, it’s probably not genuine brand marketing. That is a hot take right there.

Branding is about putting yourself in a position to grow; it is not growth per se. If brand marketing were farming, it wouldn’t even be planting the seeds; it would be sowing the soil so that you could eventually plant the seeds.

Brand is concerned with perception and momentum, not adoption. I know that sounds crazy, and half of y’all out there on both the brand and performance side of marketing are shaking your heads, if not your fists, right now.

But it is the truth. Real brand marketing, the kind you see the Cokes and Lexuses of the world doing, is about perception that leads to momentum. It’s about putting you in a position to grow and to have opportunities that you can capitalize on.

How Do You Then Balance Brand And Performance?

Brand is the setup for performance. Brand creates the opportunity, and performance captures it.

It’s all one dance.

Allow me to explain.

Brand Is Primary, And Here’s Why

Balancing performance and brand marketing isn’t about some sort of give-and-take between the two approaches. If you’re thinking about balance in terms of scales, that’s not how this is going to work.

It’s about knowing where each discipline sits in the “marketing hierarchy” and how the two interact.

This is why I am telling you brand is primary – and it’s not even close.

There are two fundamental ways brand is primary to performance marketing (I was going to insert another, but I think for now these two are the most important):

The Ultimate Goal Is To Have People Come To You

Brand is primary in the very goal it sets out to achieve – to bring audiences to you (as opposed to you chasing your audience across social and search screaming “Pick me! Pick me!”).

It’s like the old line from the Cheers theme song, “You wanna go where everybody knows your name.” No one wrote a line in a sitcom theme song that said, “You wanna go chasing everyone around the block screaming like a mad person so that they will know your name.”

Consumers knowing who you are and seeking you out is self-evidently more advantageous than trying to chase after your consumer base and hoping to heaven you found them at the right moment in the buyer journey.

In case it’s not entirely self-evident (because I have heard performance marketers say the complete opposite), people coming to you creates more momentum and opens up new revenue possibilities than the inverse ever could.

Buzz is contagious. I’m not saying you need to go viral or anything like that, but creating momentum naturally leads to more momentum. The momentum your brand creates for itself leads to all sorts of new possibilities.

Being sought after on whatever level builds upon itself. If done with care and patience it can create real stable opportunity growth for you. This is really what any serious company wants: long-term stable growth. Nothing is more long-term and more stable than being sought after and enticing.

Serious connections with your audience are hard to create but they are hard to really break as well.

Unless you become a known quantity in your niche, no amount of performance marketing is going to help you achieve what you really want: self-sustained staying power.

Brand helps fulfill the ultimate goal any company has: to be a market leader.

Brand Is What Allows Performance To Perform

Can pure performance marketing perform (for lack of a better word)? Yes, obviously.

Can it reach its true potential without brand? No.

Brand marketing is what creates the willingness to invest and interact with your performance marketing.

Imagine you’re on a train, and some random goofball starts waving at you. Are you gonna wave back? And even if you do, are you really interested in interacting with this person?

Now imagine instead that some random whacko your friend sees you on the train and waves. Would you wave back? Wave? You might go on mosy over and have an actual conversation.

Performance without brand is randomly waving at people and hoping that they converse with you. Sometimes they might, but you’re fighting an uphill battle.

Creating a connection with your audience that exists beyond utility is what enables your performance marketing to perform the way you want it to.

To use an SEO analogy, trying to get your product or service to perform without brand is like trying to get a single page on a new website to rank for a highly competitive keyword without any other content history to support it.

Effectively establishing your brand is what enables you to make the pitch that can covert at the appropriate time.

That’s why I would say 99% of brand marketing is not about trying to build revenue. It’s about building the possibility of building revenue. It’s about building cadence and momentum so that the part of your marketing that asks folks to open their wallets works.

Brand puts you on the doorstep of performance. In effect, brand creates the lead, and performance signs the deal.

Like I said earlier, if marketing were a farm, then branding wouldn’t even be planting the seeds. It would be sowing the ground so that you could plant them. And like a field, if you don’t sow it first, you will not have a crop.

If you want revenue without fighting an uphill battle, you have to realize that brand is primary. It is what allows your other marketing activity to perform as you really want it to.

This goes back to what I was saying earlier about people not understanding what brand is.

As far-out as it sounds, brand is not about revenue, it’s about building the opportunities that will eventually lead to revenue. Understanding this one point puts you so far ahead of everyone else.

The Problems In Giving Performance Primacy In A Balanced Approach

Let’s take this from the other side of the coin. What would happen if you gave performance primacy, not brand?

If performance is the building block of the marketing strategy you’re setting yourself up for significant problems down the road.

There are more than a few reasons why this is true, here are some of the more notable ones:

Performance First Means Working With Your Hands Tied Behind Your Back

I don’t even know where to start with this one because a performance-first mindset limits you in so many ways.

Broadly speaking, performance being primary, as I mentioned earlier, means fighting an uphill battle. You’re constantly trying to find the right audience at the right time and then convincing them to funnel through.

Yes, you can get to a good place that way but it’s never really working on its own for you. You never really become a “thing” this way and can’t naturally build momentum upon your activities the same way.

Again, a) I spoke about this at length above b) I am sure you will find me a case where I am wrong – that’s not my point.

On top of that, performance generally tends to be siloed – an obvious inefficiency. Link builders do link building, PPC does paid, etc. – there’s a general lack of broader strategy and comms when performance takes the lead.

Each team has its own KPIs and does whatever it takes to meet them, resulting in obvious inefficiency.

Performance Will Pigeon-hole You Every Time

Because performance marketing is very here-and-now, it generally lacks the flexibility to build for the future.

Doing what’s best for the KPIs is too often doing what’s best in the immediate only.

That means a lack of flexibility in both structure and activity.

I’ll give you a great example of what I mean when I say performance limits a business structurally.

While this case may sound “far-fetched” today, SEOs who have been around a while will search their feelings for they know what I am about to say to be true.

Back in the day, if I had a site that sold DVDs, “the SEO play” would be to name the site “buydvds.com,” or whatever.

It’s generally not a good idea to name your brand after a specific tech asset as, well, tech assets change. In this case, DVDs are basically defunct.

Now the business here may have pivoted to streaming media but now has to deal with a whole rebrand (including a site migration) and all of the immense headaches that come with it. What they should have done at the onset was name the site something like “entertainmentmedia.com” or whatever.

Why didn’t they? Because the performance play became primary, and the brand play was discarded.

Performance, by its very nature, lacks breadth and as a result, will often limit the scope of how the business is able to function or structure itself.

The other way performance limits a business relates directly to the marketing activities performance signs off on and doesn’t sign off on.

Now, if you think I’ve been a bit salty thus far…hold my beer.

What performance-based marketing does to overall marketing activities is the equivalent of a marathon runner deciding to amputate their foot mid-race while maintaining the expectation to break a world record.

To see this in action, look no further than what happens when performance owns a content strategy.

What is the value of content in the context of performance? Impressions, clicks, traffic, conversions, etc.

You see this all the time in the SEO space. You can’t go a week without seeing someone somewhere ask, “If a keyword has 0 search volume should I bother writing content for it?”

Every time I see this question, a piece of me dies.

Not because it might not be true. There might not be a ton of search volume but because that’s a not reason not to write a piece of content.

Leave aside the fact that your current users may expect that content to be there on your site, it could signal the same expectation to new consumers hitting the site for the first time. Also, content is a corpus. You have to build it up to the point where you can write that post for that money keyword.

Performance marketing never asks, “What does writing this content allow me to do next?”

Instead, it’s always, “Why does this content do for me right now?”

Pigeon-holed.

Folks Might Use You, But They Also Might Hate You (And Is That What You Really Aim To Do?)

My sister recently told me how she’s so reliant on Amazon but hates using them at the same time due to how they allegedly treat their workers.

It’s entirely possible that folks may consume your offering but will not be fond of you when doing so. It’s also almost certain that your brand can’t get away with it the way Amazon can.

If all you’re thinking about is traffic KPIs and conversions, etc., you’re missing the most fundamental aspect of success – likability.

It doesn’t even have to be so extreme. Look at the oversaturation of content between Marvel and Star Wars (and even my personal favorite, HBO’s Hard Knocks NFL documentary series).

Sure, they get viewers, but it all comes with negative sentiment. While the end product of Hard Knock’s new preseason series was actually not bad, New York sports radio (the series featured a New York team) trounced HBO before its release.

For a week, every sports host was basically shaking their heads at the idea of having to watch a whole series about phone calls between General Managers making trades, etc. So HBO got the numbers but accumulated a lot of brand baggage to do it.

How smart is that as a long-term strategy?

That’s, fundamentally, a testimony to the fact that brand can assess a move qualitatively while performance just can’t.

That’s not to say performance’s quantitative measurement isn’t vital. It’s a very important part of this brand balancing act.

If Brand Builds, Then Performance Course Corrects

I don’t want you to walk away thinking that performance marketing doesn’t hold value. This article isn’t about brand being better. It’s about the balance.

Brand needs performance to leverage its full power, just like performance needs brand. Again, brand can set you up, but performance closes the deal. Brand, for example, can set up a business to have the authority it needs to pull in organic traffic.

But you need a genuine SEO strategy that includes things like keyword targeting, etc. In this specific case, a performance-based mindset is what will take the brand from potentiality to actuality.

Very often, brand course corrections should be based on the data performance marketing provides.

If there’s a drop in whatever KPI whether it be sign-ups or traffic or whatever, it’s often a change in brand and business strategy that’s needed. That change can’t occur unless you have the data insights performance marketing provides.

Take Starbucks. At the time of this writing, they’ve seen a decline in business, and there are multiple reasons for it. What I found interesting was the user sentiment towards Starbucks’ “corporate identity.”

In an interview with CBS, one customer said, “Starbucks started really feeling like corporate America in a way it hadn’t before.”

If I were Starbucks, I would at least explore the idea of creating a sub brand that is more niche and local. Much the way the beer companies did when they saw craft beer sales surge (hence Coors created Blue Moon).

That sort of shift in brand strategy can’t possibly occur without the insights offered by performance marketing. You have to have sound performance marketing processes in place to effectively run your brand marketing.

So when I say brand is “primary,” I mean that in the sense of the stages of marketing thought and activity.

Not necessarily importance (I do think brand is fundamentally more important, but that’s, again, not what this post is about). You literally have to balance (maybe integrate is a better word) performance into your brand marketing in order to be effective.

Can’t Performance Build Up The Brand?

Doing this is like trying to pull a whale through a needle hole.

Yeah, I guess it might be technically possible, and someone out there did it – but it is not the norm. Upon considering this, I am sure no one has pulled a whale through a needle hole, but I think you get my point.

You are trying to build up a tidal wave one raindrop at a time. Yes, it is possible, but it goes against the very foundation of what you’re trying to actually do – gain momentum.

I’ve heard the argument that by ranking for this and that query and everything in between, you will become an established presence – a brand.

That can be possible. And yes, your content strategy (SEO and beyond) is a big part of your brand strategy. But thinking about something like Google Search as being the method to establish a brand reputation is a chaotic way to go about building a brand.

To start, Search isn’t a medium where your audience may even be interested in “hearing from you.” They may have a specific need at a specific moment that brings them to search. Once that need is met does the user really care to explore more about your product or service? It’s a toss-up at best.

It’s like trying to have a conversation with someone in the middle of a lecture – it’s just not conducive.

You want to have a conversation and make a connection in a place and time that is meant to have a conversation and connection (social media, YouTube, live events, etc.).

Using something like Search to establish a distinctly recognizable brand is just not what Search is.

SEO and search engines are a great way to supplement and reinforce the messaging and positioning you establish on more suitable platforms.

If a consumer sees you on social and interacts with you over time and then goes to search and keeps seeing your results pop up it can reinforce your positioning. It may even make it likely to get a conversation out of it.

What makes performance hard in terms of it being the method to establish a brand is that the assets usually associated with it (PPC, SEO, etc.) are secondary branding assets in the context of how users discover them.

They can supplement, accent, and reinforce, but they are not designed to be primarily effective at establishing a brand identity and audience connection.

Think of it like the difference between someone specifically coming to your blog after interacting with your brand for years on social versus someone who finds a single post on Google.

Yes, they both might read the same content but in the latter case, there is no identity contextualization. They don’t know who you are and how that post fits in with your overall identity and positioning. They get the information in the post but in terms of getting “you,” it’s not very direct.

The way the audience interacts with your brand via performance marketing activity is far too limited and narrow in scope for identity contextualization to easily take place.

So it can happen, and it does happen a bit each time that person interacts with your content (say via search), but it’s piecemeal and disjointed.

Better Balance Means Better Marketing

Balancing brand and performance means knowing the role and place of each marketing discipline. It means allowing the two areas to interact and influence each other at the right time and in the right way.

While it all starts with branding at the onset, the relationship between the two areas of marketing should grow to be reciprocal. Brand should open the doors for performance and performance should help the brand evolve.

For too long, the digital marketing space has siloed these two areas, with inefficiency (and more) being the net result.

The future of marketing is being able to unite these two concepts effectively. I think there is a lack of attention given to how brand impacts performance efficacy (and vice versa).

Uniting the two areas of marketing will better align with where the web and its user base are headed.

More resources: 

• What SEO Should Know About Brand Marketing With Mordy Oberstein
• Google Performance Max: Everything You Need To Know
• Perfectly Optimized Content From Start To Finish
• PPC Trends 2024

Featured Image: Jack_the_sparow/Shutterstock

One of a brand’s greatest gifts is its ability to communicate with its prospects and customers through social communities.

These goldmines of customer sentiment and potential product or service positioning can provide every brand with a wealth of information.

However, cultivating those communities and building the authenticity to engage with your customers takes time and effort.

This post will not tell you, “Here’s exactly how to do it,” because every brand will have a different voice that it needs to leverage as well as different needs for its community.

However, we will explore a framework you can leverage for your brand so that your conversations with customers and prospects are meaningful.

Here are the main areas we will discuss in this article:

• Value and tone – how to determine which ones are right for you.
• Translating your message across channels and carrying your customers with you.
• Owning whether engagement should be paid or organic.

A final note before we dive in: this is not going to be a criticism or praise of any one particular channel. We intend to keep this as agnostic as possible, acknowledging that some brands will be more aligned with some channels than others.

This can be related to creative bandwidth, i.e., how much time you have to post and engage with a channel. It could also be related to whether you have the means to create video. There are a number of different criteria.

Just know that whatever you decide to engage with, you do need to be consistent.

Value & Tone

A brand’s values come down to who it is at its core. Some brands lean toward transparency and sharing all of the ins and outs of how they function. This can include what it’s doing with its team and what the product/service roadmap looks like.

Others will focus far more on doing well by doing good, highlighting customer engagement in the community versus just what they are working on themselves.

There is no right or wrong answer to this. You need to make sure that you know what your brand’s beating heart is and how the message you’re sending ties back to that.

Coming up with your values is not something you should undertake lightly. Additionally, your team needs to agree on and comply with them.

If giving in the community is a core value, your team members shouldn’t be caught posting things that make light of others’ suffering.

Conversely, if part of your values relate to certain tech advancements, calling out those tech advancements in a negative light could be counterproductive.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t change your opinion and have reasons why your opinion shifts, but consistent communication is needed to reinforce the new value position.

Image from Semrush, April 2024

One example is Semrush. Semrush used to have a different brand aesthetic, and there were questions about how to pronounce its brand name.

The company settled the debate once and for all with a very clear-cut statement. In doing so, it actually ruffled a few feathers because the community didn’t like being told they were wrong.

On the other hand, Semrush ensured that its branding would be consistent moving forward. This was particularly useful as it prepared for its IPO.

Screenshot from Twitter, April 2024

Burger King ran an ill-fated X (Twitter) campaign saying women belong in the kitchen.

Now, most of us would know it’s common sense that this could only have ended badly. However, the campaign intended to highlight the shortage of female chefs leading kitchen brigades and earning top dollar compared to their male counterparts.

The brand redeemed itself somewhat instead of representing a true failure because it acknowledged the mistake and then provided detailed information about what it had been trying to do.

So, while Burger King did fall down publicly as a brand, it paved the way for more attention to be shown to the cause.

Thank you to Purna Virji for highlighting this one and lots of other great examples in her book, “High Impact Marketing.” You can read chapter one of her book here.

Both of these cases provide a useful framework to consider how you want your values and tone to come across to your customers:

• Are you comfortable poking fun at your customers and yourselves, or do you feel the need to be serious?
• How quickly can you respond to customer sentiment shifts, and how much can you let that influence your risk tolerance and risk aversion?
• How much should you be tied to public events versus how often should you create events based on industry, product, or service innovations?

The answers to all of these questions will help you build a framework that you can then take to each channel.

You are prepared to build a community, but these communities will need moderation, so you should only engage in a channel that you are prepared for.

Staff will go through each major channel in a moment, but it is important to know that no matter how many you choose, successes tend to go unnoticed. Failures tend to be remembered indefinitely, and the greatest failure is not owning your brand.

So, even if you aren’t prepared to engage with a channel, you should still at least claim your profile.

Translating Messages Across Channels

When people talk about social media, they are typically referring to Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok, LinkedIn, X (Twitter), Snapchat, Pinterest, and Quora.

However, how you actually engage with each of these channels or any additional ones that pop up, including login-based communities like Discord, Slack, and Tumblr, will all depend on how well-equipped your team is to engage with the pace of each channel.

We’re going to break down each channel based on its pace, general tone, and creative flexibility.

When engaging with these communities, it’s important to note that you should claim your profile across all channels but only be active where you intend to be consistent and know your customers and prospects are or could be enticed to engage.

Facebook

• Tone: Generally casual and personal, but can vary depending on the content shared.
• Pace: Moderate pace, with a mix of real-time updates and more evergreen content. Brands typically post 1-2 times per day to maintain visibility in the algorithm.
• Creative Flexibility: Offers various content formats like text posts, images, videos, live streams, and Stories. Moderation includes adherence to community standards, which restricts certain types of content.
  
• Community Management Tools: Provides features like Groups, Pages, and messaging for community management. Also offers insights and analytics for Page owners.

Instagram

• Tone: Visual and aesthetic-focused, often aspirational or inspirational.
• Pace: Fast-paced, with a focus on real-time updates and Stories. Brands typically post at least once per day to maintain visibility.
  
• Creative Flexibility: This category primarily includes visual content (photos and videos), with features like filters, stickers, and editing tools for creative expression. Moderation includes content guidelines and community standards enforcement.
  
• Community Management Tools: Offers business profiles, analytics, and messaging for community management. Also, features like hashtags and tagging help in content discovery.

LinkedIn

• Tone: While mostly professional and formal, geared towards career development and networking, there is an appetite for B2B humor/memes.
• Pace: The pace is generally slower, with more thoughtful and curated content. Brands typically post 2-5 times per week to maintain visibility. However, individuals post daily to maintain their presence in the feed.
• Creative Flexibility: Primarily text-based posts, articles, and professional updates, with multimedia options.  Moderation includes professional standards and restrictions on promotional content.
• Community Management Tools: Provides tools for personal and business profiles, including messaging, groups, and analytics. Also offers job postings and networking features.

TikTok:

• Tone: Fun, entertaining, and often light-hearted or humorous.
• Pace: Very fast-paced, with short-form videos designed for quick consumption. Brands typically post multiple times per day to maintain visibility.
• Creative Flexibility: This is highly flexible, with a focus on short videos augmented with effects, filters, and music. Moderation includes enforcing community guidelines and restricting certain content types.
• Community Management Tools: Offers features like Duets, reactions, comments, and hashtags for engagement. Also provides analytics for creators.

X (Twitter)

• Tone: Conversational, often informal, and concise due to character limit.
• Pace: Fast-paced, with real-time updates and trending topics. Brands typically post multiple times per day to maintain visibility.
• Creative Flexibility: Limited by character count but supports text, images, videos, and GIFs. Moderation includes adherence to Twitter rules and restrictions on sensitive content.
• Community Management Tools: Features like retweets, replies, hashtags, and lists facilitate engagement and community building. Analytics and Twitter chats are also useful for community management.

Reddit

• Tone: Diverse, depending on the subreddit, but generally informal and community-driven.
• Pace: This can vary, but it is often a mix of real-time discussions and slower-paced threads. Brands typically engage regularly but avoid spamming to maintain credibility.
• Creative Flexibility: Supports various content types including text, images, links, and videos. Moderation includes subreddit-specific rules, enforced by moderators.
• Community Management Tools: Moderation tools like banning, removing posts, and community guidelines enforcement. Subreddit creation and management, along with voting and commenting systems, are essential for community engagement.

Quora

• Tone: Informative and knowledge-focused, with an emphasis on sharing expertise.
• Pace: Generally slower-paced, with longer-form questions and answers. Brands typically engage by answering relevant questions and participating in discussions.
• Creative Flexibility: Primarily text-based, with options for including images and links. Image size: Varies based on Quora’s formatting. Moderation includes adherence to Quora’s policies and guidelines.
• Community Management Tools: Moderation tools for questions, answers, and comments. Features like following topics, upvoting, and following users facilitate community interaction.

Discord

• Tone: Varied depending on the server, but often casual and conversational.
• Pace: Can range from slow-paced discussions to real-time chats and events. Brands typically maintain active presence but avoid overwhelming channels.
  
• Creative Flexibility: Supports text, voice, and video communication, along with customizable server settings and bots for additional functionality. Moderation includes server-specific rules enforced by administrators.
  
• Community Management Tools: Extensive moderation tools for roles, channels, permissions, and content moderation. Features like voice channels, emojis, and reaction roles enhance community engagement.

Slack

• Tone: Professional and work-focused, though it can be casual within specific channels or teams.
  
• Pace: Typically moderate-paced, with real-time communication within teams. Brands typically engage regularly but avoid excessive messaging to maintain productivity.
  
• Creative Flexibility: Primarily text-based, with options for file sharing, integrations, and custom emoji. Moderation includes adherence to team guidelines and restrictions on off-topic discussions.
  
• Community Management Tools: Offers channel management, user roles, message deletion, and integrations with various apps and services for productivity and collaboration.

With each channel’s baseline explored, we can now talk about translating messages across each.

As a general rule of thumb, text-based creative will translate fairly well across each, provided that you count for the character and or word count. Where it gets a little bit tougher is when you begin layering in visual content.

This is tough on two counts.

First, there’s pressure to create visual content because visual content tends to do better on social channels. However, there’s also a difference in tone and formatting between the visual channels. For example, you can’t always just recut a video you made for LinkedIn to be a TikTok video.

While length is a factor, so are tone and subject matter expertise. While the ideas might be the same, you may need to repackage them for each channel.

Additionally, from a community standpoint, there are different algorithmic rules that go into each platform. So, if you have a community that’s a little bit looser on language/sensitive topics, you may struggle to translate that community to channels with stricter guidelines.

An excellent example of this is that Facebook Groups tend to have stringent community rules based on bots identifying and removing posts.

Conversely, on platforms like Slack or Discord (i.e., private servers with a login), what’s allowed is up to the server controller’s discretion. So, if you know that your community will need that flexibility, you may decide to go for the password-gated community versus a more open group, such as LinkedIn or Facebook.

Different communities have different algorithms for how content reaches users, so if you care that the content reaches your people specifically, you may need to tell them to check the group regularly.

You may also need to tell them to identify that your Group or your Page is of special interest to them so that they receive all updates from you as opposed to only getting it filtered through their feed. For example, when someone posts on LinkedIn, they can tell the system whether they want to see more or less from a particular person or group. This is true on Facebook as well.

If people consistently say that they don’t want to hear from your Group, even if you have engaged members, you may struggle to have your content reach them organically without them coming to your community page.

Paid Versus Organic

When it comes to being real with your audience, you’ve got to think about how you talk to them – whether you’re paying for it or not. The key to being genuine lies in how you interact with the folks who support your brand.

No matter how you promote yourself, it’s no accident that paid ads and sponsored content often let people leave comments and reactions. If you see lots of people engaging with a paid post, that’s a sign you should also share some regular stuff. And if you respond to comments, you can reach even more people than you paid for – but there’s a catch.

Paying to show up where people haven’t asked for you can sometimes annoy them instead of making them like you more.

For instance, imagine a brand keeps running ads on YouTube about something new, but it doesn’t limit how often you see them. Then, the brand brings up the same thing in its online groups. Instead of getting a positive response, it might end up getting yelled at for being annoying because people are already tired of hearing about it.

The trick is listening to what your customers say while explaining how things work. For example, if you want to prevent your current customers from seeing your ads, you have to meet certain audience size requirements (1,000 for search-first platforms and 100 for social-first platforms).

If you can’t, it’s important to let them know it’s not intentional – it’s just how the system works.

Now, about being genuine: Some say paid ads aren’t as real as regular posts. But the truth is that many social platforms make a lot of money from boosting regular posts, so there’s no shame in doing the same to reach more people.

The key is to know which posts are worth boosting and why. If a post looks okay on its own but doesn’t quite fit your brand’s style for ads, maybe hold off.

And if a post is already doing great without any help, putting a “sponsored” tag on it might make people trust it less. So, thinking about how your audience feels about ads is essential.

Finding the right balance between paid and regular content means keeping it real with your audience and respecting their preferences. It’s all about building trust and making sure your brand stays true to itself.

Final Takeaways

Building authenticity is all about consistency and being useful to your people in the way that they want to be helped using a channel. Just because your competitors are is meaningless.

If your customers aren’t there and if you’re not able to engage with them in a way that lets you help them, the best way to confirm whether to be on a channel or not and whether to foster a community there or not is all down to how much can you be you while engaging with your customers?

More resources: 

• 20 Awesome Examples Of Social Media Marketing
• Why Brand Awareness Is The Fifth Pillar Of SEO
• Social Media Marketing: A Complete Strategy Guide

Featured Image: FabrikaSimf/Shutterstock

For the SEO industry, the Google documents leak offered an important view behind the scenes. Although the leak was not a blueprint of how the algorithm worked, there was considerable confirmation that SEO professionals were right about many elements of the algorithm.

From all the analysis and discussion following the leak, the one insight that got my attention was how important the brand is.

Rand Fishkin, who broke the leak, said this:

“Brand matters more than anything else … If there was one universal piece of advice I had for marketers seeking to broadly improve their organic search rankings and traffic, it would be: “Build a notable, popular, well-recognized brand in your space, outside of Google search.”

Mike King echoed this statement with the following observation:

“All these potential demotions can inform a strategy, but it boils down to making stellar content with strong user experience and building a brand, if we’re being honest.”

Mordy Oberstein, who is an advocate for building a brand online, posted on X (Twitter):

“I am SO happy that the SEO conversation has shifted to thinking about “brand.”

It’s not the first time that “brand” has been mentioned in SEO. We began to talk about this around 2012 after the impact of Panda and Penguin when it first became apparent that Google’s aim was to put more emphasis on brand.

Compounding this is the introduction of AI, which has accelerated the importance of taking a more holistic approach to online marketing with less reliance on Google SERPs.

When I spoke to Pedro Dias, he said, “We need to focus more than ever on building our own communities with users aligned to our brands.”

As someone who had 15 years of offline experience in marketing, design, and business before moving into SEO, I have always said that having this wide knowledge allows me to take a holistic view of SEO. So, I welcome the mindset shift towards building a brand online.

As part of his X/Twitter post, Mordy also said:

“I am SO happy that the SEO conversation has shifted to thinking about “brand” (a lot of which is the direct result of @randfish’s & @iPullRank’s great advice following the “Google leaks”).

As someone who has straddled the brand marketing and SEO world for the better part of 10 years – branding is A LOT harder than many SEOs would think and will be a HUGE adjustment for many SEOs.”

Following his X/Twitter post, I reached out to Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Brand at Wix, to have a conversation about branding and SEO.

What Do SEO Pros Need To Know About ‘Brand’ To Make The Mindset Shift?

I asked Mordy, “In your opinion, what does brand and building a brand mean, and can SEO pros make this mindset shift?”

Mordy responded, “Brand building basically means creating a connection between one entity and another entity, meaning the company and the audience.

It’s two people meeting, and that convergence is the building of a brand. It’s very much a relationship. And I think that’s what makes it hard for SEOs. It’s a different way of thinking; it’s not linear, and there aren’t always metrics that you can measure it by.

I’m not saying you don’t use data, or you don’t have data, but it’s harder to measure to tell a full story.

You’re trying to pick up on latent signals. A lot of the conversation is unconscious.

It’s all about the micro things that compound. So, you have to think about everything you do, every signal, to ensure that it is aligned with the brand.

For example, a website writes about ‘what is a tax return.’ However, if I’m a professional accountant and I see this on your blog, I might think this isn’t relevant to me because you’re sending me a signal that you’re very basic. I don’t need to know what a tax return is; I have a master’s degree in accounting.

The latent signals that you’re sending can be very subtle, but this is where it is a mindset shift for SEO.”

I recalled a recent conversation with Pedro Dias in which he stressed it was important to put your users front and center and create content that is relevant to them. Targeting high-volume keywords is not going to connect with your audience. Instead, think about what is going to engage, interest, and entertain them.

I went on to say that for some time, the discussion online has been about SEO pros shifting away from the keyword-first approach. However, the consequences of moving away from a focus on traffic and clicks will mean we are likely to experience a temporary decline in performance.

How Does An SEO Professional Sell This To Stakeholders – How Do They Measure Success?

I asked Mordy, “How do you justify this approach to stakeholders – how do they measure success?”

Mordy replied, “I think selling SEO will become harder over time. But, if you don’t consider the brand aspect, then you could be missing the point of what is happening. It’s not about accepting lower volumes of traffic; it’s that traffic will be more targeted.

You might see less traffic right now, but the idea is to gain a digital presence and create digital momentum that will result in more qualified traffic in the long term.”

Mordy went on to say, “It’s going to be a habit to break out of, just like when you have to go on a diet for a long-term health gain.

The ecosystem will change, and it will force change to our approach. SEOs may not have paid attention to the Google leak documents, but I think they will pay attention as the entire ecosystem shifts – they won’t have a choice.

I also think C-level will send a message that they don’t care about overall traffic numbers, but do care about whether a user appreciates what they are producing and that the brand is differentiated in some way.”

How Might The Industry Segment And What Will Be The Important Roles?

I interjected to make the point that it does look a lot like SEO is finally making that shift across marketing.

Technical SEO will always be important, and paid/programmatic will remain important because it is directly attributable.

For the rest of SEO, I anticipate it merges across brand, SEO, and content into a hybrid strategy role that will straddle those disciplines.

What we thought of as “traditional SEO” will fall away, and SEO will become absorbed into marketing.

In response, Mordy agreed and thought that SEO traffic is part of a wider scope or part of a wider paradigm, and it will sit under brand and communications.

An SEO pro that functions as part of the wider marketing and thinks about how we are driving revenue, how we are driving growth, what kind of growth we are driving, and using SEO as a vehicle to that.

The final point I raised was about social media and whether that would become a more combined facet of SEO and overall online marketing.

Mordy likened Google to a moth attracted to the biggest digital light.

He said, “Social media is a huge vehicle for building momentum and the required digital presence.

For example, the more active I am on social media, the more organic branded searches I gain through Google Search. I can see the correlation between that.

I don’t think that Google is ignoring branded searches, and it makes a semantic connection.”

SEO Will Shift To Include Brand And Marketing

The conversation I had with Mordy raised an interesting perspective that SEO will have to make significant shifts to a brand and marketing mindset.

The full impact of AI on Google SERPs and how the industry might change is yet to be realized. But, I strongly recommend that anyone in SEO consider how they can start to take a brand-first approach to their strategy and the content they create.

I suggest building and measuring relationships with audiences based on how they connect with your brand and moving away from any strategy based on chasing high-volume keywords.

Think about what the user will do once you get the click – that is where the real value lies.

Get ahead of the changes that are coming.

Thank you to Mordy Oberstein for offering his opinion and being my guest on IMHO.

More resources:

• Why Brand Awareness Is The Fifth Pillar Of SEO
• Building Brand Authenticity Through Community
• SEO Strategy: A Full Year Blueprint (+Template)

Featured Image by author

Having a strong brand makes everything in SEO easier. 

Brands have better user signals on their sites, better click-through rates in the SERPs, and get preferential treatment from Google.

Google’s algorithms elevate sites with strong brand signals and punish companies that are too aggressive about SEO without having “the engine” to back it up.

Image Credit: Lyna ™

There is a common belief that SEO can’t do much about the brand, but that’s wrong. We often simply miss the tools.

Product marketing skills and insights can significantly improve the impact of organic traffic and support brand building in the process.

Both disciplines sit between product development and customer needs. Both work on content, audience understanding, and driving revenue – but from different angles.

Together, they can amplify each other. It’s an opportunity most companies miss, to their detriment.

One key lesson is to think long-term about brand impact. Focusing on the user’s value helps create a stronger brand connection, which pays off over time. It’s about building trust and loyalty that translates into sustained engagement and recognition. – Bar Wolf

Image Credit: Kevin Indig

I spoke with five seasoned product marketing experts about their lessons from decades in the field to distill what SEO pros can learn from product marketing:

1. Lauren (Hobbs) Decker, senior consultant at Carema and former VP of brand & product marketing at G2.
2. Bar Wolf, product marketing manager at Wix.
3. Blake Thorne, head of marketing at Govly.
4. Dirk Schart, portfolio marketing lead at PTC.
5. Sol Masch, group vice president, product at WebMD.

Product Marketing Tools And Frameworks For SEO Pros

Product marketing and SEO are highly complementary. They can unify customer research and quantitative insights for better prioritization and impact measuring.

They can uplevel user experience with the right messaging. And they can improve the quality of traffic with clear differentiation.

It makes sense: The goal of product marketing is to help the product organization bring the product to market with market research, positioning and messaging, go-to-market strategy, customer education, and sales enablement.

While SEO pros research keywords and analyze search volumes, product marketers spend a lot of time talking to customers.

Traffic is great, but what makes people remember your product? – Blake Thorne

Lesson 1: Improve Content With Customer Insights

You will surely agree that customer insights are critical for any form of marketing.

In my work with high-performing tech companies, however, I often notice that marketing teams have no idea where to find customer research, and they don’t have open channels to existing customers.

The results of performance marketing, including paid and organic search, made it too attractive to focus on metrics.

The solution is to either collaborate with product marketing to learn from customer insights or get them yourself.

Product marketers get customer insights through:

1. 1-on-1 interviews.
2. Surveys.
3. Focus groups.
4. Reviews.
5. Customer support/sales.

They look for:

1. Pain points.
2. Motivations.
3. Expectations.

Good questions to ask:

• “What challenges are you currently facing in [specific area related to the product’s value]?”
• “How are you currently addressing this challenge, and what do you like or dislike about your current solution?”
• “When evaluating solutions for this challenge, what are the most important factors you consider?”
• “Have you considered making changes to your current approach? If so, what’s holding you back?”
• “What would convince you that a new solution is worth exploring or investing in?”

Some of my favorite customer feedback tools:

• Google Sheets / Excel
• Wynter
• Dovetail
• Opinion X
• Maze
• Lookback
• Lyssna

Other opportunities for insights:

• Analyze reviews on g2.com.
• Product analytics data from Amplitude or Mixpanel.
• Insights from sales, product, and customer success/support teams.
• Analyze the positioning and messaging of key competitors.

SEOs can use customer insights to:

• Create product landing pages or category pages (in ecommerce) for use cases and features and competitor comparison pages like ahrefs.com/vs for perceived competitors.
• Build lead-gen tools or quizzes based on the most common customer problems and questions.
• Generate content for pain points mentioned in interviews that might not have “search volume” but are searched by your target audience.
• Use the wording of customers/prospects and embed quotes in the content.
• Addressing common pain points and expectations in content.
• Prioritizing topics and keywords on the roadmap (instead of by search volume only).
• Inform content length and the level of detail.
• Incorporate product-tested messaging into meta titles and descriptions.

Tip: AI tools can process large volumes of data from customer reviews, surveys, or social media to identify pain points, motivations, and trends faster than traditional methods.

I so often land on a website via SEO and can see a very strong SEO program at play, but I’m not left with any impression of what the company actually does.

For many SEOs, this moment might be “mission accomplished,” they’ve got their rankings and traffic.

This is where brand and product marketers can step in and work alongside SEOs to augment the experience on that page – what makes people remember the product? What makes people know the brand and have a positive sentiment even if the initial visit is short? – Blake Thorne

Lesson 2: Send Stronger User Signals With Clearer Differentiation

Differentiation is how a company stands out with unique features and value.

In my guide to building a winning SEO strategy, I explain that an absolutely essential component of any strategy is strong differentiation:

Critical: the approach needs to be differentiated. You need to do things differently (competitive advantage or asymmetry). You cannot expect to do the same things as your competitors and beat them. That’s just a way to end up in attrition warfare and obsession with operational efficiency. Differentiation creates greater value, prices and margins.

For clear differentiation, you need to deeply understand three things: the market, alternatives, and customers.

Figure out what problems customers are trying to solve, the options at their disposal, and the impact that solving those problems has on their business/life. You can use interviews and review platforms like G2 or Trustpilot to source insights.

The way most SEOs measure “the market” is by looking at competitors’ ranking for the same keywords.

That is a good start – and valuable for product marketers – but it needs to go further. SEO pros should also factor in “perceived competitors” (i.e., What alternatives does the customer have in mind that product marketers can bring to the table?).

“Different is better than better.” – Dirk Schart

Good differentiation is very specific and makes it easy for customers to understand the value they get from your product.

There are three outcomes from differentiation work:

1. Positioning Statements: a clear articulation of how the product fits into the market, who it serves, and why it’s better or different. See an example from Slack: “Making work simpler, more pleasant and more productive.”
2. Value Propositions: Statements that highlight the key benefits and outcomes customers can expect, tailored to specific customer needs or segments. In the example of Slack, again, “Streamline communication, reduce emails, and increase productivity”
3. Messaging Frameworks: A spreadsheet covering the product’s unique features and benefits, broken down by audience segments, use cases, or buyer personas.

SEO pros should incorporate differentiation factors into content briefs to influence the tone, sub-topics, meta titles, headings, and CTAs on any page on the site.

In the YMYL/Health space that WebMD participates in, trust from consumers is paramount.

According to a recent Harris Poll study, 1 in 3 Americans don’t know whether the health information they read online and on social platforms is truthful or if the source is being paid to promote things, and ultimately they can’t determine what’s true and what’s false.

WebMD prides itself on editorial integrity – advertisers have zero influence on our editorial content, and all of our content is fact-checked by medical professionals for accuracy.

Moreover, our medical reviewers audit all of our content frequently to ensure that months/years after the content is published, it’s updated as necessary to stay accurate even as medical research & science evolve.

In part, these efforts contribute to WebMD being the most recognized and trusted name in online health – we’ve earned our trust over the past 25 years and have become a household name for quality health information. – Sol Masch

Lesson 3: Drive Better Traffic With Strong Positioning And Messaging

Obviously, driving traffic is not enough. It needs to be the right kind of traffic. Good positioning and messaging can make the difference because they can act as a lens for topic/keyword prioritization.

Messaging can elevate the user experience by showing the copy on landing pages on other types of content that highlight how and why the product is a good fit.

The goal of positioning is to define how a product is perceived by the market relative to its competitors. Who is it for? What problem(s) does it solve? How is it better? It’s high-level and strategic.

Messaging turns the company’s positioning into narratives and statements to use in copy, sales material, and advertising. It’s specific and operational.

For example:

• Positioning: “Our app is the easiest way for busy parents to organize their kids’ schedules, standing out for its intuitive design and automatic reminders.”
• Messaging: “Effortlessly manage your kids’ schedules with our user-friendly app. Save time and never miss an event with automatic reminders. Trusted by thousands of busy parents.

A basic messaging and positioning framework is the Value Proposition Canvas:

1. Define jobs (goals), pains (frustrations), and gains (desired outcomes).
2. Outline the product/feature you offer, pain relievers (how it alleviates frustrations), and gain creators (how it delivers expected outcomes).
3. Connect each pain with a pain reliever and each gain with a gain creator.
4. Share your canvas with real customers to confirm alignment with their needs and refine it if necessary.

The Jobs To Be Done is a good alternative for horizontal products that have many use cases (think: Notion).

1. Identify the focus market (for example, software buyers).
2. Map all jobs out through brainstorming, user surveys, or keyword research.
3. Group the jobs.
4. Create job statements.
5. Prioritize opportunities depending on how well they’re served at the moment.

These frameworks can literally be spreadsheets with a column for every factor. Don’t overcomplicate it or think you need a fancy tool to build messaging and positioning.

SEO pros can use positioning to identify core topics and keywords within them, and messaging to drive content angles (e.g., “how to do {use case} with {product}”).

Somehow we focused all our energies on rankings/traffic/audience building to create this demand channel, and not enough on the things we’d typically do in a demand channel: Share our brand, get our messaging out there, get people excited about what we do. In other words: actually advertise the product. – Blake Thorne

Bringing Product Marketing And SEO Closer Together

Product marketing and SEO complement each other by sharing insights like search volume or customer research and approaches like positioning or messaging.

But most companies stand in their own way by keeping their respective teams siloed. Shared metrics, i.e., goaling two teams by the same numbers, are the crowbar to break the silos up.

Three actionable and comprehensive metrics to share:

• Branded search volume and traffic from branded keywords.
• Customer sentiment (qualitative feedback, NPS, brand sentiment/recall).
• Pipeline contribution (influence on leads and conversions).

The metric mix reflects the whole “funnel” or user journey, can be influenced by both teams, and is actionable.

The benefit for companies that get this right is two teams that are more effective and impactful.

SEO teams have another way to not just drive more and better organic traffic, but to evaluate their impact from a brand perspective (customer sentiment).

Instead of stopping at traffic or obsessing over rankings that are less and less valuable, impact on customer sentiment and pipeline over refuge for a changing SEO landscape.

The question is how to convince leadership to give it a shot. Test into it. Try improving a few product landing pages together, whether you’re in SaaS or ecommerce, and measure the impact on shared metrics.

SEO and product marketing are not exempt from AI disruption. Maybe they have belonged together all along, but the AI tech shift offers an opportunity to run in a new formation and bring SEO and product marketing together.

Brand/product marketing focuses on aligning messaging with customer emotions, behavior and needs, while SEO focuses on visibility.

SEOs can elevate their impact by considering how the brand’s narrative fits into the customer journey – moving beyond keywords to a deeper connection with the audience. – Dirk Schart

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal

If you want more quality in your pipeline, you need more quality in your marketing efforts.

That means you should focus more on your ideal customer profile (ICP) and their journey to conversion.

Reflecting on the year, I can tell you that these are some of the most impactful places to spend time and resources to support a more quality-driven pipeline.

I just saw a post in my social feed that could not have been more timely:

Content is your round-the-clock salesperson.

It can reach more people in one day that you’ll meet in a lifetime.

– Ayesha Ameer

The content that you’re putting out there is dictating the type of lead you’re going to get from that content.

So, when you’re looking at your pipeline, what do you see?

I hear it from organizations all the time. They want leads in their pipeline who are most likely to convert (i.e., high quality).

And I also see the efforts they’re putting in, and there’s so much opportunity they’re missing.

The bottom line: If you’re looking for higher quality in your pipeline, you need higher quality in your marketing efforts.

To inject more quality into your marketing efforts, you need to build a content strategy based on what your ideal customer wants and needs to solve their pain.

So, step back and audit: What is your round-the-clock salesperson selling for your business? Is it attracting the right leads?

Quality can no longer be an afterthought for your marketing team, and the executive team needs to get on board, too.

The stuff in this article isn’t new. But sometimes, we need reminders of the foundations.

My hope is that it gives you at least one ah-ha moment to help you be more intentional – and successful – with your lead generation efforts.

How To Shift To Quality-Driving Marketing Strategies

I’ve had the pleasure of moderating half our 45 webinars this year with some great experts!

There are some resounding themes that surface across them all. The importance of quality, branding, consistency, and holistic strategies came to the top of the list.

And have you noticed all the branding articles in your LinkedIn feed, or is it just my algo? Psst … it’s because it’s important…

With leaner teams, leaner budgets, and leaner attention span (and let’s not forget all the changes in search this year), marketers just don’t have the resources to “try it and see what happens.”

There are some places you can focus your resources on that can have a big impact on the quality of leads you attract and retain.

First, you have to understand all the content touchpoints your audience needs to help nurture them into the next phase along their journey.

Think about call-to-action (CTA) to get them into your pipeline, and educate them if they’re not ready to convert yet. (This is where alignment with sales will be an essential part of this strategy planning.)

A solid strategy tells your story, delivers value throughout the customer journey, and woos your audience with a solution that fits their needs.

No more creating content that doesn’t serve your audience.

Notice what I said: Your audience needs. Put yourself in their shoes and create content that informs and shows value.

The Importance Of Intent-Driven Content To Support Journeys

Remember those leaner teams, leaner attention span? Teams don’t have time to do all the things. Plus, consumers don’t have time to focus on all the content that hits them.

So, focus your attention on places that matter.

Intent-driven content supports journeys by focusing on the content relevant to the ICPs you want to grow, helping streamline content creation.

Using the research from the ICPs and sales and marketing alignment, this is where you’ll create targeted pieces that address specific pain points or needs at that moment of the journey.

Content is tailored for each stage of the journey (awareness, consideration, decision, retention, advocacy), and showcases your value at that stage.

When coupled with your first-party data, you can create a personalized experience to make them feel seen. This helps build loyalty.

Email/CRM Automation Is The Easiest And Fastest Way To Inject Quality Content Into Customer Journeys

We all know that it costs more to attract new customers. So, start by looking at the leads you already have. Improve their experience with you.

You have gold at your fingertips. Use data you have on your leads (i.e., demographics, firmographics, engagement, behavior) to help you understand where leads are in their journey and how you can nurture them with targeted content. This also serves as the foundation for leading scoring.

• Tip: Use third-party compilers to enrich missing or outdated data that would be helpful to your segmentation strategy, like accuracy, buyer intent, company size, revenue, etc.

Lead scoring is often overlooked by many sales teams. This functionality, available in CRMs, can help you easily identify where leads are in their marketing journey and how qualified they truly are.

Leads get scored based on the likelihood they will convert. For each demographic or firmographic they have that matches your core ICP, they get points.

Plus, they get additional points for each action they take on your site.

Sales and marketing need to collaborate here on what data points, actions, and behaviors get what score. The idea is that the higher the score, the more likely that the lead is a qualified lead.

Once a lead hits a certain score (determined and agreed upon by the team), the most qualified leads get pushed to your sales team to nurture and close (SQLs, sales qualified leads), and the lower scores stay with marketing for automated nurturing (MQLs, marketing qualified leads).

Using these data-based insights, give them a custom experience to show them you’re here to help and provide value.

The onboarding process is the most important part of their interaction with your brand. That first email is the first impression of how you’re going to interact with them. Let’s do a quick audit:

• First, can you tell, based on how they got in your pipeline and what actions they’ve taken on your site, what stage of the journey they’re in?
• Second, does that onboarding content match that stage?

Where I see most lost opportunities is when brands go for the direct sell, even if the lead is still in those awareness/consideration stages.

In those stages, they need information to educate and nurture them to conversion. A direct sales push could have them unsubscribing if you’re not providing value, making it more difficult to get them into your pipeline again.

Beyond onboarding, look at your journey stages or the segments of the audience you have.

Once you have the journey mapped, look at the content you already have that can support the journey. Fill gaps where needed.

Use one piece of content to make several (“sweat the assets”). Try different formats to help reach users with media that is more palatable for them.

And, most of all, lean on sales and customer service to help develop content you don’t have.

Automation Within Your CRM Is Powerful

If the tech gods didn’t want us to use technology, they wouldn’t have blessed us with all the toys we have.

For this article, I’m going to focus on the automation within your CRM/email platform that can help you be more efficient and effective with your resources, and enable your sales to spend their time on the most valuable leads.

Automation can be set up to tag users based on actions or behavior, which helps increase or decrease lead scores.

The key benefit of lead scores is that you can send only the most qualified leads (SQLs) to your sales team. Let marketing nurture those who aren’t ready yet.

Then, building on the segmentation and scoring above, with the right setup and triggers, you can identify their place in the journey and provide them with the right content at the right time.

Example: We have prospecting flows set up for readers who download one of our ebooks, but don’t subscribe to our newsletter.

The goal is to get users who don’t subscribe to our newsletter to do so.

These are fairly robust flows and contain multiple branches with personalized content based on website behavior, content engagement, self-identified interests, and other attributes.

We entice them with content based on interests. Below, you can see emails, delays in timing, and triggers to push them to other workflows.

Image from author, December 2024

You can use automation to provide that intent-driven content we talked about above.

Your strategy should include thinking clearly through the customer journey to current customers (think upsell, cross-sell, retention).

Automation can be used across the journey and is great for converting abandoned carts, showing personalized offers to users on your site, or getting prospects to convert into your newsletter.

There’s so much more to unpack here, but hopefully, you can envision how workflows are powered by data and segmentation and help your team spend their time in other places by nurturing leads for you.

Targeted Retargeting

There’s power in building a well-intentioned segmentation and tagging workflows.

Building on the segmentation above, you can serve targeted ads to leads or customers when they’re on their favorite social media site or just browsing the web.

If you’re running retargeting, how much personalization is going into it? Or are you going straight for the bottom of the funnel?

This is another opportunity to show you’re listening, you know them, build loyalty, and stay top-of-mind.

Join Your Marketing And Sales Teams (& Customer Service) At The Hip

I’ll say it again: If you want more quality in your pipeline, you need more quality in your marketing efforts.

You have a wealth of knowledge under your roof. How well are you leveraging it? Here’s your chance to knowledge-share in order to make more informed decisions.

In order to put your best efforts into the most impactful places, sales and marketing should collaborate on ICP development, a content strategy to attract, nurture, and retain customers, and, of course, a feedback loop on lead quality.

Marketing needs to hear the good, the bad, and the ugly of their efforts.

When you’re looking at marketing to drive quality leads more than anything, feedback on customer interactions gives them a vantage point to create/modify content that speaks more closely to their needs.

For your sales team, knowing the customer more deeply enables them to personalize efforts during their sales journey, and create more meaningful connections.

This builds trust, increases the likelihood of closing deals, and helps with greater customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Communication and feedback are really the core components here.

I could go on and on here, so let me know if a deeper post might interest you.

Actions For Sales & Marketing Alignment:

• Collaborative persona development: marketing can provide data on market trends and behaviors, while the sales team contributes insights from direct customer interactions.
• Shared use of customer relationship management (CRM) and data tools – centralized, single source of truth.
• Regular communication between teams: Slack, standups, joint training sessions.
• Collaborate on nurture sequences – a place content mismatch can break a deal.

It’s important to note that ICP knowledge and sales and marketing collaboration are the foundational blocks for success. Everything in this post hinges on this working partnership.

Holistic Marketing Campaigns For A Full, Consistent Journey

A holistic marketing strategy takes into account all stages of the journey, and that different people consume content differently across multiple channels.

This is your opportunity to test different content formats with different CTAs.

You may find that certain content formats perform better on specific channels, and optimize toward that.

To keep building on quality, maintaining brand consistency is so important here.

The more types of content and channels you put them on, the more imperative it is that you treat each as an extension of the current campaign and not a one-off.

Nothing can turn off a lead faster than an inconsistent experience. They see that as a reflection of your brand and the rest of the journey with you.

Get Real About Costs And What You’re Willing To Pay For A Lead

I said it before: “Investing in quality resources for lead generation may mean higher costs, but it can lead to higher quality leads and lower overall Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC).”

CRM access and continual feedback from sales fill a blind spot to help marketing more fully understand lead quality and where content/channels need to be tweaked.

It’s up to marketing to convey the value of the marketing and the expected return on the investment.

Sometimes, ROI is long term and not easily realized in the short term. And, not all metrics or journey stages are going to be easy to quantify.

When presenting the plan to stakeholders, take the time to go through shifts in strategy and provide the whys behind it.

Explain the importance of focusing on content to drive better leads, and tell the story. Show the numbers.

And, use examples that might help them reflect on their own buying habits to get the buy-in you’re looking for.

Which brings us to a stakeholder’s favorite marketing excuse…

Get Real About What You Can Track And What You Don’t Need To Track

Not every click or conversion holds the same weight. This will become evident when you plan your lead scoring. And it’s time we stopped treating marketing performance metrics that way, too.

Sure, it’s easy to track form fills on a gated whitepaper in the consideration phase, but it’s not as easy to track awareness efforts from an optimized blog post.

Yet, that blog post counts as a touchpoint along the journey, and needs to have budget and resources allocated to it.

This is where asking for budget and showing attribution gets tricky. With the move to quality, lead costs can be more expensive (especially at first while you’re optimizing).

Stakeholders and your CFO are asking how many of those awareness leads converted and at what cost – when, in reality, those may not be realized for months or years, depending on your sales cycle.

So, what do you track? It depends. For each stage of the journey, you will have different metrics to track across different media types.

Awareness pieces are designed to drive engagement, so it usually doesn’t make sense to push a “buy now” CTA when they’re just becoming acquainted with your brand.

• Podcasts, for example, are an awareness tool. You should track downloads, listening time, reviews, and followers.
• For a blog post, tracking track time on site, scroll depth, along with any engagement like social shares of blog posts.

You might not be able to directly attribute these efforts to sales, but they do aid in the sale process and, as such, need resources.

If your efforts are well-developed and backed with insightful data, these awareness pieces should help you continue nurturing leads along the way.

Be patient, but also be testing.

Adapt your thinking to evaluate lifetime value rather than needing to value each individual touchpoint.

Adapt Or Get Left Behind

There are so many more things I could have talked about. I feel remiss that I didn’t even touch on AI, but that’s a whole post we’ll save for another day.

• Quick plug for AI: Let it be your sidekick, your research assistant, the Robin to your Batman. Use AI to help automate tasks that are taking up human resources. Think about where you need humans to do the work, and see what you can offload to AI. I also use AI to inspire me when I’m short on time. It can also help you analyze data or perform competitor research.

Building the strategy, journeys, and segmentation to power the personalization and automation engine will take your team time. Be tenacious and patient – don’t wait for perfection.

Know that your email is golden, and can be your biggest source of conversions, especially if segmented properly. This is your chance to have one-on-one conversations and meet prospects where they are in their journey.

A strong segmentation strategy will help with lead-scoring power automation and support a great retargeting strategy.

Now, it’s time to get real about what you’re willing to pay for a quality lead, what resources need to go into making that happen, and what makes sense to track as you forge into this new strategy.

Here’s to driving quality leads and focusing on the journey in 2025!

More Resources:

• Is Value-Based Bidding Your Ticket To Higher Quality Leads?
• 7 Ways To Segment Your Audience For Successful Retargeting
• B2B Lead Generation

Featured Image: Lightspring/Shutterstock