Google recently released a new update to search algorithms, which features improved AI with a greater ability to read and understand more content. Having a clear sense of how your customers search (and what they search for) can enable you to use SEO and empathy to connect in a way that meets their needs.

This BERT update, which impacts both Google’s software and hardware, provides greater clarity on two things that are essential for creating useful and effective content: What people are thinking about and how they’re living their lives. In a nutshell, it means Google’s search feature will enable users to find more useful information based on their queries, more quickly and easily:​​

​As a firm, we’ve been saying for a while that with improvements in artificial intelligence and voice-based search, Google will be able to read more of the internet and to understand more of it. To date, Google has been skimming the internet and looking for keywords in places a human would look to understand an article at a glance - in headlines, in the first paragraph, etc.

​For that reason, we’ve always suggested having content that follows SEO best practices, but more importantly that puts the core needs, struggles, and desires of your customers first. To understand those needs, struggles, and desires, we must use empathy in conjunction with data, which helps us understand how customers are searching for our products and services in different scenarios.

While some of the focus of Google’s update is simply clarifying search intent in basic ways:

​It’s also easy for there to be a mismatch between how you present your products and services, and what customers are actually searching for. A common mistake businesses make is to focus their copywriting on their own business goals and personal passions. Sometimes, we do this at the expense of connecting effectively with our customers and their problems, aspirations, and goals.

For example, looking at the websites for two farms in the New York area, the first example focuses on traits like how big the farm is, and how it is family-owned.

In this second example, this farm focuses on the desires of their customers (for delicious, nutritious, farm-fresh food, for people who want their purchase to make an impact) as well as on things that might be difficult for their customers (emphasis on ease of sign-up and pick-up, and ability to pause CSA subscription at any time.)

There are a few tools that we regularly use as marketers to help us understand our customers:

• User Personas: Often used in web design, but just as helpful in marketing, user personas are fictional characters that represent your ideal customer. They help us imagine our customers’ needs and wants and effectively market programs to those customers. 
  
  • Button: Download our User Persona Template (we can make people give us their email addresses to do this - there’s a way to set this up in Mailchimp.)
    
    
• Customer Value Proposition Statements: A value proposition statement explains why people should buy your product. It should also convince a customer why they should pick your offering over the other options that they have. What you’re looking for is product-customer fit. We like Strategyzer’s value proposition canvas for this exercise. They have a nice explainer video here that explains how to fill out the worksheet. 
  

Start by taking your best guesses based on your interactions with customers, and then work to validate your assumptions by conducting user research. This could be as simple as making a few phone calls, observing customers as they search for various scenarios, or evaluating marketing analytics.

A great example of this in action can be seen in our work with Easterseals of DuPage & Fox Valley. With Easterseals, we asked parents of children with disabilities to explain what search terms they'd use in different scenarios, and one of the discoveries we made is that parents were searching for toddlers with [name of condition], rather than for services. This knowledge allowed us to write and implement new condition-focused landing pages—such landing pages for families seeking ADHD therapies or Down syndrome therapies—to reflect how parents were actually searching for services.

So how do we improve our search terms to be better aligned with our customer’s needs? Here are two of our favorite tools for improving our “listening skills” in the digital sphere within a search context:

• Google Trends allows you to track interest in specific search terms or topics, as well as view data for top keywords and topics based on “recently trending” searches. For example, by typing in the search term “things to do from home,” we can see that it rose from 61 searches the week of March 8-14, 2020, to 100 searches from March 15-21, 2020, as coronavirus quarantines were put into place.
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  For some businesses, this suggests some natural ways to engage with customers or to connect them with related services, such as printable activities for kids, streaming video services, or at-home workouts:
  

Here are some examples of businesses who responded to this trending inquiry in a paid advertising context, using offers to drive urgency to sign up:

Photo credit: Acorn TV

Photo credit: Barre3 Madison

Even though these examples are from a paid advertising context, good content, optimized for search queries can fulfill this need as well. Which brings us to….​

• AnswerthePublic.com is a specialized search tool that enables you to enter a topic, brand, or product and see what language people are using to search for it based on the most common questions asked.
  
  For example, if we again search “things to do from home” within the U.S., there are 47 common questions users are asking—which can help point to how to shape your SEO and content in the most relevant way possible:
  

Listening to your audience “in real time” means you can respond with empathy, provide relevant information, and adapt in ways that can immediately fill a need. In some cases, this may mean using language or emphasizing elements in your content that match how your audience is thinking and making choices.

It may also mean adapting what you offer and how you interact with your audience to fit their needs. That could mean holding events online, building ecommerce platforms, or finding ways to offer services remotely. Adaptation is key—and you won’t know how to adapt if you haven’t first “listened.”

Here are some ways organizations have adapted to the current reality of social distancing, while meeting people’s needs with empathy: 

• Faith organizations are offering online sermons, singing, parent check-ins, classes for kids, and group activities to keep congregants connected. Read about these ideas and more in our recent blog post.
• Several museums, including the Louvre in Paris and The Art Institute of Chicago, are offering virtual tours of their art collections, which keeps museum-goers connected to their mission, while keeping the museum front-of-mind.
• The Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden has been posting daily “Home Safari” videos on Facebook for families across the world, which gives their zookeepers a way to educate regular and prospective visitors and families a daily event to look forward to. By including a donate button, they’ve also enabled people from all over to provide financial support while the zoo is closed to the public.
• Multiple events have moved online in the wake of local and state restrictions on large gatherings, including Microsoft’s MVP Summit and the Google Cloud Next ‘20 event.

Not sure how to adapt your usual way of doing things to the emerging needs of your audience? Or maybe you’re struggling to maintain operations remotely and keep your team collaborating effectively. We can help with both. Not only can we provide remote coaching and online bootcamps on these topics, we can also helping you strategizing how to work remotely and provide services online.

Learn more about our services on our website, and if you’re a nonprofit or faith organization, you can sign up for a free 30-minutes consultation to get help with marketing, Zoom, SEO and more. Nonprofit organizations can sign up here. Faith organizations can sign up here.

In December of 2018, Sarah Best was a speaker at my Rotaract Club meeting, a student organization that I co-founded on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. She delivered an inspiring presentation about her path that lead to her founding and CEO of Sarah Best Strategy. What stuck with me the most was that she emphasized the potency of always asking questions and forming connections with others, so I did just that. I reached out to Sarah the following day and was fortunate to be offered an internship with Sarah Best Strategy the following semester.
 
My name is Elise Goldstein, and I had the pleasure of interning at Sarah Best Strategy for the spring and fall of 2019 (my sophomore and junior year). I am a student in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at UW-Madison, and I learned a great amount about working in a digital marketing agency. The unique aspect about my internship at SBS is that I had the opportunity to work hands-on with the CEO and founder.
 
Sarah has taught me the importance of being detail-oriented, mission-driven and loving what you do each day. When I would come into the Industrious Office and meet with Sarah, I truly admired her organization and ability to run the company while maintaining strong relationships with her clients.
 
Beyond this, being the only intern at the company allowed me to explore a variety of positions within an agency and figure out my strengths, weaknesses, likes and dislikes. From day one, Sarah and I compiled a list of my interests and I was able to exhibit all angles of the company. On a daily basis, I helped to create, post and boost social media content for clients such as Clergy for a New Drug Policy while utilizing Sprout Social and Facebook Business, which are social media management tools. I conducted research on TikTok's impact on brands, which was used in Sarah’s consulting session. I sat in on meetings and consulting sessions with clients. I pitched and designed social graphics for Forward Community Investments to use to promote the Nan Cheney March for Justice Award Ceremony. I analyzed and synthesized data into a report for the YMCA based off of their competitors. I also was in communication with the rest of the Sarah Best Strategy team, and they were extremely warm and welcoming towards me.

All of these roles in my internship have strengthened my strategic communication background and given me tools that I believe will be useful for any future aspiration of mine.

A well-crafted annual report can be a powerful vehicle for sharing your message and accomplishments. Once finished, organizations often step back and strategize how to convert the full-breath of the report into engaging social posts. But what if you approach the annual report from a social media-first perspective at the very outset?

It's common knowledge that attention spans are getting shorter. We're bombarded by news, videos, and images every day, every where. It's estimated that Generation Z's attention span clocks in at roughly eight seconds, with 98 percent of them owning a smartphone. A report from Deloitte, the average American consumer now checks their phone 52 times per day. 

That means your audiences are likely interacting with your annual report in ways you never planned for. Taking a social media-first perspective will do more than make your social media manager happy, it'll bring in more readers and drive fresh traffic to last year's content, keeping key stakeholders engaged throughout the year. 

As you approach the year's end, take an inventory of all your blog posts, stories, photos, press releases and other materials over the past year. As you sort through it all, think about which stories qualify as the most compelling and keep in mind where you can utilize dynamic visuals. As you keep a social-first focus, consider using the following strategies to highlight the necessary facts, figures and images while opening the door to greater interest (and engagement):

With many annual reports, there's a tendency to create drafty long stories and standard letters from the leaders. With a social media-first perspective, consider where you can use visuals instead of text--and gather together facts, figures, images and examples that can demonstrate your work and vision in a more succinct way. 

For example, in developing last year's annual report for Food 4 Farmers, we spread a conventional story arc across three pieces:​​

• Illustrate the challenge - Food 4 Farmers does more than help farming families develop food security strategies, it builds awareness of the challenges that coffee farmers face. What's the challenge you face? What didn't work? How did you overcome the challenge or not?

• What success looks like - Success was illustrated by one of the Food 4 Farmers' most popular programs: beekeeping. Not only did it help farming families diversify income, these pollinators also contributed to food security. 

• Setting aspirations - Eighty percent of all participants in the organization's programs are women and young girls. While food security is the organization’s main goal, there are intersecting issues—like gender and productive opportunities for young people—that Food 4 Farmers focuses on. You have challenges, you have success, but where are you headed next? 

When you build your story with different elements rather than a self-contained narrative, you'll make it easier to break your annual report down into posts that you can share over weeks and months as you roll it out. 

In any of the narratives we used for Food 4 Farmers, we gathered common elements that easily convert into social media posts:​​

• Impact information - What are the numbers that get to the heart of each story? (It's not just about how many people you reached.) For Food 4 Farmers, we looked into how much families saved on groceries after they added a home garden and how much income or productivity increased (or didn’t) thanks to interventions like beekeeping. â€‹

• Images - Well-composed photos can generate interest beyond words. Make sure that each story has at least one photo that defies description and invites your readers in. 

• Individuals - Figures and numbers are important, but they're difficult to relate to. Create concise stories of people—the important individuals that illustrate the larger goal and make success possible. 

• Infographics - Rather than creating a singular infographic, develop artwork that can be broken down into pieces and shared individually or all together.​

For those of you eager to go above and beyond this year, we've got two more tips to share:

• Sizing is important - Don’t just share the same graphic across all social media channels. Make sure the images are cropped to the proper size for the channel you’re chasing. Vertical, horizontal, square? It matters to your readers. Try using Canva, which offers free templates to help you set up the proper size.
• Extend the approach to all content - Preparing for an annual report shouldn’t just come up at the end of the year, it’s a process that hums in the background throughout the year as you consider what to publish on your blog, social media and in traditional media. How are you planning your stories for the entire year? How will these be reflected in your day-to-day posts on Twitter, Tik-tok, Facebook or LinkedIn? 

 
For ideas on boosting your content planning strategy, check out our Same-Page Content Planning Case Study. And if you’re looking for help promoting your Annual Report or other accomplishments on social, we offer Social Media Management for nonprofits of any size.

None of this would be possible without the trust and collaboration of our clients. It means a great deal to be entrusted with a company’s vision and brand, and it never ceases to thrill us when a client calls to tell us we’ve made their life easier through our services.

To all of our clients: I and my team are so grateful to you them in our lives—and we are inspired by the work you do each day. If I could send cupcakes to each and every one of you, I would. But instead I hope you’ll accept my sincerest gratitude. Thank you for making my first four years memorable. ​

The Sarah Best Strategy team is in Orlando, Florida this week, doing live social media for the 66th Annual IWCS Cable & Connectivity Symposium Conference.

​We've done live social media executions for many conferences, fundraising events, and theater festivals. Live social media can help drive key business results, such as generating millions of impressions, improving customer experience, and promptly addressing (and containing) negative feedback. Capturing the energy of a live event is also an incredibly powerful way to share the story of a brand.

Here are some keys for success that we've picked up through our work.

What does doing live social media at a conference or other large event entail? Spreadsheets! Spreadsheets! Spreadsheets!

Before we leave for a conference, we obtain a copy of the conference program and pre-write as much content as possible. We pre-schedule reminders about key conference events.

​Having a solid layer of content in place before the event allows us to focus on live storytelling - whether we're sharing key quotes from speakers, photography from the floor of an exhibition, or wrapping up what's happened each day.

Also before we leave for the conference, we spend time looking up the Twitter handles of conference speakers and exhibiting companies ahead of time.

Where pre-conference or pre-festival content may focus on channels like Facebook or LinkedIn (depending on the conference's focus), the best channels for live content are Twitter, Instagram, and potentially Snapchat. There are two reasons for this.

1) Lag: When you do a Facebook post, there can be a lag in between when you post the event, and when it shows up in the newsfeed, making it less ideal for truly timely information.

2) Cadence: Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ accommodate a lower cadence of posts that channels that are constantly refreshing. In other words, you'll annoy people if you post too much. 

Twitter and Instagram's constantly refreshing stream of content is a boon in this case. While both platforms still use an algorithm to highlight content a reader may have missed, it's still more likely that people will see live content, and use these channels to keep tabs on what's happening at an event as it's happening.

I can't emphasize this enough—good photography is critical to telling the story of an event, whether you're talking about a corporate conference, a nonprofit fundraiser, or an arts festival. 

At live social media executions, we typically work closely with a professional photographer to outline what types of shots that we think will work best. Particularly if there is an opportunity to get those shots retweeted by a partner with a large number of followers. 

For other events, we shoot photos and take short videos ourselves with our phones, and often train other staff on how to take compelling photos so that we have "eyes" in many places at once. It's important to make sure everyone has phones with decent cameras (a recent smartphone should suffice).

Photos below courtesy IWCS / John Disney.

For large conferences, you may get a high volume of inquiries from conference or event-goers. For our work at the Institute of Food Technologists, for example, we received hundreds of inquiries per hour through Twitter.

A best practice here is to have the answers to common questions pre-written ahead of time, so that you can promptly respond to people with common questions about parking, registration, tickets, schedules, etc. 

Hey, stuff happens. It's not uncommon for unexpected issues to crop up at an event, such as sound bleed between two rooms or someone having a problem locating a parking lot.

For customer feedback that requires some follow up (such as a complaint), it's important to know what the chain of command is for a particular event, and to have contact information (cell phone numbers are best) so that you can reach the person who can address or respond to a problem as quickly as possible.

For some events we've worked at, the phone numbers of key staff were written on the back of our staff badges so we always had cell phone numbers handy.

If you're producing social media for an event, having your phone, laptop, or other device run out of juice can mean the difference between capturing an important moment and just being out of luck. We often travel with three external battery packs and a fresh set of USB cords so we can stay charged up at all times. 

Other people we know travel with portable wifi hotspots, in case the conference internet is bad (which is often the case). Have a gameplan for what to do if your connection is unsteady.

So for people who are not familiar with how hashtags work, it's common for conferences and events to use a branded hashtag (like #IWCS2017) to denote any content related to the event. This also gives attendees the opportunity to share their thoughts and photos too.

Because hashtags are searchable on Twitter and Instagram, this is a great way to find content that you can repost or retweet. 

But if you've waited to set a conference or event hashtag until the day of, it's too late. Like any sort of branding, hashtags work when they are clear, easy to type, are used consistently (ideally on ALL content, pre-conference and day-of) and repeatedly. 

The events that I work at print the hashtag on collateral materials, programs, signs, so that people know to use them. We work hard to raise awareness of the hashtag year-round if not in the months leading up to the event itself. 

Doing live social media can be really exciting—there's no better feeling than capturing a critical takeaway, photographing a moment that really tells a brand's story, or amplifying what's happening at a live event out to much broader audiences. If you're energized by a dynamic live event, chances are your content will communicate a certain energy, too.

By having a solid plan in place ahead of time, you'll be well-poised to go with the flow, tell rich stories, and provide immediate feedback to attendees who need help or want to share your feedback.

Learn more about our live social media services.

In our free Social Media and Google Analytics guide, we share our four favorite Google Analytics reports related to social media. These reports help us understand:
​

1. ​How are people getting to my website? Are they coming from social media?
2. How are people getting to a specific page on my website?
3. Do my customers like my content?
4. Are my customers signing up for my mailing list? Are they buying something?

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