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This is a marketing strategy that may change everything you know about content marketing and SEO.

The customer feedback loop is an effective way to improve your offerings to your customers and modify what they get based on their feedback. It’s a business strategy that has been in existence for quite some time, but here, it’s refined towards content marketing and SEO.

Surely, there are ways you can make use of one of the most effective business and marketing strategy in human existence. And it’ll improve your content marketing and SEO efforts and help grow your brand. I’ll be taking a deeper look into the feedback loop, how it works in marketing and how you can apply this to your content marketing and SEO efforts.

What is a marketing feedback loop?

Firstly, let’s try to understand what marketing feedback loop is and how it works in the traditional marketing world. Done correctly, and with a well documented and measured process, the marketing feedback loop can improve your content marketing and SEO results.

According to HubSpot author, Caroline Forsey,

“A feedback loop is a process in which the outputs of a system are circled back and used as inputs. .. this refers to the process of using customer or employee feedback to create a better product or workplace.”

Marketers will understand that there are gems to be found in the feedback their businesses and products receive online. Both the positive and negative feedback you get, if utilized properly, can significantly transform how customers perceive and interact with your brand.

A marketing feedback loop is created when a business utilizes the responses they attract from a campaign effort or a product on the social web, and this can be later utilized in their marketing efforts. This may also include feedbacks from surveys and research campaigns.

Here, we’ll look at how it can be utilized to improve content marketing and SEO efforts.

How to create opportunities marketing feedback loop

Identifying opportunities for marketing feedback loop is just as important as how to make it work for you. Customers will take to social media to raise concerns or praises about your products and services where potential customers are actively participating in discussions that will determine whether or not to choose you over the competition.

Naturally, you’ll incorporate praises about your services into your testimonial campaigns to promote your business. These content are easily seen. Negative feedback, on the other hand, is where the treasure lies. And you will almost always miss them.

Below, let’s take a look at ways to identify marketing feedback loop and ultimately how you use it to improve your content marketing and SEO efforts.

• Necessary tools: The first step to identifying opportunities for feedback loop is to actively monitor mentions about your brand on the web. This includes social media, blogs, and forums. In this case, the right tools, and people are what you need. Some tools to employ may include Mention, Radian6 and setting up Google Alerts for known names/keywords (or phrases) your brand is associated with.
• Surveys: What’s better than the opportunity to secure valuable feedback? One that is solicited. Implementing surveys can help you to elicit feedback from your users right before they share it themselves. This will give room for you to identify potential issues and address them before they become problems.
• The right person/team: Is someone on your team who determines how customers’ feedback should be responded to and what department gets to see and utilize it. This individual is responsible for its proper documentation as well. Naturally, they should be working very closely with the marketing department.
• Interpreting constructive and negative customer feedback: Most times, when emotions run high with customers, constructive criticisms may come off as negative feedback. This may be perceived as an attack on your brand if care is not taken to analyze the issue — leaving you with a missed opportunity to improve on both SEO and content efforts. Instead of making a blanket judgment on the surface and writing of the complainant as a troll, look closely to identify what others may agree within their feedback. There, you’ll find your next content fodder and SEO hack.

How significant are feedback loops to content marketing and SEO?

Customers’ feedback can be looped into the whole brand experience output, which includes user experience(UX), answering the right questions on your website (enabling for richer content experience and broadens keyword opportunities).

Getting content marketing and SEO benefits from implementing feedback loop in your marketing would be a successful effort if done the right way. The following procedures will not only ensure you’re creating a better experience for your users but also gaining SEO advantage in the process.

Using a feedback loop to improve SEO – UX improvements

The most significant drawback to most businesses’ web presence is the user experience, and Google — growing ever-smarter with its constant algorithmic updates — is now effective at scoring a website’s rankings based on overall UX score. The best way for businesses to know how their UX measures up is through direct feedback from those using it. Here, customer feedback can be looped to the design team who can improve upon the website feel and accessibility. The result is a website with better UX and improved search rankings.

A feedback loop can prevent worthless content efforts

Say your content marketing team have been working tirelessly, analyzing trends and interviewing industry experts just to improve visibility and rankings. But the result is slow or abysmal. Here, the marketing team should be tasked to score through the complaints that have been left by your customers and come up with problem-solving content to line up your content calendar. This will not only directly address your users concerns but will help you see improved content marketing efforts.

Where have feedback loops improved SEO efforts?

In 2018, I and my partner at Effective Inbound Marketing, Ayodeji Onibalusi conducted a survey asking people to go visit our website and give feedback about what should be improved on. Majority of the responders wanted us to improve navigation and some others wanted us to produce more marketing content on the blog.

We incorporated the feedback loop by upgrading our content output and introduced breadcrumbs that’ll show the users how they navigated our website. These improvements saw our Alexa ranking move from 850,000 in December of 2018 to 272,000 as of today (August 2019) and our navigation improvement saw our users spend more time on site, dropping bounce rate by 50% and also increasing the number of pages visited per user. This has trickled down to our rankings, with terms like “Amazon” and “Russian Marketing” now driving users to our website.

Three takeaways from this

• The smallest feedback loop implemented can have a significant impact on SEO
• When implementing feedback loops, consider users satisfaction first
• A feedback loop can be equally effective if solicited from users

The right way to use a marketing feedback loop to improve SEO

Getting marketing feedback loop right shouldn’t be tricky if you follow best practices. The core purpose of a marketing feedback loop is to use constructive complaints from your customers to improve your content marketing and SEO efforts. This can be accomplished by identifying their pain-points and incorporating this into your content and SEO campaigns.

Successful marketing feedback loop must follow these rules to positively have an impact on content marketing and SEO.

Is timely

Customers feedback should be looped to the right department as quickly as possible. Ideally, the customer should already get a response within the first hour, on the same channel. If it’s worth incorporating into a content, your content marketing team should already have a well-thought-out long-form content that addresses critical factors and answers questions such as:

– Was the complaint legitimate?

– Would other customers face this same issue?

– Was there a solution in place before?

– How did the company help the customer resolve the complaint?

– What did the company do prevent future customers from experiencing the same?

The medium of feedback should remain the same

Marketers should not make the mistake of addressing issues on different channels from where feedback originated from. Instead of providing a solution to a problem, this may escalate situations as the customer may assume you’re being defensive and trying to manipulate the situation.

If complaints are generated on social media, the complaints should be acknowledged on the same medium. Then support can take it up from there either through DMs or tickets. After which marketing feedback loop should be implemented once there is satisfaction, and then a campaign can be created out of it.

Must address concerns generated through implemented changes

For example, if users complain about the inability to access your products due to lack of breadcrumbs and poor navigation features — like the absence of a search tool, a short term solution may be to point them to categories or help them identify tags. But going further to introduce the features that’ll create a better experience would serve a longer-term purpose.

Changes implemented may be the focus of marketing feedback loop campaign

If the above approach is implemented, then a content marketing campaign around the customer’s feedback and the success achieved would be a welcome step. This would not only help attract more users through content marketing but would also show your brand as a listening one.

Conclusion

Getting content marketing and SEO right is critical to the success of your business if you’re competing online. Then the goal is to discover strategies that’ll keep your efforts successful and help you serve your users better. Marketing feedback loop helps you get this done.

Have you tried using a marketing feedback loop to optimize your SEO efforts? What results did you get?

Femi Haastrup is Founder and CEO of Femtrup LLC. He can be found on Twitter @Femihaastrup.

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https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2019/08/30/marketing-feedback-loop-for-seo/

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Every dollar matters in the social-media marketing war.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/338115

Social networks have struggled to figure out how to handle issues like threats of violence and the presence of hate groups on their platforms. But a new study suggests that attempts to limit the latter run up against a serious problem: the networks formed by hate group members are remarkably resilient, and they will migrate from network to network, keeping and sometimes expanding their connections in the process. The study does offer a few suggestions for how to limit the impact of these groups, but many of the suggestions will require the intervention of actual humans, rather than the algorithms most social networks favor.

Finding the “hate highways”

The work, done by researchers at George Washington and Miami Universities, focused on networks of racist groups, centered on the US’ KKK. To do this, the researchers tracked the presence of racist groups on two major social networks: Facebook and a Russia-based network called VKontakte. The researchers crafted an automated system that could identify interest groups that shared links with each other. It would chart these connections iteratively, continuing until the process simply re-identified previously known groups. The system tracked links to other social sites like Instagram, but it doesn’t iterate within those sites.

The authors confirmed this worked by performing a similar analysis manually. Satisfied, the team then tracked daily changes for an extended period of 2018. Through this, they identified more than 768 nodes formed by members of the white supremacy movement. Other nodes were identified, but these tended to be things like pornography or illicit materials, so they were ignored for this study.

The groups identified this way varied in size considerably, with some networks showing a power-law distribution in size. The authors say that this indicates the clusters were self-organizing, since it would be difficult to engineer this pattern.

The networks were also geographically diverse. While VKontakte is primarily used in Russia and Eastern Europe, US-based white supremacists ended up using the service as well, and there were multiple cross-platform links and subgroups with presences on both networks. Networks on Facebook extend from the US into Western Europe, but they also have outposts in South Africa and the Philippines. This led to some bizarre cross-cultural links: “neo-Nazi clusters with membership drawn from the United Kingdom, Canada, United States, Australia, and New Zealand feature material about English football, Brexit, and skinhead imagery while also promoting black music genres.”

Unfortunate stability

The period that the authors tracked included some major events that altered the white supremacist networks. Most prominent among these is Facebook banning the KKK. That led to a wholesale migration of US-based KKK groups to VKontakte; in many cases, these were simply mirrors of the sites the groups had set up on Facebook. But things became complicated on VKontakte, as well, as Ukraine chose to ban the entire network in that country.

At that point, some of the original Facebook groups surreptitiously made their way back to the new platform, but they did so with some new skills. Hoping to avoid Facebook’s algorithms, the re-formed KKK groups often hid their identity by using Cyrillic characters.

Another notable event that reshaped the networks was the Parkland school shooting, after which it was discovered that the shooter had an interest in the KKK and its symbols. In the wake of the shooting, many of the small clusters of KKK supporters started forming links with larger, more established hate groups. “This adaptive evolutionary response helps the decentralized KKK ideological organism to protect itself by bringing together previously unconnected supporters,” the authors argue. They also note that a similar growth in clustering took place among ISIS supporters in the wake of the news that its leader had been injured in combat.

A possible plan?

Given the behavior seen here and in the previous study of ISIS groups, the authors built a model of the formation of connections among hate groups. They used this to try out a few different policies in order to see how they might reduce the robust networks formed online. The result is a series of suggestions for any platform that decides to get serious about tackling hate groups that use its service.

To begin with, they argue that the first thing to do is focus on banning the small clusters of hate group members that form. This is easier, since there are far more of them, and it’s these individual clusters that help provide the resiliency that dilutes the impact of large-scale bans. In association with this, the platform should randomly ban some of the members of these groups. This both undercuts the hate groups’ resiliency, and, because the total number of bans is relatively small and randomly distributed, it reduces the chance of any backlash.

Their last suggestion is that platforms encourage groups that are actively opposing the hate groups. Part of the reason that people form these insular groups is because their opinions aren’t welcome in the wider society; groups on social networks allow them to express unpopular opinions without fear of opposition or sanction. By raising the number and prominence of groups opposed to them, a platform can reduce the comfort level of those prone to white supremacy and other forms of hatred.

Nature, 2019. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1494-7  (About DOIs).

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1557119

Make Facebook and Instagram your friend.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/324723

Following years of accusations that it stifles right-wing speech, Facebook has published an audit failing to show any particular anti-conservative bias, and some conservatives are furious.

Law firm Covington & Burling LLP conducted the audit under the auspices of former Sen. John Kyl, a Republican who served in the US Senate representing Arizona from 1995-2013 and again for several months in 2018 following the death of Republican Sen. John McCain. The interim report (PDF), released today, seeks to reconcile the different ways Facebook sorts and presents content to its billions of users with users’ perception of biased or quashed material.

Conservative politicians have for years been complaining that Facebook suppresses right-wing speech, despite nonpartisan data showing that conservative outlet Fox News is far and away the biggest English-language publisher on Facebook by user engagement. Fellow right-wing outlets Daily Wire and Breitbart also feature prominently among the top sites by engagement, mixed in among mainstream news outlets such as NBC, the BBC, CBS, and The New York Times.

Claims about alleged anti-conservative bias on social media have reached new heights in recent months, with the Trump administration and the president himself amplifying the allegations. The White House held a social media summit in July, at which Trump lambasted “the tremendous dishonesty, bias, discrimination, and suppression” practiced by Twitter, Facebook, and Google.

The audit

As “conservative” is an imprecise and flexible term, former Sen. Kyl writes, the report considered the extremely broad umbrella of “political conservatives, people of orthodox religious views, libertarians, pro-lifers, traditionalists, Republicans, and free-speech advocates.” From that pool, Covington identified 133 persons to interview in 2018, then conducted follow-up interviews in 2019.

The report generally puts the concerns interviewees identified into one of six overall buckets, such as content enforcement or ad policies. But by and large, the most frequent problem identified in every category is one of transparency. Respondents felt that the algorithms Facebook used to surface content were unclear and the mechanisms behind efforts to reduce spam “too opaque.”

Similarly, interviewees complained about Facebook’s hate-speech designations and policies, both objecting to the entire category of “hate speech” existing in the terms of service and also objecting to how organizations are categorized as “terrorist groups or hate organizations,” which are prohibited on the platform. They also took issue with the way Facebook flags content as violating one of its policies and the completely unclear and occasionally seemingly arbitrary process for appealing a takedown.

Some complaints in the report, such as the claim that fact-checking by organizations such as the Associated Press and PolitiFact skews to the left, definitely espouse a conservative point of view. Complaints about Facebook’s lack of transparency and seemingly inconsistent or arbitrary enforcement of its rules, however, have for many years been coming from all sides.

The conclusion

“Freedom of expression undergirds the First Amendment,” Kyl writes in his conclusion, as well as being considered a basic human right by the United Nations. But for all the complaints identified by participants in the research, the report does not actually identify any specific or consistent bias.

“Facebook’s policies and their application have the potential to restrict free expression,” Kyl notes. “Given the platform’s popularity and ubiquity, this is a danger that must be taken seriously.” The platform has made some baby steps toward transparency that help, he concludes, but “[t]here is still significant work to be done to satisfy the concerns we heard from conservatives.”

“While we err on the side of free speech, there are critical exceptions: we don’t allow content that might encourage offline harm or is intended to intimidate, exclude, or silence people,” Facebook communications VP Nick Clegg wrote in a company blog post. “And we work to slow and reduce the spread of content like debunked hoaxes and clickbait by downranking it in News Feed. We know we need to listen more as we work to strike the right balance with these policies.”

Facebook might have hoped having a staunch conservative oversee the audit and write the report would mitigate criticism by Republicans. It did not. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said in a statement that the report wasn’t a genuine audit. Instead, he called it “a smokescreen disguised as a solution.”

“Facebook should conduct an actual audit by giving a trusted third-party access to its algorithm, its key documents, and its content-moderation protocols,” Hawley added. “Then Facebook should release the results to the public.”

The Media Research Center, a conservative organization, criticized the report, saying it “stunningly fails to admit fault or wrongdoing,” and that any changes made by Facebook to date toward addressing the complaints levied by conservatives are “empty and insulting.”

Nor was the report met with open arms by left-leaning groups. The Center for American Progress told Politico the report was a “lurid fiction perpetuated within right-wing circles,” adding, “Facebook made a grave mistake in allowing external political actors to direct an assessment of company policy and practices.”

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1555017

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