I delivered a talk about empathy at Oracle’s recent Modern Customer Experience (ModernCX) conference. In the talk I described how we in North America SaaS Customer Success are building out an enablement program for Customer Success Managers (CSM) that will be fueled by empathetic inputs. What are those, you might be asking? Good corporate education programs are the result of outcome-based design, of course, and if we are to properly design a program with the right outcomes in mind it needs to reflect the strategy and values of our company, and the abilities of its students (in our case, the CSMs). Also, the program needs to consider how it will eventually play out in front of customers (the ultimate beneficiaries of the program), even indirectly. In other words, the customer’s experience needs to be represented in those inputs. One of the end goals of the program is to help CSMs gain a deeper appreciation for the customer experience so they’ll be able to strengthen their customer engagements regardless of whether those engagements are digital or face to face. The curricula will go beyond product and domain training and more, even, than just teaching them all the mechanics they’ll need to know in order to effectively deliver the new Advanced Customer Success Service to customers. The program will attempt to ensure that the constant consideration of the customer experience becomes more than a buzz phrase and that its prominence and criticality is built into the core of the program.
CX Is Hard and So Is Exhibiting a Natural Inclination to be Empathetic
Here’s the thing about CX. If you don’t focus on it as being a corporate-wide strategy there will be a competitor who will and they’ll end up bleeding your customers away. We know this from research like this CEO Guide from McKinsey, which states that “…customer-experience leaders gain rapid insights to build customer loyalty, make employees happier, achieve revenue gains of 5 to 10 percent, and reduce costs by 15 to 25 percent within 2 or 3 years.” To complicate matters, optimal customer experiences cannot be described by a single definition. Just as there are a hundreds of millions of customer touchpoints happening constantly in business, similarly there are multivariate customer skill and solution adoption levels that need to be considered as well and that can significantly impact the ability for companies to deliver optimal experiences for customers. So, when I read research like this report from PWC which shows that 70% of customers value speed and convenience from companies while at the same time 74 to 82% say that human interaction matters, the word tension comes to my mind. Why tension? Because how can business leaders balance and deliver on both those critical fronts (speed and convenience AND human interaction) while also growing and economically scaling the business? Clearly, technology must play a critical enabling role?
Time – a Multi-Faceted Object
Customer experience as a top priority for companies is a refreshing development for those of us who were reared in a world in which choice was limited, change was slow, and recourse for poor service was usually an exercise of endless wandering along the branches of a telephone tree. As a customer myself, it’s nice to see product and service providers on their heels ferociously battling to ensure I’m satisfied. I welcome the vastly improved ability to get good service from a company without wasting too much of my time and usually arranging for it at a time that is convenient for me. It does boil down to time and time is the exact right word in this context of the customer experience and it’s a word that is more extensively expanded upon in this great piece that Oracle’s head of CX, Rob Tarkoff, EVP and GM, Oracle CX Cloud, wrote recently. Broadly speaking the cloud has helped to usher in a tremendous opportunity for both sides of the equation (vendor and customer) to transform customer experiences by creating the triggers that allow customers to take more control of their time and of their relationship with vendors.
Respecting Customer Time Sometimes Means Delivering Expertise Sooner Rather Than Later
Oracle’s new Advanced Customer Success Services is one of those triggers. By offering a deeper level of expertise that is grounded in knowledge about the customer’s business and its imperatives, it offers a real possibility for moving forward the vital corporate-wide strategy conversation I mentioned earlier. By respecting customers varied digital and business capability levels and offering a number of ways to begin on a journey to value, the service is designed to acknowledge that no customers are completely alike and that they should be given choices when they embark upon their road to value realization. But that respect has to come from somewhere and I believe that it must come from empathy for the customer’s experience.
Launching just about anything online is one of the most rewarding, yet challenging things you can ever undertake.
It can be an extremely lucrative way to make money online too, when you do it right.
For example:
You create a valuable course on a topic people really want to learn about. You price it right, and set up a great marketing funnel to attract people to it, and if all goes according to your plan, that course will bring in a consistent stream of recurring revenue for you.
Or
You decide on doing a one-off launch, where you put months of planning and energy into a five to seven day window where you open your course for enrollment. During that time, if your launch went well, you’d potentially make an entire year’s salary in a matter of months.
Creating online courses and offerings is one way to build a successful online business that scales, because there’s no limit to how many online courses or offerings you can sell, once you’ve created them.
This is why so many people have been lured into the world of online course creation and the hope of making a living from selling their knowledge.
In fact, according to Industry Forecasts, by the year 2025, online learning will be a $331 billion industry!
It’s exploding.
But here’s the thing I’ve noticed, poorly planned launches, that don’t have a clear strategy or plan, can be a huge waste of time, money and energy.
What’s more, without a long term aim, they can really knock the wind out of your sales and leave you wondering if launching several times a year is sustainable.
So let’s look at ways to make sure that you feel motivated and energized by your launch and ready to take on the next challenge.
Step 1. Focus On Your Health
Another big reason why you may feel deflated, even after a successful launch, is that due to the intensity of the launch period, you probably didn’t look after yourself well enough and now you’re paying for it.
As I’ve stated already, launching anything online is super rewarding, yet also, no matter how much of a seasoned pro you become, it’s still challenging.
They stop exercising, eat poorly, stay sedentary and do nothing to release the stress and tension that’s building up each day.
It’s like they almost enjoy running on the smell of an oily rag, because it makes them feel like they’re really doing something special. I know because I’ve been there!
Initially those tight deadlines you need to hit (because you set them!) work in your favour, propelling you on, making you work on all the moving parts of your launch like a boss.
But within days, or weeks, too much of that intensity can leave you feeling exhausted, unfocused, irritable and indecisive – pretty much the last way you need to feel in the most critical periods of your launch.
The number one concern you have is not your sales page, your copy, your email sequence, the module you’re building or your payment gateway setup. It’s YOU.
So do me a favor and make sure you schedule in ‘YOU’ time before, during and after a launch.
Your energy, your peace of mind, your focus, your health and your happiness are key.
If you’re not enjoying every moment of it, even the stressful parts, you’re not going to want to launch ever again!
Step 2. Get Help
This last one is so often overlooked. You get into superhero mode thinking you can rock this launch by yourself.
Newsflash! You can’t do this alone, nor should you want to.
It’s so much more fun working on a launch with a small team, even if that’s just one other person helping you out and making you feel like you’re not going insane.
If you’ve already done a launch or or thirteen, you know just how many moving parts there are to juggle. Too many for one person.
Each time I launch, my small but nimble team are always surprised and a bit overwhelmed, if I’m honest, with the launch plan I share with them, because they can see all the different phases and tasks that need to happen sequentially to pull it all off.
I often bring in 2-3 specialists to help me out at the very least, just for the launch period, like an expert in paid advertising, copywriting or design.
Basically anything that’s not in my zone of genius, or that I can do, but will take me too much time to do, or take me away from what I do best, I outsource.
It works wonders. It works even better if you have those people on your team before launch time so that you don’t get stuck in operations or managing your team.
The more you get to know each other and how you work, and your rhthyms, the smoother and less stressful the launch period is going to be,
Note to the person reading this who thinks they can’t afford a team…
YOU CAN!
An ads expert who knows their stuff should be giving you a 2-10X return on investment on what you’re paying them and the money you spend on ads.
On one of my launches we got a 5X return on investment which was completely worth it!
A talented copywriter can do the same. A friend of mine recently paid $20,000 to a copywriter to do her sales page and emails. That investment right there returned her half a million in sales from her launch.
A systems expert who can deal with your tech set up, integrations and testing is going to save you a ton of heartache.
If you believe in your product or course, have priced it right, know your audience are going to love it, and have done your launch financials, you should be able to factor in the cost to hire the right people to help make your launch a success, and to help you scale it again and again.
Step 3. Launch Reflection and Review
After the huge high of getting through a launch and closing your cart, one of the first things you should schedule in is a full review and analysis of your launch.
It may sound a bit ‘meh’ but it’s best to do it while everything is fresh in your mind.
The real reason behind this, and why it’s so beneficial to do it right away, is it gives you a true picture on what really happened, and let’s you gain perspective on how you really went, versus what you ‘saw’ happen or ‘felt’ went on.
For example, in my main launch last year, I felt like it was the biggest failure I’d ever had. It hit me really hard, as in the past, I’ve had multiple six figure launches that all went to plan and exceeded my expectations.
I would have continued to think it was an epic fail if I hadn’t looked at the stats from Google Analytics and Facebook ads, or run the numbers to get the true picture of what happened.
Even though I didn’t hit any of my goals, and actually made a loss, it wasn’t related to the marketing or the content of my course, but to the execution, and getting too caught up in the operations.
The actual facts showed the conversion rate of people who went through my video series to my sales page and bought, was actually above average and that had we targeted the right audience and built a better funnel, we would have had better results.
When I looked back over my launch strategy, I could see where things could have been timed differently or what steps I may have overcomplicated or missed.
This made me get out of my funk, and get my big girl panties back on!
I was able to look at it with a fresh pair of eyes and look at options to make the most of the outcome, salvage what I could, and then focus on areas I could improve on for next time.
Remember, the only time you truly fail is when you don’t learn the lesson!
Step 4. Plan Your Escape Vacation
The best thing you can do when you’re planning a launch is to plan your escape when it ends and give yourself a well-earned break – particularly if this was a launch over several months.
This may seem counterintuitive to you, but you have to factor in a celebration period, no matter what your launch result is, and rest and recharge, mentally and physically.
Part of the fun of launches is that you can use the momentum and energy you have during your launch to get an incredible amount of work done and achieve more than ever.
But that can take its toll. And you have probably underestimated the importance of escaping all that momentum and stress, by rolling straight into the next project.
STOP. Don’t do that. Take a freakin break.
You are not designed to do launch after launch after launch – unless it’s a fully automated launch funnel which means you don’t have to do anything after running it live a few times and testing it.
Even after the smoothest launches I’ve done, I always factor in time out to celebrate and reward myself no matter what the outcome.
I truly hope these tips will help you in your next launch, because every single launch is different and you have to embrace this fact or you will find yourself struggling.
Instead I want you to truly make the most of your time, money and energy and have FUN on each and every single launch.
We are living in such an incredible time where it’s possible to sit at a laptop, and use tools, technology and a remote team, to make an impact in thousands of peoples’ lives by simply sharing your knowledge through your online products and courses.
That’s one heck of a privilege right there!
Natalie Sisson is driven by what most value so highly but few achieve – uncapping your true potential. She’s an entrepreneur, No #1 Bestselling author, speaker, triathlete and lifelong learner, who’s on a mission to show you how to tap into your true potential to optimize your life, business and mindset.
With a laptop and a smartphone, she built a six-figure education business The Suitcase Entrepreneur, that she ran from anywhere in the world. Now she’s on a mission to show other entrepreneurs how to tap into their potential to design a life and business they love at https://nataliesisson.com
It has become second nature. You probably don’t even realize that you’re doing it. However, you are always offering up some information about yourself in exchange for goods and services. Need a few examples?
Whenever you download a movie
Whenever you buy an ebook
Whenever you call for a driveshare service
You’ve already given away your contact information, but these services also have data on your location, preferences, interests, and more.
Lyft and Netflix and similar big-name businesses have not only become huge brands, but they are a part of our daily lives. No one thinks twice about the information they offer up in exchange for a ride, an evening’s entertainment, or a meal ordered in.
This is the new world that we live. It’s different than things were only a few years ago, and there’s no going back. Data now sits at the heart of everything. Every business is collecting it and using it to create marketing strategies and customer experiences designed to win over their customers and keep them coming back again and again.
How can you compete? How can you thrive?
First, you have to realize it’s not so much about brand building. You need to focus on generating revenue. This means you put out the best and most convenient services possible tailored to your audiences. Data helps you accomplish this. With it, you can create a connected, consistent, and comfortable experience for customers across all channels. They have expectations that you meet with your services and the rate at which you innovate and expand.
Well, you might have an awful amount of it, but data is useless is you can’t properly utilize it. You have to strive to connect and fit your data together so that you can take action with it. You can tie your marketing and sales strategies to what the numbers say and build a customer experience that reflects the vivid picture the metrics you have available has painted.
If you have too much data and don’t know how to use it and where it all connects together, you have what’s called a “data island.” You don’t want to end up trapped on one.
Therefore, you need actionable, real-time data and teams that can properly use it to your advantage. With it, you can generate new customer segments to target and possibly bring down your sales cycle. For instance, going from a four-week to a three-week cycle can save money, time, and have you responding quicker and more urgently to customer needs, which helps you stay on the ball.
You should have different specialized teams working in different areas, such as email, apps, the customer experience, sales, marketing, and more. However, your teams should not operate in silos. You should have access to the data and work together using it. Proper data sharing is the key to your teams coming together to craft a better experience that better excites and interests customers and allows them to grow comfortable in providing you more data and returning for more service again and again.
Social media marketing is good for business — more than 40 percent of digital customers use social media to research products and brands. However, personal social media accounts are bad for business. Here are five important reasons to use a separate business profile, plus best practices on how to set it up.
1. Professionalism and credibility
For your business to be taken seriously, you need to present yourself professionally on social media. A business profile can help lend the credibility your brand needs to foster trust among potential customers. For example, if you run a mom-and-pop business out of your garage, a social business account can make you look like a global enterprise.
2. Privacy and control
You can’t control what friends and family post to your personal social media accounts — and you don’t want clients to see that embarrassing #ThrowBackThursday pic from your college days. Conversely, you probably don’t want potential customers to have access to your personal photos, friend list and contact information. Maintaining separate personal and business social media accounts grants you necessary privacy and control.
3. Multi-user management
Assuming you don’t want employees to access your personal information, only one person can manage your personal accounts: you. Business social accounts allow for multi-user management, often with different, role-based permission levels, so your entire team can promote your company on social media.
4. Paid advertisements
Some social platforms will not allow you to run ads unless you have a business account. This is important because social media offers targeted, affordable marketing for small businesses. Paid ads make it easy to increase your reach beyond your current followers, so don’t limit your marketing capabilities by using a personal account.
5. Useful insights
While personal social media accounts will tell you how many friends, followers and shares you have, business accounts grant access to in-depth insights about your audience. You can use those insights to understand audience demographics, identify which types of posts perform best and improve your social skills for greater exposure, engagement and customer response.
Best practices for setting up business profiles
Follow these tips for creating a successful business profile on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram or Pinterest.
Include your website URL, location and contact information so potential customers can easily get in touch
Allow direct messaging to encourage instant engagement
Completely fill out your profile, including your business “about” section, so people understand what drives your business, who you serve and what makes you different and better (your unique selling proposition)
Use keywords and hashtags in your profiles to show up in searches
Add high-quality photos that help tell your story and foster a sense of solidarity between your customers and your brand
Add a call to action if the platform allows it; Facebook is one that does
Add products and services to your profile, if possible (such as with LinkedIn)
Use your logo or other memorable brand visual for your profile image
Study competitors’ profiles to identify ways you can make yours better
Choose account management roles wisely to ensure control over your social content
Apply consistent branding between social platforms for memorable repetition
Strive for a professional, yet inviting, profile that promotes your brand values and encourages potential customers to follow you, share your posts and contact you
You don’t need to give up your personal social media accounts to start business accounts. Use these tips to avoid the pitfalls of personal accounts and take advantage of the marketing benefits provided by social media business profiles.
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Email deliverability is constantly changing, as inbox providers adjust their filtering algorithms, blacklists tweak their listing criteria, and consumers evolve their definition of spam. That’s why even the best email marketing programs suffer deliverability problems sometimes.
Google announced that it is using TensorFlow, the open source machine learning framework it developed, to identify and block an additional 100 million spam emails every day. That works out to one extra blocked spam email per 10 users, according to The Verge. Google says that Gmail already blocks 99.9% of spam, so its use of TensorFlow is intended to get at that last fraction of a percent.
What this means for marketers:
“That’s a lot of extra mail that Gmail is blocking, especially when you consider they’re already blocking the more obvious spam,” says Dan Deneweth, head of OMCC’s Deliverability Practice. “At the margins, the definition of spam becomes quite subjective. Some brands will have deliverability problems that didn’t before.”
Who should be especially on guard for problems?
“Anyone migrating to a new platform or spinning up a new IP address or domain may see increased problems,” says Deneweth. “We’ve seen with Gmail that’s it’s been very difficult to warm up IP addresses and domains.”
Brian Sullivan, Strategic Director of OMCC, adds, “This is true even for senders with established IP and domain reputations that add additional new IPs or new sending domains. Be mindful that authentication, domain alignment, and audience make-up on new IPs and domains are optimized during warming up to avoid problems.”
If you haven’t seen the effect of TensorFlow yet, that doesn’t mean you’re in the clear, says Clea Moore, Director of Deliverability Strategy at OMCC. “Google tends to roll things out gradually,” she says, “so more brands could start to see an impact.”
Heather Goff, Director of Deliverability Strategy at OMCC, adds that machine learning that leverages neural networks and deep learning takes Gmail’s sophistication to the next level, which should motivate email marketers to take their strategy to the next level.
“The ability to track user engagement at this scale demands that our email marketing is not only evolving, but is also super effective,” she says. “The time is now to maniacally measure key performance indicators on email effectiveness. As I like to say, more testing, better marketing, deeper engagement delivers to the inbox.”
Verizon Media Group Announces Support for List-Unsubscribe
Verizon announced in February that all Verizon Media Group (Yahoo, AOL, Verizon.net) inboxes now support List-Unsubscribe for one-click unsubscribe in their hosted inboxes. List-Unsubscribe headers enable native unsubscribe links in a range of email clients and provide email users with a trusted way to opt-out from a sender’s emails besides reporting those emails as spam.
“We strongly recommend senders to adopt this technology and include those headers as we believe that it will further improve the experience, trust, and satisfaction of our mutual customers,” says VMG Product Director Marcel Becker.
What this means for marketers:
Check with your email service provider to see if they support list-unsubscribe and whether you need to enable it.
All of Oracle’s email marketing platforms—Responsys, Eloqua, and Bronto—support List-Unsubscribe headers. They are added automatically to all outbound messages by default in Bronto, but in you need to enable it in Responsys and Eloqua. We highly recommend that you enable it by default, but you can also enable it for individual email campaigns.
“Support of List-Unsubscribe across VMG-hosted inbox domains has been long overdue,” says Sullivan. “Now that all AOL, Yahoo, and Verizon.net users have one-click unsubscribe functionality available to them, spam complaint rates among those subscribers may decrease a little.”
Verizon Media Group Launches Postmaster Site
Since acquiring AOL in 2015 and Yahoo! Mail in 2017, Verizon has been consolidating those organizations and their backend email infrastructure—first as Oath and then in a second rebranding in January, as Verizon Media. The shuttering of the long-standing AOL Postmaster page this month and the launch of a new Verizon Media Postmaster site is further evidence of this transition.
What this means for marketers:
As of the publication of this post, the site was still in beta, but it’s where you’ll be able to find updates and tools going forward.
“The quest to provide better tools and services for the sending community is exceptional, exciting and appreciated because it enables brands to do the right thing and use more data to take action,” says Goff. “The new Verizon Media Postmaster site—and VMG’s outreach to the sender community in general—is another example of the growing collaboration between inbox providers and senders.”
Return Path Losing Gmail Panel Data
Return Path has notified its customers that Google will cut access to Gmail panel data on March 31. Return Path is developing SmartSeeds, which are seed accounts that will use AI to mimic consumer interactions with emails as a way of creating the necessary scale without having people using those Gmail accounts.
Will Google be able to detect these AI-controlled accounts and, if so, what will it do?
Will the deliverability data based on these accounts be legitimate?
Regardless of the answers to those questions, Sullivan is a little skeptical about the value of this panel data in the first place. “Marketers see a lot of value in third-party data sources like this,” he says, “but the data represents a small sample of the marketer’s audience and should be considered directional rather than precise. Brands should put more emphasis on first-party data such as their own open, click, and bounce rates when monitoring for deliverability problems.”
Need help with your email deliverability? Oracle Marketing Cloud Consulting has more than 500 of the leading marketing minds ready to help you to achieve more with the leading marketing cloud, including a dedicated email deliverability practice within our Strategic Services Group.
“The Modern Marketing Influencer Blog Series asked top influencers from across the marketing spectrum what’s on their minds and what topics and pressing issues in their fields they feel are begging for more insight. Here they share their thoughts on content marketing, personalization, and how they both come together.”
The essence of successful marketing is getting the right message to the right person at the right time. The problem, of course, is that those are three very elusive variables, and locking them all down has traditionally required a great deal of manual effort. But sophisticated automation built into best-in-class marketing platforms can reduce this manual effort, making large-scale personalization possible.
Over the years, marketers have devised ways to balance specificity and effort to scale their personalization efforts. Account-based marketing, for example, focuses on a small segment of high-value prospects with targeted messaging, but it is limited to enterprise-size prospects, which are not necessarily your best prospects. Progressive profiling is another way to learn who your audience is and what they’re looking for, but it takes a long time and requires a great deal of input from your audience. What if your best prospects never come to your website to fill out a profile?
The Role of Automation
When you can personalize at scale, you can reach smaller organizations with highly targeted messaging. That requires powerful tools that allow you to:
Aggregate offline and online data from a variety of sources, including public channels, such as social media or blog posts
Derive insights based on the data
Then deliver a personalized experience to smaller and smaller audience segments
Insights, Triggers, and Plays
Raw data on its own isn’t of much use unless you understand what it means and what to do with it. You must identify these insights by gleaning the data and then set triggers to perform marketing plays when the data meets certain criteria.
Insights tell you what you want to know about the nature of the account; that is, what’s going on with them? One familiar approach to this is lead scoring, in which certain actions are assigned a value: a newsletter signup is worth 5 points, for example, while downloading content is worth 10. But this is something of a blunt instrument that fails to tell the full story. By drawing in external information, you can find far more refined insights that don’t depend on a prospect’s interactions with your brand at all. And you can consider the sequence of a prospect’s actions, adding an entirely new trend dimension to your analysis. Are they growing or shrinking? Are they making money or not? What industry are they in? What are their priorities? What do they need to meet these objectives?
You can also glean insights into individuals within those accounts: who they are, what role they have, what they're working on, and what tools they're using. Best-in-class marketing platforms (such as Oracle Eloqua) can provide AI and machine learning to assist in this process.
Triggers are thresholds for action. They represent a collection of data, or even a sequence of activities, that indicate an account or individual message you’ve crafted to suit that set of circumstances. Like insights, these can be at the account or individual level.
Marketing plays are the actions that follow a trigger to get individuals or accounts engaged. They might include targeted messaging, offers, or calls from sales reps.
Technology Does Not Equal Strategy
While technology can assist in this process, it can’t do everything. Even sophisticated technology is a tool to implement strategy, not replace it. You still must start with a fundamental understanding of who your customer is. Two ways of going about this include asking:
Who is our target account? What do our target accounts look like and why? If you're selling into healthcare, your target account list is not just the biggest healthcare companies. What are the attributes and characteristics of accounts that make them more likely to be good matches for your company? How do you build that filtered list of prospects to begin with? What tools can you use to help you identify other healthcare companies that meet (or on a trajectory to meet) those criteria as well?
Who are the decision-makers within those organizations? Buildings do not write checks. You must identify the people who will decide whether they will do business with you or not. You can break these down even further along roles, both formal and informal: decision-makers, influencers, detractors, and users. If you can understand who those people are, what they care about, and what they're thinking at various stages of the buying journey, you can target them with the right message at the right time.
Now we have a basis for creating powerful, engaging content. We’ve set up a system that helps us manage and bring value to those individuals throughout that buying process. Not only does that build trust, rapport, and differentiation, but it also helps to increase velocity and conversion.
As a child, I did everything that most kids did. I played outside with friends, I watched a lot of TV, I loved eating cereal for breakfast, and I went to school.
My childhood wasn’t too much different than yours. But there was one thing that was a bit unique.
I grew up watching Bloomberg before I went to school.
Now, I don’t want you to think I was some child prodigy because I wasn’t. The only reason I watched Bloomberg in the morning is that my dad dabbled in the stock market and wanted to know if his stocks were going up or down.
Plus, we only had one TV… so I didn’t really have a choice.
But from all of those years of watching Bloomberg, it wasn’t too hard for me to spot trends. And one of the big ones is globalization.
See, as a kid, most of the financial news channels discussed how things were progressing in America.
But now, due to technological advances, companies no longer see themselves as regional or even national. Things like headquarters no longer matter.
Companies look at themselves from a global perspective. And every big company out there has done well because they focus on attracting customers from all over the world as it’s a much bigger pool and opens up more potential revenue.
And it’s not just businesses, it’s people too. When children go to school these days, their parents think about how they are going to stack up against kids in other countries versus kids just from their own classroom.
So, with everyone thinking from a global perspective, why do you think of your SEO from a national or regional perspective?
And once I cracked the nut of international SEO, my traffic exploded…
So how much traffic do I get?
Here’s how many visitors NeilPatel.com received over the last 7 days.
In the last 7 days, there were 972,026 sessions on my site that generated 1,501,672 pageviews. And of those visitors, 584,294 where unique people. Hopefully, you were one of those unique people. 😉
But this is where it gets interesting…
The United States only makes up 22.35% of my traffic.
The rest is coming from other countries and, in many of them, English isn’t their primary language. Just look at the chart above… Brazil, India, Germany, Spain, and France are all examples where I am generated a lot of traffic from.
Of course, there are people all around the world that speak English, but the big reason for the growth is that I started to expand internationally by doing things like translating my content.
Just click on the language selector next to my logo and you’ll see some of the regions I am going after.
So how does one go after organic traffic from different countries?
The simple answer is to translate your content. If you translate your content into different languages, in theory, you should get more traffic.
But what most people won’t tell you (because they haven’t done it enough times) is that translating your content isn’t enough. Even if you translate it and adapt it to a specific country, it doesn’t guarantee success.
I had to learn this the hard way.
Case in point, here are the traffic stats during the last 7 days for the Portuguese version of my blog:
And here are my traffic stats during the last 7 days for Spanish:
I get a whopping 238% more traffic on the Portuguese version of NeilPatel.com than I do on the Spanish version.
Here’s what’s interesting…
There are 298 million more Spanish speakers than Portuguese speakers.
My team doesn’t just translate articles for both of those regions, we optimize them and make sure they are adapted to the local markets.
We do keyword research to make sure we are going after popular terms.
And I have more backlinks to the Spanish version of the site than I do to the Portuguese version.
Here’s the backlink profile to the Spanish version:
And here is the backlink profile of the Portuguese version:
As you can see, the Spanish version has 52% more backlinks.
Are you puzzled why the Spanish version of my blog isn’t as popular? There is a reason and I’ll give you a hint. Here’s a quote from Eric Schmidt who used to be the CEO of Google:
Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.
Need another hint?
Here’s how many people land on my site from branded queries (people searching for my domain name or variations of it) in Spanish speaking countries:
And here’s how many people land on my site from brand queries in Portuguese speaking countries:
That’s why I get so much more traffic from Portuguese speaking regions like Brazil. I have 104% more brand queries.
It’s something Google values so much that most people ignore.
And it’s not just me. I have analytics access to 18 other companies that have a global strategy due to my ad agency. I obviously can’t share their stats, but it just shows the power of brand queries from a global perspective.
So, what’s the real secret to ranking well globally?
Based on my site and helping 18 other sites go global, I’ve learned what works and what doesn’t. Sadly, I made one too many mistakes, but you won’t as long as you follow the advice below.
Localizing
You have to translate and adjust your content to each region you want to target. You can do so by hiring translators on sites like Upwork, but the quality may be low.
Now, this doesn’t mean Upwork is bad, more so you should consider getting an editor who knows the local market, speaks the local language and speaks English, and understands the niche you are working in.
This way they’ll understand your goals, your original content, and the market you are going after.
And similar to finding translators on Upwork, you can also find editors there too. Just interview a few and ideally look for people with experience in your field.
The last thing you want to do is translate 100 articles to find out that they were all low quality and you have to do it all over again.
Keyword research
Popular keywords in one language aren’t always popular in other languages.
Read this article to get an overview of how I rank for 477,000 keywords. It teaches you the concept of key expansion and it’s important for your translators and editors to understand the process. You’ll want them to use it.
In addition to that, have them use free keyword research tools like Ubersuggest as it will give them more ideas. I would also have them check out this tutorial as it will teach them how to get the most out of Ubersuggest.
By understanding which keywords to go after in new markets, you can start creating new content (beyond just translating) to target keywords that are relevant and have high search volume. By understanding where there are gaps in the quality of the competition’s posts, you’ll be able to produce new, high-quality content that can rank quickly.
The article on my Portuguese blog, for example, that gets the most organic traffic from Google is an article that only exists in Brazil. We found a keyword to go after that had low competition but high search volume and were able to rank very quickly for it. In the last 30 days, that article has had 17,197 visits.
Build links
Building links in English may be hard, but internationally it’s easy.
No one really sends those cold outreach emails begging for links, so when you do this for countries like Brazil, you’ll find that it is fishing with dynamite.
Again, you’ll want someone who knows the language to do the outreach… this can be your editor or someone you hire from Upwork.
Once you have the person who is going to be in charge of your link building, have them start with this. It will break down what they need to do step-by-step.
Make sure you let them know to avoid spam sites, paying for links, and even building rich anchor text links.
Remember in these markets SEO isn’t as competitive, so it won’t be too hard to get rankings.
Hreflang
Google doesn’t penalize for duplicate content… especially when it is in a different language.
If you translate your content, it isn’t as simple as popping it up on landing pages. You have to tell Google which version to show for each country/language. You would use hreflang for that.
Here’s a video that explains how it works:
And here is a tool that’ll help you generate the hreflang code needed for your site.
Subdomains over subdirectories
On NeilPatel.com, you’ll notice that I use subdirectories for each language/country over subdomains.
They say subdirectories are better because more authority and juice flows through your site versus using subdomains.
But here’s what I learned the hard way, you are much better off using subdomains from everything that I tested than subdirectories.
Not only is it easier to rank as it is treated as a separate site, but it ranks faster from my experience. And if you don’t mind spending the extra money, I would even consider registering the international variation of each domain and forwarding it to the respective subdomain.
Browser redirects
Similar to how Google Analytics shows you the browsers people are using and countries and languages people come to your site from… your server is also getting that data.
What you’ll want to do is redirect users once you’ve translated your content and set up your hreflang tags.
For example, if you were to visit this site form Brazil and your browser told us that your preferred language is Portuguese, we would automatically forward you to the Portuguese version of the site. Not just to the homepage, but to the correct page you were originally browsing, just the translated version.
Now if you were visiting this blog from India and your browser stated that your preferred language was English, we wouldn’t forward you to the Hindi version of the blog. We would keep you on the English version as that’s what you prefer.
If you don’t forward people, you’ll find that it takes search engines much longer to realize that they should be ranking the language and country-specific sections of your site instead of the English version.
Build a community
As I mentioned above, international SEO isn’t just about backlinks or content, it’s about building a brand.
I pay in each country to respond to my blog comments as I don’t speak Spanish and Portuguese so I can’t personally respond to them.
I show them how I respond to comments in English so they can replicate me.
I also spend money on boosting posts on Facebook within those regions as it helps me attract new potential readers and get my brand out there.
And most importantly, I hire people on the ground in each country to help build up my brand. That’s why I do so well in places like Brazil over the Spanish market.
I have more people on the ground in Brazil focusing on brand building. From attending conferences to representing my brand on webinars… they put in the effort to truly help people out when it comes to anything marketing related.
That’s how you build a brand. Just look at my Instagram channel, the content is in English, but a lot of my followers are from Brazil due to the localized brand building efforts.
AMP
Do you remember Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)? No one talks about AMP anymore, but it does help increase traffic.
What we’ve found through testing is that in regions like the United States, AMP doesn’t do much, if anything, for your traffic.
But for regions like Brazil and India, where their infrastructure is still developing, we found that leveraging AMP boosts mobile search traffic by anywhere from 9 to 32%.
If you don’t want to use AMP that’s fine too. Just make sure you optimize your load speed times. Not only does it boost traffic, but it also boosts conversions.
Time
Similar to how it takes forever for you to get Google rankings in English speaking markets, it does take time internationally. Typically, not as long as it does for the United States or United Kingdom markets, but it does take time.
Typically, if you are doing everything above, you’ll see some results within 3 months. Things will really take off at the 9-month mark and after a year you should be crushing it.
Now as your traffic and rankings go up, this doesn’t mean you should slow down. Just like how you can lose rankings on your English site, the same can easily happen for any other region.
What countries should I target first?
You got everything done when it comes to international SEO… all that’s left is tackling the right regions.
It would be great to go after every language and country at once, but it’s going to be too resource intensive and costly.
You could try tactics like automatically translating your content through machine learning, but the translations won’t be great and your user metrics such as bounce rates will go through the roof. This typically will lead your whole site’s rankings to tank.
You don’t want to do that.
Another approach people take is to go after the markets with the highest GDP… such as the USA, China, Japan, UK, Germany, etc…
But going after markets that have money doesn’t guarantee success either because culturally each region is different. Some may not care for your products or services.
What I like doing is to look at your Google Analytics and see where your traffic is coming from. Are you getting traffic from countries where English isn’t their main language? And, if so, are people from those countries buying your products and services?
If they are, now you have a list of potential countries to go after.
Then what you’ll want to do is look at your competition and see if they are going after any regions by translating their sites. Chances are if a region that isn’t predominantly English speaking is driving you sales, and your competitor is translating their content for that region, then you should be going after it as well.
Conclusion
SEO is no longer about ranking your site in one country or even just English-speaking countries.
You have no choice but to think of it from a global perspective. Not only is it more affordable, but there is less competition and you can see results faster.
Sure, the total market of some of these international countries may only be a fraction of the United States, but there won’t be much competition, which means you can gobble up the market share.
So what countries are you focused on with your SEO?
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