Inbound Marketing Age

Widely touted as the biggest change to the Google algorithm in years, the BERT update has been the subject of much media attention. But what is it and should content creators be worried about it? 

What is the BERT update?

BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, of course. It’s a technique for NLP (Natural Language Processing) pre-training, developed by engineers at Google that’s now being harnessed to improve the quality and precision of our search engine returns.  

Sadly, despite all the pictures of Bert and Ernie adorning the top of SEO articles - it has nothing to do with Sesame Street.

Forgive the question, but does your content marketing strategy ask your audience to ‘lie back’ and think of you?

Or does it demand they ‘lean forward’ and pay attention?

Traditional marketing stresses the importance of detailed demographics in defining, targeting and attracting the right customers for your business.

In the era of fake news is the idea of an 'internet news channel’ set up and paid for by a non-media brand, slightly unsettling? Remember the launch of Trump TV, which used all of the tropes and paraphernalia of 'real' television news to deliver highly distorted and downright untruthful messages to the general public on behalf of the Trump brand as he continued his presidential bid?

Long form written content is traditionally highly prized by marketers because we know its power. It gets better SERP rankings than short form, it’s seen as more authoritative by search engines, and quite often it's considered more shareable. 

Well-written, with the right keywords and centred around carefully chosen topics of ‘evergreen’ relevance, a long form piece of content (such as an ebook) can become a cornerstone of your digital real estate.

It will drive traffic to your site and support a virtuous circle of discovery, sharing and conversion.

With the rise of Siri, Alexa, Amazon Echo and Google Home, voice search has been promising a revolution in our digital behaviour at home and work for some time now, but has it really happened?

What’s the story?

Voice recognition has come a long way since the early days.

Remember Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella’s excruciating Cortona demonstration, where he asked the voice assistant to retrieve some data and she thought he wanted to buy some milk?

So, after all these years, content marketing is pretty much mainstream. And the pattern of a successful content strategy is by now, well established.

Fill your website with interesting, relevant blogs, the argument runs, become a resource for your audience, back up with eBooks and the occasional piece of video, then tend your patch. Your market standing, influence and sales will grow as result.

According to Gartner, when it comes to Account Based Marketing (ABM) we have just past the peak of the hype cycle. That means it’s downhill all the way from here, until expectations are readjusted and its true merits discovered once again.

At the moment the breathless blogging about its value to business might be sounding a little hollow. 15 Captivating Statistics That Prove You Need ABM Right Now, for example, seems to be suggesting it’s a magic bullet for everyone, which it certainly is not. There is also hype around ‘hands-free ABM’, which is promising effortless, fully automated solutions for what is, in reality, a detailed and complex task of analysis and execution.