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Four Ways To Amplify Your Team’s Creativity

SEPTEMBER 22, 2021

While there is no single formula for creativity, there are a lot of ways to get a team’s creativity flowing. Fostering an open place for ideas to be heard is the best way to make it happen, but how can leaders help?

Here are some ways you can boost your team’s creativity so they’re ready to take on any challenge or bring new ideas to the table.

1. Autonomy: It’s no surprise that trusted employees are more likely to be engaged and have better performance. One way to show some trust is by providing flexibility and autonomy so employees can work at their natural energy levels.
2. Retreats: This is all within budgetary constraints, but your team might be in dire need of a change of scenery or a change of pace. Give them a break! A retreat can come in all shapes, sizes, and durations. Even just a few hours away from the daily grind could do wonders. The trick is not to dangle a step away from work just to overwork your team after it’s over.
3. Diversity: Variety is the spice of life. Diversity is vital for bringing different perspectives. A more diverse team offers more voices, experiences, and solutions. A variety of backgrounds and skills working together is going to end up with much more creative problem solving overall.
4. Rethinking: There’s a lot of power to be found in processes. Unfortunately, tight processes can crush creativity. On occasion, you need to review, break, and rebuild systems to see where you could find more innovative thinking. Since everything is constantly changing, being actively open to defying the same old same old is your way to unlocking creative solutions.

Are you already doing this as a leader? Pat yourself on the back. If not, maybe it’s time to look at ways you can support the creativity and innovation of your team. Check out the full Forbes article for examples of how to do that.

Google Changes to Know for 2022

SEPTEMBER 20, 2021

It’s no secret that Google switches it up on us every now and then (even though sometimes those changes are a secret to us). Keywords will always matter, but here are the big six changes to be aware of for your SEO and ranking on Google.

No. 1: It’s the MUM Era – Google had previously launched BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) which understands intent from search queries. Well now there’s MUM. MUM (Multitask United Mode) is Google’s new interpretation model that uses more conversational queries, analyzes video content, and has a higher language count.

No. 2: A Little More Conversation – Google unveiled LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), a machine-learning model designed for dialogue. LaMDA wants to have a conversation and provide results based on what users feed it.

No. 3: Shopping is Serious Business – The Shopping search engine has found new life. Google’s Shopping Graph, Linked Loyalty Programs, discount searching, and more cart reminders are among some new shopping features.

No. 4: Just Rank an Excerpt – Can’t rank your page? Just rank for a part of it, then. “Passage indexing” or “passage ranking” allows a page to rank for a specific part instead of ranking for the whole page.

No. 5: Key Moments from Video – Googled will launch two new video structured data types that can give users content for a “Suggested Clips” tab from your videos. Clip markup and Seek markup let you pull out key moments from your videos.

No. 6: Core Web Vitals – Page experience is going to play a larger role in ranking. This is based off of Google’s Core Web Vitals, a set of metrics that measure a page’s load speed from a user experience perspective.

Check out Single Grain’s full piece for more deets on Google’s technical specs, retail examples, and Core Web Vitals.

Your Guide to Content Syndication

SEPTEMBER 19, 2021

Sometimes you wanna get your content to the masses, right? You need some content syndication in your life. Content syndication is publishing your online content on a third-party platform. The big benefits are to grow your traffic, grow your brand awareness, and generate more leads.

It’s a marketing quid pro quo. The third-party site gets your sick content to plug with your byline, and your content gets a whole new set of eyeballs on it. Content syndication can mean:

Republishing a piece entirely
Publishing a shorter version of the piece
Posting an excerpt or summary from the original piece

It’s as simple as a copy and paste situation, though. It takes a strategy, so let’s get into it.

The content has to be link-worthy. Ensure that the content you make is relevant, high quality stuff that other sites would want to post.

The platforms should be a right fit. What sites would your target audience read? Then what would those platforms publish?

The content has to be tagged properly. The method of tagging helps tell search engines the content isn’t plagiarized. Use a rel=canonical tag, a meta no index tag, or regular backlinks.

The performance needs to be tracked. Engagement, qualified leads, conversion rate, and win rate are the biggies to keep up with from your syndicated content.
The strategy should evolve. Try different methods and platforms, or reuse them as needed.

So we said it takes some finessing. Sometimes syndication could actually work against you. We advise to screen sites ahead of time and be wary of the risk that your syndicated content could outrank your original content SEO-wise.

We can’t fit everything about syndication, but G2 can! Their Learn Hub piece is chock full of examples and specifics, so check it out!

6 Tips for Your Gamification Strategy

SEPTEMBER 14, 2021

What is a gamification strategy? A gamification strategy is using gaming techniques to incentivize something. It’s especially prevalent in online communities, workforces, and software participation.

How can you use it in your business model? Here are some tips before you get started with a gamification strategy:

It’s for the long haul: One of the chief things to avoid when it comes to gamification in the workplace is going too deep too early but treating it like a one-and-done program. Think through gamification in ongoing, longer terms, and how it could benefit an individual user.
Chill on just rewards: People love prizes, but they’re all about the engagement, too. If you focus too heavily on the rewards aspect, gamification isn’t sustainable.
Make sure it’s open to all: Help every user that comes across your gamification understand how the game works, what the goals are, and how to succeed. Keep it accessible to anyone who wants to interact with it.
It’s not all about the top dogs: We’re not advocating a whole bunch of participation awards, but you have to reward engagement. Granted, winners have a huge influence on usage, but all users make the dream work.
Give creative rewards: Back on the topic of prizes, Get creative with them. Prizes don’t have to be physical when you can also offer things like small shout-outs.
Track and report: As with any strategy, time to analyze the performance. How does gamification perform against your brand goals?

Is a gamification strategy or program right for your business? Read more on the strategy with EveryoneSocial’s piece about it.

The Case for Ugly Design

SEPTEMBER 8, 2021

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right? After all, ugly is a pretty subjective term. But when it comes to design, there are standards, and sometimes rules. What happens if you break them? Sometimes: eye sores. Other times: magic.

That’s when you can make a case for “ugly” design and when breaking the rules is a good move. Here are some reasons designers are doing that:

It’s a Philosophy: Beautiful is boring! The idea is that shedding the tradition away from your design will leave you with genuine, interesting, “smarter” results. It’s that “down with the man” fire in designers’ bellies that drives them.

It’s Progressive: This is where the philosophy can get a little deeper than design, but beauty standards, filters, and edited photos get into a new layer of editorial design that is starting to become out of touch. Be real! Be raw!

It Defies “The Grid”: Non-traditional layouts break you out of the same editorial boxes that many designers find themselves repeating.

It’s a Whole Typeface Movement: Reject the standards! Fonts can mark whole movements in time. There’s a resurgence in experimentation and the blending of serifs and sans serif type faces.

Fun Fact on “Grotesque” (a.k.a. Grotesk, Gothic) – Generally, grotesque is used as a synonym for sans serif fonts. It all started with an 1815 set of sans serif fonts that were affectionately referred to as “grotesque” because they were thought to be ugly for publishing.

It’s Freeing: Just give the people what they want. People are complex. And weird. And distracted. Free your design, and you may just capture their attention.

Check out Fast Company’s piece for visual examples and a deeper dive into the uggo philosophies.

Stay creative out there, creatives.

Repurposing Content for Social Media

SEPTEMBER 6, 2021

Getting your social media content to rank high in any platform’s algorithm is like trying to hit a moving target. Relevance and timing is everything, but coming up with content to feed the beast usually ends with brands sacrificing quality over quantity.

This is when repurposing content comes in handy for marketers spinning their wheels. You take your best stuff and put it back out there for a number of reasons. The big benefits for marketers to repurpose content are:

Reinforcing brand messaging
Boosting SEO and driving traffic
Reaching new audiences and supporting new leads

Sounds good, right? Well don’t think that it’s as easy as a copy and paste job. Repurposing content is a strategic balance and not all content is meant to be repeated. As with everything marketing move, it should be goal-focused and relevant to your audience.

Some basics: Find your best-performing content first and then reformat it across different channels.

Some specifics:

Steer the conversation: The best way to do this is to ask your audience a question. And your content is the answer.
Make it video-worthy: Turn your long-form blog content into bite-sized video or audio that your audience can consume easier.
Make it GIF-worthy: Already have video content? Chop your most interesting visuals into GIFs for social posts.
Make Images from Inspo: Get inspiration from your own written content and turn it into a visual of some kind using quotes, headlines, or stats.

There really are endless ways to take your top posts and find new ways to get them in front of your audience. Check out Sprout Social’s full post for more ideas and details about repurposed content.

The Website Accessibility Checklist

SEPTEMBER 1, 2021

Not to toot our own horn (toot), but we know a thing or two about making accessibility a priority, not an afterthought, for websites. We get it! A lot goes into making a website beautiful and functional.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) has a full checklist of 50 criteria. To help you out with some of the major conformance features of websites, here is a checklist:

Back Away from Blinking: Flickering, flashing, or quickly alternating content can trigger seizures for people with epilepsy. If you are going to have shifting content, slow it down.
Color Contrast: Sometimes people can only read the text if there’s a strong enough contrast between the text and the background colors (psst, check out today’s Tool to help with that).
Alternative Text for Images: Screen readers help to relay what’s on a web page, but they can only use the information at hand. If your descriptive alt-text isn’t accurate, a screen reader is going to relay that.
Caption Your Content: People who can’t hear won’t know what’s being said in a video unless it’s captioned or transcribed.
Resizable Text: Most websites are all about trying to be responsive, but also keep resizable text in mind for people with low vision. Avoid a lot of images with overlaid text.
Keyboard Navigation: Unique scrolling can be interactive, but not everyone is using a mouse or mobile device the same way. Arrow keys or assistive technology should also be able to navigate your site.
Page Titles: Pages should have unique titles that are brief but descriptive for screen readers and SEO best practices. Two birds one stone!

Check out Essential Accessibility’s post for more details on website features that make your website accessible to those with disabilities.

60 Video Marketing Statistics

AUGUST 31, 2021

Because we are such visual creatures, video is often the best content to grab the attention of an audience. But just how important is video marketing? Well, Influencer Marketing Hub gave us a whole lotta stats on video marketing in use, how videos are being consumed on social media, and overall video trends. Now 60 stats is a doozy, so we picked out the ones we thought were the most interesting:

This past year, ere has been an 800% increase in global watch time of ad-supported and purchased feature-length movies.
Mobile video consumption rises by 100% every year.
More than 70% of watch time on YouTube comes from mobile devices (and that one is straight from YouTube).
Psychologists suggest that music can directly influence how viewers respond to your videos.
85% of Facebook videos are watched without sound, but 60% of Instagram Stories are watched with sound.
Videos under two minutes long generate the most engagement.
37% of viewers watch videos to the end.
83% of marketers say video helped them generate leads.

Now that we’ve seen the retirement of Twitter’s Fleets and LinkedIn’s Stories, we want to remind everyone of how important your platform is for video marketing. Per day:

Snapchat users watch over 10 billion videos
Facebook gets over 8 billion video views
Twitter receives over 2 billion video views
Instagram has over 500 million users using Stories

Check out Influencer Marketing Hub’s full list of statistics (and all of their linked sources) by clicking the button below.

Understanding the Google Page Title Update

AUGUST 29, 2021

SEO and the best practices that go along with it are always changing. Google, as the most widely used search engine, is at the forefront of SEO topics marketers have to keep up with. But it can get confusing, especially when Google can keep their specific algorithm details on the down-low.

Here are summaries of the latest updates for Google in the Summer of 2021:

The June Core Algorithm Update: As with many Google updates, there is a stress on quality, non-fluffy content to effectively support the search intent of users.
The Page Experience Update: This will use several page experience signals, including Core Web Vitals metrics, to influence search rankings. The Page Experience report in Search Console also got a new, more streamlined version.
The Spam Algorithm Update: A link spam update that targets spammy links with a more broad approach.
The Page Title Generation Update: This is a new system of generating titles for web pages.

With that last one, site owners everywhere were left shaken up at the titles coming up in SERP’s. Search Engine Journal reported on this “Titlepocalypse,” but they also gave the scoop on how it all works. Here are the big takeaways:

HTML title tags will still be used as a strong consideration factor by Google.
Google is now treating titles as more reactive to content changes, especially for news.
H1 tags, on-page content, and text within links are going to have a strong pull on title generation.

Fear not! Google is also open to feedback on this update. Check out SEJ’s full post to learn more.