SEO Innovation: Are You Part Of It?

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AI revolution, COVID crisis, wars and military events, instability – the world is complex and shaped by various circumstances that demonstrate the importance of building resilient businesses that can operate in uncertain times. Two things are critical to making this happen – innovation and flexibility: without the first or the second, it may be impossible to develop a business model that works and thrives in difficult times. If you can master both, you will be on the safe side.

Innovative marketing is critical for companies that want to stand out from the crowd, especially in saturated markets, to attract new customers. Innovative marketing is not just a concept – it can really help you generate brand loyalty and fidelity, which can lead to increased sales and financial growth. Why would not you adopt innovative marketing if it can help your business maintain a competitive advantage and adapt to changes in the industry?

WordLift’s clients pride themselves in using innovative marketing instruments, business functions and scientific research to enhance their SEO and achieve increased efficiency in their business processes. That is why we are creating this blogpost series, because we want to give you a glimpse into how innovative marketing SEO leaders reengineer their marketing operations, what characteristics they demonstrate during the marketing revamping process and how they approach innovation in general when improving their lead generation systems. That is how we operate, that is what our manifesto is based on, that is how we wake up every day to strive for more. Here we go!

Visionary Thinking

Being visionary is not easy – sometimes, you need to have the ability to grasp complex technical concepts because innovation in marketing is closely related to innovation in technology. New ideas that shape the IT industry are taking the world by storm and quickly find their way into the marketing sector. That is why you need to have the right foundation to tackle them or to collaborate with the right people to help you break these complex topics into pieces to analyze their potential one by one. Innovating is not easy and requires strong ethical values too – it’s not a mindset that you can build overnight, you cannot say “from now on I will be innovative and that is it”. It is a constant investment and dedication into reshaping some (core) processes in a new way.

With that being said, marketing visionaries always strive to anticipate future customer needs and test new technologies even before they become an official market demand. They are able to create a  vision of how the market might look like in the future and say “OK, this is where my company stands, these are the capacities that we have in place, this is the knowledge base that we’ve built over time, this is where I see us in the future – how can we combine all of these stuff  in order to stay competitive?”. Thinking about how and in what way is what makes the difference – marketing leaders are not the people who say no to difficult situations or give up immediately when it’s tough. You need to have the stamina to continue to innovate even if the times are unstable.

Being able to detect and predict what might be an interesting growth opportunity, especially when it comes to concepts that are interoperable across sectors and being strategic about them – these are the key advantages that marketing innovators like you need to have or develop over time. Going there alone or without the right partnerships in place will make this almost impossible. If you prefer to avoid hard work and are not proactive to achieve something important with your business, we can’t do much for you. Proactive innovators don’t look just for motivation to do something, they go beyond this: looking for strategies that work. Their ideal is to find proven effective formulas that can be practically implemented. Does that sound like you? Marketing leaders have a knack for planning several steps ahead, just like chess players, they know how to set up their chances and pick up their opponent.

Understanding User Persona Perfectly

At the core of growth marketing is the ability to conduct user research and perfectly understand your buyer persona. Marketing innovators master user personas because they help them understand what to say to their customers, how to say it, how to say it, and where and how to find and attract customers online.

Here is how its done:

• You can start your manual keyword research process or export data from multiple sources, the more the merrier;
• If the initial keyword research phase does not reveal too much information (only several interesting keywords but nothing more), then it is time to perform competitor analysis. You can do this by using search competitive intelligence tools and filter out all the questions that your competitors are ranking for;
• You can observe which questions are the most dominant in the process if you use embeddings and Tensorflow to unveil real search demands behind your website or niche of interest. The tool will help you group your keywords into clusters (separate, dominant topics), so that you can use this information to incorporate real questions about customer pain points at a faster rate;
• And voila, it’s done!

Using embeddings (and in some cases even creating our embeddings) is an innovative way to understand the entire customer journey and user personas. For over 2 years, we have been experimenting with Large Language Models (LLMs) and text embeddings to change the way we read user queries and search existing content. Take a quick look at what that looks like below

The key idea as a marketing innovator is to be able to find the non-brand verbiage that your online searchers are using to describe what they need. I’ll give an example. If the product is a “food composter”, then an appropriate non-brand verbiage will be “recycle food scraps”. A quality Google search string, combined with Reddit in certain situations can be a great idea of finding hidden gems in your customer persona research process. Engineer and set up your marketing operations in place to be able to learn as much as possible about your customers. Bear in mind that data cross-validation and exploration with other departments like sales, marketing, customer success and product are an awesome way to build the most comprehensive user persona possible.

Creativity

Having a unique ability to think outside of the box, coming up with fresh and new ideas and bringing them to execution is how marketing innovators demonstrate creativity. Being able to identify which problem needs to be solved or finding a new or improved way to solve something – this is the superpower of you as a marketing leader. Innovators are not afraid to take risks in order to achieve their goals. They are often generalists, being able to find connections between seemingly unrelated concepts and bring their ideas to fruition. Marketing innovators are great fans of design thinking and ideas sprints in order to generate as many bad but equally good ideas in order to set direction and plan for the next phases. Be like them.

Risk-Taking

Some ideas are sometimes unproven, and that requires diligence, conviction, and great confidence to pursue, especially if the data is lacking in the first phase. In product development, you can expect to invest time, money and resources to develop a new product or service, but for starters, you may be forced to rely only on your intuition and business sense. Marketing innovators like you develop these over time because they know that data can not tell you everything at once – it can only support you once you have gathered it, but not before.

Certain problems require you to rely on imagination, experience and domain knowledge in order to say “OK, I might not have the full data but I am fully convinced that if we pursue this path with the team that I set up, we will actually be able to achieve something”. Aman Saxena, an SEO specialist, says that this is one of the most important traits that marketing innovators have. Embrace it!

Adaptability

Reevaluating, retesting, reiterating your efforts over and over again – this is what characterizes great marketing minds in the industry. Maria Amelie White, an SEO leader, shared with us on Twitter that marketing innovators are “open to change, eager to admit their own mistakes”, but still stay strong to continue their marketing innovation journey. Marketing leaders which are innovating are open to feedback and criticism – they pivot their ideas based on the evolving customer and market trends, moving quickly when opportunities or challenges arise. They have the ability to make educated guesses and take calculated risks to fulfill their business dreams.

Collaboration

Innovative leaders work well with others, they are team players and have a penchant for building relationships with people. They know they need to close talent gaps to achieve common goals. Therefore, they build their teams accordingly and are willing to compromise.

This is not where the story ends. Innovative leaders like you are able to understand and commit to external collaborations, communicating and collaborating with suppliers and customers. They engage with different stakeholders to gather feedback and insights, enabling syncing between departments, encouraging fruitful teamwork and cooperation. They create and foster a culture of shared ownership and accountability. Marketing leaders know that in order to succeed they need to brainstorm with cross-functional individuals, encourage participation of different team members and other forms of collaborative work to achieve their goals. That is how it’s done – the right way.

WordLift is one of the leading marketing intelligence agencies in the world that pioneered the use of knowledge graphs, artificial intelligence and linked data in the SEO world. We spend time researching, developing and testing new solutions to make SEO easier and more effective, so that businesses can scale and bring value to the market. People say to us “you are the first to do this innovative thing, you are leaders in intelligent marketing”. Being innovative is how you can position yourself as a market leader and put yourself in the best position to win the hearts and minds of your target customers!

Ready to innovate with us today? Book a call with our expert to know more about how you can innovate your SEO and your business.

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