Ideas, insights and inspirations.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your website and creating fresh content to improve your website rankings on Google, Bing and other search engines. Search engine algorithms today use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to understand and interpret user queries and serve up search results. Google has introduced some famous algorithm updates like RankBrain, Bert and MUM which use AI principles to improve search functionality. With the introduction of ChatGPT, AI has gone mainstream and now everyone is talking about it. However, in the world of Search algorithms & SEO, AI has been playing a part for a much longer time. Here are some of the ways these AI principles are being used to serve up results that users are looking for: 1. Natural language processing (NLP) AI-powered NLP enables search engines to understand the context, intent, and semantics of search queries and website content. The Google Hummingbird update that launched in August 2013 represented a fundamental change in … Continue reading

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Great content is the lifeblood of successful brands. However, creating great content is a labor of love. It takes both an investigative mind (that discovers and uncovers brand evidence and proofs) and an imaginative mind (that infuses brand romance) to create persuasive content. Two quick reminders before I dive into the content ecosystem. First, the best college copywriters and storytellers uncover truths about an institution that it may not have even known about itself. They instinctively know that the real hero of their story is the student, the alum and the faculty member — not the institution. They tell the stories of the challenges the brand heroes faced and how they creatively overcame them to realize their personal destinies. As my colleague Todd Erkel would say, a college becomes the story it chooses to tell. Second, before you embark on your content journey, I would strongly encourage creation of a SEO Keyword Lexicon that’ll guide all future content creation. It’s comprised … Continue reading

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What’s the difference between a college with a surplus of applications and one with an unacceptably high acceptance rate? Sometimes, it’s curiosity and nerve. Adversity — brought on by geographic isolation, shifting demographics, living in the shadows of giants, deep-pocketed for-profits and other Goliath competitors — can inspire a college and university to challenge assumptions and try new approaches to gain an unfair competitive advantage. We call these schools underdog brands — and salute the leaders willing to rethink the potential of a school website, blog, and social channels. Underdog brands evolve from thinking of marketing assets as a fixed cost — an unwelcome guest knocking at the budget door — to seeing its potential to enlarge the vision and change institutional culture. Underdog brands tend to serve a lot of first generation in college families and students who are willing to try harder. These students are unafraid to roll up their sleeves and get things done, and are eager … Continue reading

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The primary goal of digital content marketing is to earn attention and grow brand reputation by providing valuable content – that informs, persuades, engages and delights prospects and customers. However, delivering on this goal has turned into an all-out arms race, with three distinct generations of content marketing.   First Generation: Core Content In the beginning, marketers equated content with website copy and photography. Copywriters and storytellers elevated the website copy – presenting the facts and persuading the prospects with engaging content; professional photographers were hired to lift the website experience with beautiful imagery that told visual stories. Core Content = Copy + Stories + Photographs + Press Releases.   Second Generation: Enhanced Content Once parity was achieved in basic content, marketers expanded the concept of content to include blogs and juiced up the copy, photographs and blog posts with keywords to secure page 1 rankings on Google. Enhanced Content = Core Content + Blog Posts + Social Media Posts … Continue reading

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  Today, there is a lot of advice around how to create high quality, student-centered content in the higher education space — from bringing student experiences to life through stories, photos and videos to creating content by involving passionate faculty, students and brand champions. However, far less is said regarding how to create an orchestrated effort around content publishing to ensure that your content receives the most visibility and positive engagement. Often, marketing teams get caught up in the demanding work of content creation and fall short when it comes to creating a well-thought-out content release plan. The result is limited exposure of a content piece that was incredibly time consuming to complete. At Elliance, for each piece of high-fidelity content — whether it’s an infographic, guide, video, blog post, story, etc. — we develop a content release plan to ensure maximum exposure among target audiences. While each piece of content demands unique considerations, here are a few recommendations that can … Continue reading

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Thought leaders are created through persistent leaning into critical issues with a distinct point of view and expertise. Here are our guidelines for positioning yourself as a thought leader using blogging and social media: Goals Build your personal or institutional reputation as a thought leader in your core expertise. Create a readership that engages with your passion for your expertise by delivering insightful, practical, dependable and valuable content. Personal Brand Curate and manage your personal profiles on your organization’s website, your personal LinkedIn account, and other social channels. Grow and cultivate your personal network comprised of practitioners, peers, collaborators and perhaps most importantly influencers. Target Audience Speak to practitioners, peers, collaborators and influencers. Lead the believers in your cause. Persuade the receptive. Ignore the rest. Keyword Focus Think of the keyword or phrase you would like your blog post to be ranked for. Search Google to see who else appears on page 1 of Google for that phrase. Tie content … Continue reading

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Content marketing is in a state of constant flux. To reach potential students, best practices in higher education marketing dictate being everywhere; Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube and SnapChat, right? Well, no. Yes, the number of ways consumers can access information, and thus make a purchasing decision, has grown exponentially. The days when a university only bought a billboard, some television commercials and used direct mail are long gone. Websites, email, digital ads and sharing content on social sites are used in addition to the older forms of marketing. But, that doesn’t mean you should just throw the same content everywhere. Instead, universities must make their content interesting, useful and at times, entertaining. This only happens if you focus on your customer’s needs rather than your own interests. That’s where John Deere enters the picture. They published a magazine, called The Furrow, in 1895. The goal was to sell farm equipment and they did this by sharing stories farmers … Continue reading

The title of this blog, “Find Meaning in Your Social Media Analytics” is kind of broad and could probably be interpreted in many ways. Upon coming across the blog title, one might think it was about discovering a secret way of distilling all that unruly social media web traffic into coherent and meaningful data reports. Others may think it is a blog about some new age digital strategy that will help you find your inner social media analytics chi that simplifies the way you look at clicks, likes and impressions. Although these ideas sound great and might be topics for future AHA blog posts, this one is simply about how to help you locate and find meaning in the social media analytics tools provided in your Facebook and Twitter accounts.  So let’s get started with this simple road map and light overview of the Facebook and Twitter analytics platforms that may help you make more sense of why you are … Continue reading

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Facebook has been making a lot of changes to their news feed algorithm. In the past, there used to be a chronological listing of stories as they were shared by your network. However, as the membership on the social media network continued to grow (more than a billion members) and the content continued to explode, Facebook decided to make some changes. The goal, per Facebook, of News Feed is to “deliver the right content to the right people at the right time so they don’t miss the stories that are important to them.” To make this happen, Facebook currently considers thousands of factors to serve up stories from a publisher’s page in an individuals’ news feed. Some of these factors can be broken up into the following: Relevance factors Engagement factors Quality factors Profile factors Recency factors Relevance Factors: Is your audience interested in that topic? Has your audience engaged with that topic in the past? Have they hidden any content related … Continue reading

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So now that 2017 is in full flap, let’s jump right in and get that bird tuned up and singing on key. Here is some Twitter 411 to help with your social media marketing this year. This information is general knowledge and commonplace among social media marketers and Twitter jockeys everywhere and is not part of some secret social media cabal or in this case… flock.  So go ahead and take full advantage of these tips and information to make your manufacturing marketing or higher education social media campaigns fly higher this year. Definitions Impressions: Number of times users saw the Tweet on Twitter. Engagements: Total number of times a user interacted with a Tweet.  For example clicks anywhere on the Tweet which include: – retweets – replies – follows – likes – hashtags – embedded media – profile and more Engagement rate: Number of engagements divided by impressions. Followers: People who have chosen to follow your Twitter account and … Continue reading

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