A warm atmosphere around SEO and Marketing Automation
On Thursday, February 2, 2023, the Webmecanik team and the Semji team had invited everyone interested in SEO and Marketing Automation topics. Held in the Esprit Libre room overlooking the Saône riverbanks in Lyon, the conferences and customer testimonial workshops started at 9 a.m., in a relaxed atmosphere with hot drinks and pastries.
The most anticipated conference? The one on the 10 SEO & Marketing Automation ideas to test in 2023! Sébastien Lefoulon, Head of Sales at Semji, and Sophie Panot, our Marketing Director, shared their knowledge with participants, who diligently took notes.
Conference recap: the 10 SEO & Marketing Automation ideas to test in 2023!
Exclusively, here are the 10 key trends of 2023 in detail, enabling all sales and marketing teams to adopt best practices to optimize the use of their content (thanks to Semji’s relevant advice) and create impactful email campaigns (with Webmecanik solutions). A selection of highlights.
What is EEAT: being legitimate and making it known
To begin this conference, Sébastien Lefoulon from Semji explained the acronym EEAT, an essential tool used by writers and copywriters before writing any content.
Four words to explain this acronym:
- Experience
- Expertise
- Authoritativeness: authority
- Trustworthiness: security
Ideally, each piece of content should be original (based on the writer’s Experience), useful, relevant, written by experts (Expertise and Authority), and published on a secure site (Trustworthiness).
These four points are essential to obtain SEO-optimized content and climb Google’s rankings.
Helpful Content Update: always bringing more expertise
Why does your site stand out from the others? Thanks to your expertise! Sébastien Lefoulon highlighted the importance of creating useful and up-to-date content to provide ever more added value. The days of texts designed 100% to please Google, saturated with keywords and ultimately not very informative, are over. Today, the algorithm has only one goal: answering internet users’ questions. Your website text must therefore be useful and expert to reach the top of the rankings.
AI, the future of SEO?
Artificial intelligence is on everyone’s lips. This new tool, which answers a question with a detailed and (often) relevant text, is called ChatGPT. It has already been widely adopted by content creators in particular, who saw it as an opportunity to eliminate writer’s block. Indeed, the tool provides an answer and a detailed text outline for every question asked by the user.
The Sales Director of Semji, an agency specialized in SEO optimization, wanted to warn the audience during this breakfast. These auto-generated texts are a bit like translations found on Google Translate. They are generated automatically but contain errors and are seen by Google as spam.
Artificial intelligence is useful for getting the framework of a text, but copying and pasting a text from ChatGPT onto your site can be severely penalized by Google (and by your readers if they notice!).
Content is timeless
Text content is the most natural, but other highly powerful types of content that are gaining popularity day by day should not be overlooked. Images, videos, podcasts, or social networks like TikTok or Twitch capture an audience ready to truly engage. More qualified than simple article readers, podcast listeners, for example, are 80% likely to listen to an episode all the way through. On the video side, 90% of respondents say that videos help them make a purchasing decision.
Don’t optimize only for Google
Is Google losing some of its power? Sébastien Lefoulon points out that Google’s goal is not to push users to click on links but rather to answer their questions. Thus, every year, the rate of searches that generate no clicks increases and now reaches 70% on mobile. Semji’s Head of Sales therefore recommends looking into the Amazon and YouTube search engines, which allow a real action on the user’s part. Three tips to remember to optimize your SEO content:
➡️A little artificial intelligence, but not too much
➡️Think user-first with useful content
➡️Vary SEO channels and media (videos, podcasts, for more added value)
The basics of marketing automation: the right offer at the right time to the right person
The conference, punctuated by participants’ questions, continued with a focus on marketing automation, presented by Webmecanik’s Marketing Director. What a shame it is to have good content but let it sit idle, or worse, send it to the wrong person at the wrong time.
In her talk, Sophie Panot revisited the primary goal of marketing automation: creating a lasting relationship with the prospect so they become a customer.
The 3 advantages of marketing automation:
- For the marketing department: fewer repetitive tasks, more added value
- For the sales department: hot leads are identified more quickly, follow-up is automatic, so no more cold calls!
- For the customer experience: messages are tailored and personalized for better service quality.
Account Based Management and lead scoring: automate your prospecting in B2B as in B2C
Having the ability to understand and analyze your customers’ behavior is possible thanks to Account Based Management and lead scoring. These two techniques, made possible by a marketing automation solution, allow you to detect opportunities and pass them on to the sales department.
A quick reminder:
- The major challenge of account based management is identifying anonymous visitors to your site while complying with the GDPR. It allows you to contact qualified leads in a personalized way, based on their behavior.
- Lead scoring essentially consists of ranking inbound prospects to help you identify their chances of becoming customers, using a points system.
In practical terms, if you see that a lead has downloaded a white paper sent by your marketing department, you can pass this information on to sales reps, who can use it during the next exchange with the lead. Example: “Hello, you downloaded our resource, do you have any questions about it?”
Likewise, marketing automation solutions allow you to understand your contacts even better thanks to a lead scoring system. For example, +10 points if your lead downloaded a white paper; as a result, this prospect moves further down the conversion funnel and can perhaps be called back by your sales team at the right time.
Marketing campaign: set up automated scenarios to distribute your content
Sophie Panot presented an example of a marketing automation scenario to target a novice persona. Find our methodology here to discover how to set up your first marketing campaign and distribute your content to the right people!
Lead management: truly qualify your leads thanks to marketing automation
In this conference, it is important to remember that one of the roles of marketing automation is to connect marketing teams and sales teams. CRM solutions work hand in hand with marketing automation solutions. These two tools, when well combined, ensure effective lead management, qualified prospects, and rewarded efforts!
The tracking of your contacts’ behavior displayed in your marketing automation solution must be transmitted to the CRM for real consistency between the two solutions and to create new opportunities. Since the salesperson is aware of an activity from their prospect, they can then get in touch and offer the appropriate solution.
Marketing automation scenarios to try right now
To conclude this conference, Sophie Panot insists on the three prerequisites that should be taken into account before starting any marketing automation campaign.
> Your database must be qualified and fairly recent (less than 18 months old)
> It is good to take inventory of your content and recycle it with each campaign
> Using already existing templates and forms saves time
Depending on your persona’s profile—novice, expert, or even ambassador—a marketing automation solution allows you to adapt your campaigns and finely qualify each contact in order to send them the right content and make the sales team’s work easier.
Three things to remember from this breakfast
This morning, rich in lessons, allowed Semji and Webmecanik experts to move thinking forward around the latest digital marketing topics, all in a friendly atmosphere in the heart of Lyon. In addition, Semji and Webmecanik users also shared their experience during two workshops to shed light on their progress since adopting these innovative solutions.
At Webmecanik, we retained three essential pieces of information:
Stay humble, because Google’s algorithm evolves
Sébastien Lefoulon repeated it: all information concerning SEO is constantly liable to change depending on Google’s algorithm and best practices. Years of work on content can go up in smoke because Google decided it. Staying humble and keeping things in perspective is the key to not getting discouraged!
Only 9% of your site’s pages perform in SEO terms
A striking figure for all content creators to remember: only 9% of pages perform in SEO terms on a website! An opportunity to identify which pages these are and how to optimize the others. This figure also means that if you constantly recycle the 9% of content that performs, you will gain time and achieve good long-term results.
The alliance of SEO and Marketing Automation is a winning one
Once the content inventory work has been completed, it is time to select the pieces you want to recycle and then distribute them to the right audience thanks to marketing automation.
The combination of solutions like Semji and Webmecanik allows you to save time with what you already have and prioritize quality over quantity. To find out in more detail how to recycle your content to increase your profitability, download our e-book here!
See you soon for new events! ?
