Rand Fishkin

I'm a feminist and I'm also a very devoted husband to my wife who is also speaking here at Inbound, Geraldine. My talk was called The Invisible Giant That Mucks Up Our Marketing. I think that a lot of the decisions that we make in the business and technology worlds and in the marketing world are essentially biased by cultural indoctrination, by the experiences of the past and by how things have always been done and by what's popular and what's talked about and that biases us away from making the best possible decision. And so I was trying to challenge some of those beliefs in my presentation. Those are beliefs about how to invest in content, beliefs about where and how to do SEO, beliefs about big picture stuff like how many hours should you actually work in a week and what's productive, whether it's productive and when to work from an office versus home or coffee shop. So all across the board just trying to challenge a lot of these biases. One of the ones that I dove into was this idea that content marketing doesn't necessarily have to mean publishing on your own website. So in the video world we're really familiar with this with YouTube because YouTube has extraordinary reach and is a wonderful channel for getting in front of your audience. But I think that folks forget about this, they think of guest contributions of all kinds as essentially just being a link building tactic. And it's really not. This is a way to leverage the reach and the powerful ranking ability that other domains have. I've pointed out a few but Quora, Slideshare, LinkedIn, YouTube itself, that these domains when you publish on them have an ability to rank in Google that you may not have ever on your own website. And so if there's content that you're particularly passionate about that might be a great way to go. Mediums and other great examples. What I asked people to take away at the end was to think about not if but how cultural biases are affecting your decision making. So I asked folks to reflect on, now here's the input I'm considering, what does sort of popular marketing culture, popular business culture tell me is the right way to do this? And is that influencing my decision? And can I remove that so that I can be more considered in my alternatives? The big question is just what is the best practice? What's standard? What's well known? What's popular? And are those things influencing me to make a non-ideal decision? It's a little less about do this instead of this and more about when you make a decision Don't be unconsciously biased. Be consciously biased. Know that, well, we're going to invest in video because video is really hot right now. Maybe that's, is that the right investment? Maybe it is, but maybe we're doing it just because everyone's doing it and it feels like a snowball effect. And maybe we should consider our alternatives. Maybe is podcasting something we should consider? Should we consider guest contributions? Should we outsource our video? We do smaller chunks of video and try and make that hot on Snapchat. Just think without the lens of popular culture. Okay, but when you created Whiteboard Signing, what was the idea behind it? What was the thing that made you think, oh, let's do that. Let's film the teaching on a whiteboard. And how did it develop into what it is today? Yeah, so it was a total accidental piece of content. I was explaining something to one of my coworkers on a whiteboard and he was like, oh, we have a new camera. I'll grab it and I'll film you. And then we looked at it and we're like, yeah, let's put it on the blog and see how it does. And it didn't do very well, but we kind of had fun with it. So we did it the next week and did it the next week. And eventually it started to build up some steam. I think it was mostly our interest in learning a little bit more about video and in seeing the engagement and the response that kept it up. And then over time, it sort of went from our worst performing content to our best performing content. And I think that's because we kept investing in it and we got better and better. I got better and better as presenter. The video quality got better and better. We developed a whole whiteboard room at our offices and then when we moved offices, we built another one out that was even better. We invested in higher quality equipment. We got more polished with the topics and how we did topic selection. We got better with our keyword targeting and better with our transcripts. So everything just kept improving until eventually this became what it is today. So rather than thinking about this isn't working today, we said, what's the trajectory of where it is a year in versus when we started? We're like, oh, it's much better now than when we started. You know what? If it keeps up this trajectory, this is eventually going to be amazing. So let's stick with it. And I urged folks in my talk today to measure things not based on how does this ROI compare to that ROI, but rather on trajectory and on the investment that is needed to get to that amazing place. What's awesome is that very few people will believe in things and trust it. Very few CMOs will give you the rope to go do these types of experimental pieces of work. And because very few will, there's much less competition. And that means it's much easier to succeed if you do get that permission. It is totally OK to copy and to steal. That's great. I would say, though, that unless you can identify what unique value you bring and why your audience will be particularly passionate about that and why they have this whatever it is, whiteboard Friday-shaped problem or video-shaped problem, that it's going to be tough to have a really extraordinary result unless you have great audience empathy and can identify why folks are going to pay attention and be passionate. I think a lot of people invest in content of all kinds because they think they're supposed to. It's not that they say, oh, a bunch of people that we know have this problem, let me see if we can solve it for them. And the best way to solve it is online education series and a quiz, an interactive series of charts and graphs, a video, a weekly data series, Google spreadsheets, template, whatever it is. But we have this piece of content that can solve this problem that we know real people have. I think too many people instead go, content's really hot. We should make some content. No. You should not make some content. You should solve some people's problems. You should help some people. If content is a great way to do that, awesome, I love it, please go after that. If it's not, maybe what you need to do is, this is an in-person thing and people need to get together for a dinner. Maybe it's a conference or an event that they need to have. Maybe it's a series of dial-ins for a webinar. Maybe it's a conference call. Maybe those solve the problems. Solve the problem. Don't make content just because you think you need to make content for some reason. Let me take a step back as well, back to Web for Friday as an example of a piece of content. Now that you've gotten to the point where you are, what metrics, what data do you look at and what do you think is the most important ones to see if an episode is successful or not, or how to optimize it? What are those pieces of data that you think are the most important ones? I'm going to be a little different than some other folks, but probably many, many marketers would say, how many free trials did people who watch Whiteboard Friday or a particular episode take within the next 30, 60, 90 days? We have that data and it's always good. Whiteboard Friday is a popular way that people find Moz and eventually give our software products a try. But it's not that I don't care about that. I just care vastly less about that than whether I am helping people do better marketing. For me, the metric is the views and the engagement rate through the video. How many people started watching? How many people made it to the end? Where did they drop off in the video? I can look at that chart and see, oh, this video really caught people at the beginning, but most of them dropped off by minute three or four. Or this video, a lot of people started watching and they made it all the way to the end. That's what I want. That's what I'm always aiming for is, started watching the video, there were many people who were interested in it, they made it all the way to the end. The engagement is the thing that matters most. I kind of take it on faith that anything with high engagement is going to have positive results for the mission, even if it's not the financials of the business. Moz is created to help people do better marketing. And yeah, take a free trial of software. That's great. I appreciate that. It's wonderful. Did I help you? Is your marketing better now? Awesome. That's what we set out to do. We have done some gated video content over the years. So we have the MozCon videos, right, that we film basically at our big customer conference every year. I shouldn't even call it customer conference. It's a huge conference. Maybe a third of the attendees are customers. Those videos go behind a, you know, you can pay to access them or if you've been to MozCon, you can get them for free. And I think we make them available for free two years after the speaking engagement. So it's sort of like we'll open them up. The ones from 2015 just opened up now. And that's been, yeah, that's worked all right for us. I actually strongly dislike gating content in general. I think if you absolutely need to be purely lead gen based or strongly lead gen based, okay, that's all right. My advice then would be to make a substantive portion of what you're offering available for free. So you know, if you have a great study, take three of the five most interesting pieces from the study, make those available to anyone so that people can link to it and reference it and use it in their presentations and talk about it. And then the rest are behind the gate. I think the, hey, we have a report. Fill it, you know, put in these seven pieces of info and you can access the report. Is the report really worth it? Maybe it is. Maybe it's amazing. But you're not showing me. Don't tell me it's amazing. Show me it's amazing. Show me it's amazing. I'll believe you. Then you've earned my trust. Then I'll fill out the form. A lot of people, especially the ones who are invested in video, are wondering how to actually optimize the video for SEO. Because in some way, if you just put them out there, they're just a visual piece of content that doesn't have any search, like any searchability. How do you optimize for search engines? So we have a pretty kind of dialed in process at this point. So we basically will post the video to our own website first. We use a service called SpeechPad and they make a transcript, but it's a pretty customized transcript. So what you'll notice is that they take the whiteboard and we take a still shot of the whiteboard before I start marking it up during the video. And then they will extract out elements of that and put them into the essentially the transcript or the blog post that accompanies it. And almost 50% of all Whiteboard Friday visitors read the post. They don't actually watch the video, which is kind of crazy, but that's fine. Like it works fine. So we're making it accessible in whatever format they want. It also means that Google gets a bunch of images with great alt attributes and markup right? That is machine readable and parsable and has good keywords and good relevance. And so the post can rank really well. Three months after that post goes up on our, on Moz, we will upload the same video to YouTube. So that way, if you're performing a search on YouTube specifically, which lots of search volume happens on YouTube itself, you can also find the Whiteboard Fridays there, but you realize that you're getting it 90 days after everybody else. So the incentive is always go to Moz, subscribe to our site. That's where you'll see it first. And then a few months later, you'll find it on YouTube for the visibility inside YouTube's own platform. It's also nice because we own two results in Google. So usually if you search for something, you'll see Whiteboard Friday for Moz and right underneath it the same, you know, that same video from YouTube. Our goal is to own the user experience and YouTube won't let you do that. Right? So YouTube doesn't give you all the data that we do. YouTube won't let you do retargeting or remarketing. YouTube doesn't have an email sign up that, you know, now you're part of the Moz community. So we want that action to happen on our site, not on YouTube. Right? Google's doing great. They don't need our help. Let's say you use YouTube and you embed a YouTube video on your own website. Not universally, but almost always the case that the YouTube video on YouTube's website will be the one that ranks. You can get your own website to rank. Challenge being that the embed code needs to point back to your website. So essentially you can customize it where essentially you say, hey, if somebody takes this video, puts it on their website, embeds it on their website, that the link points back not to Vimeo.com or to YouTube.com, but back to our website. And that link will mean that Google knows, aha, this website is the originator of the content. If you would rather get the YouTube rankings and traffic, then yes. Right? Like it is better to get those views on YouTube because they'll sort of go toward your total and that will help your YouTube rankings. But if you'd rather say, hey, you know what? YouTube traffic is worth a lot less to us than visitors to our own website. So let's optimize for the most traffic we can get to our website. And basically like putting that on your site and then saying, aha, like I'm driving all the traffic here. I want to put this up before I use YouTube. I don't want the visitors. I'd prefer the visitors to subscribe to me, not on YouTube. Right? And then you get to own the experience much more and you get a lot more permission to interact with your subscribers via email or what have you. Let's look at 2018 and a year from now. How do you think are going to be the hot topics that are interesting for marketers? I mean, I suspect we're still going to be talking a lot about machine learning and AI and chat bots. But it's not that those are not interesting topics. They are interesting topics, but I don't have tremendous personal passion around them. I think they are all nice tools to be able to do things that marketers sometimes want to do, but they don't to me change the fundamentals too much. One thing I think that we are in a sort of podcast revolution. So like the growth of podcast consumers is dramatic. I think if we realized how big that was, it would be a much bigger conversation right now. But I suspect it's going to take us a while before we realize how big that is. And so next year, it wouldn't surprise me if that's a very hot topic. I think something on the order of a fifth of Americans are regularly listening to podcasts, like multiple podcasts a month. That's way bigger than a lot of content channels. So it's just huge. I think probably one of the other things I suspect we will be talking about next year is net neutrality. I think that could in the United States dramatically change who can access the web and how much of it. And I think that will change a lot of marketing practices. So essentially, the idea of net neutrality, which Denmark definitely has, the whole EU has net neutrality as the law. And the United States has had it for forever until they're about to overturn it. Because we have some new folks in charge here. So basically, the internet providers have been lobbying for a long time, lobbying the government and paying officials, which is legal in the US, to overturn this rule that says you have to treat all internet traffic the same. So if you want to visit youtube.com, the internet connection speed has to be exactly the same as if you visit, you know, ramshouseofpaper.info, right, that I just registered yesterday. I don't actually own it. But right, like whatever the website is, it has to be treated the same. That will change such that a broadband provider, you know, a Comcast or a Cox internet or any of the big broadband providers can basically say, if you like, for $250 a month, you can get the old internet, the regular internet, or if you want to pay just $20 a month, we'll give you access to the sites that you like the most anyway. Google, YouTube, Facebook, Netflix, you know, and these are all sites that have to pay the internet provider now. But they're the only ones you can access. If you go to Google and you do a search and you click on someone else, they'll be like, sorry, you don't have access to this. Do you want to upgrade your package? Yeah, actually, Mexico works this way right now. So for about 70% of Mexico's internet subscribers on mobile devices, they can't access most of the internet because they're just paying for a smaller package. I don't know how familiar Trump actually is with this, but Ajit Pai, who's the FCC head, who's about to get reconfirmed by the Senate, he was basically in-house at Verizon, right? So he's essentially a corporate lobbyist turned head of the FCC. So his loyalties are pretty obvious, right? It's to these folks. So internet marketing in the US is about to get way, way, way shittier. Gosh, other topics. I think that the world of social media is going to continue to contract to a few big players, but one of the breakouts that I've actually been really pressed with is LinkedIn, who in the B2B space has just been getting hotter and hotter, more and more engagement, and more powerful. That's impressive to see because a lot of Microsoft's acquisitions have gone, eh, but this one seems to be going great. So I think LinkedIn's going to be a hot topic next year too.