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Google is no stranger to algorithmic change. And usually, those changes are made for the sake of the user. Looking at a history of Google’s product announcements, usability is usually at the heart of the modification.

So when Google announced its impending smackdown on mobile pop-up ads earlier this week, it came as no surprise that the major reason behind it was to enhance the user
experience.

For many businesses, the announcement carries major implications. Those that rely on advertisements as a primary source of revenue, for example, will be some of the hardest hit. To help you navigate this change, we put together everything you need to know below, from what the update entails to how to prepare accordingly.

What’s New in Mobile Search Results

Back in 2014, Google added a “mobile-friendly” label for search results that were optimized for such platforms — where text is readable without zooming or horizontal scrolling, and links are spaced well enough so that there’s a reduced chance of mis-tapping.

But two years later, Google has found that 85% of mobile search results are optimized that way. As a result, the search engine is doing away with that label, and introducing new mobile-specific ranking criteria.

And now, pages with mobile pop-ups — or what Google is calling “interstitials” — probably won’t be ranking as highly when these algorithmic changes take effect on January 10, 2017.

“Pages that show intrusive interstitials provide a poorer experience to users than other pages where content is immediately accessible,” Google’s official announcement states. “This can be problematic on mobile devices where screens are often smaller.”

Not all pop-ups are created equal, though, so there are some specifics around which types of interstitials Google considers to be disruptive to the user experience. Some are legally required — like ones used by liquor companies that verify the user’s age — so they won’t impact the page’s rank.

According to the official statement, interstitials affected by Google’s crackdown include the following:

• “Showing a popup that covers the main content, either immediately after the user navigates to a page from the search results, or while they are looking through the page.
• Displaying a standalone interstitial that the user has to dismiss before accessing the main content.
• Using a layout where the above-the-fold portion of the page appears similar to a standalone interstitial, but the original content has been inlined underneath the fold.”

Source: Google

What Does It Mean For Marketers?

As we mentioned before, the companies that rely on these interstitials for income will be especially impacted by this change. They’re the ones who, as Emma Hinchliffe of Mashable points out, need that ad revenue to survive. Now, these businesses face a difficult choice: Rank, or profit.

But losing SEO traffic can “crush” these companies, says HubSpot’s Senior Product Marketing Manager, Marcus Andrews. And that makes sense — 51% percent of digital media is consumed via mobile, compared to a lagging 42% on desktop.

Andrews suggests that, if they haven’t done so already, marketers solve for mobile SEO first. The pain that comes with changing a revenue model is inevitable, but shorter-term — and businesses that rely on advertiser dollars, he says, should figure out ways “to make money that don’t totally disrupt the mobile user experience.”

“Google is very focused on the user,” Andrews continues. “Marketers are always looking for hacky ways to increase traffic and conversion rates, and every once in a while, Google needs to make a correction to improve the user experience.”

That actually creates a great opportunity for marketers to think more about the user — both the experience, and what that person is offered. It’s what HubSpot’s Director of Product Development, Nicholas Holland, calls a “forcing function.” It makes marketers seriously consider the increasing overtaking of mobile technology, and what the implications will be on their overall business operations.

Basically, these developments from Google are a giant wake-up call to those who “create a bad viewer experience,” Holland says — especially those who might not even realize it. Now, they absolute must “think through alternative revenue methods.”

But what are those methods, exactly?

First — if it isn’t obvious by now — remove any pop-ups you’ve been using.

“As inbound marketers, we rely on driving relevant visitors to content,” says HubSpot’s Principal Product Marketing Manager, Jeffrey Vocell. “Interstitials, especially interruptive ones, do not provide a good experience, and in many cases actually block or limit the content that can be seen.”

That’s why your best option might be to create valuable content that draws the visitors that Vocell is alluding to. When you do that, Holland advises, you can focus on driving revenue — or at least leads — using calls to action and embedded forms. (And to learn more about converting those leads, check out our free ebook on optimizing landing pages.)

Replacing intrusive interstitials with valuable content is a double-edged SEO sword. Not only are you giving the user what he or she is searching for — and improving your rank accordingly — but you’re also getting rid of the invasive pop-ups that, come January, would be lowering it.

What You Can Do Now to Prepare

If you’re freaking out about Google’s announcement, that’s okay — but please, don’t be. As we mentioned, these changes actually provide a great opportunity to use inbound marketing to generally enhance your marketing presence — on mobile, or otherwise.

Here’s what you can do to get ready for the rollout:

• Ditch your interstitials — unless they’re required by law. Those include age verification displays, as noted above, and pop-ups that let your user know you use cookies.
• If you relied on interstitials for ad revenue, figure out where that money is going to come from now.
• Find ways to generate revenue without obstructing the user experience, and in a way that optimizes your page for mobile. Both of those factors will likely remain crucial to search engine rank.
• Know that those solutions often exist in the content you create. Make something valuable for the user. By gating it behind a landing page, you’re generating leads — and eventually sales — in a much less intrusive way that brings visitors to you.

What do you think about Google’s latest announcement, and what are you doing to prepare for it? Let us know in the comments.

Many schools are steeped in history, which makes it hard to change public perception. Transforming the image of your school or one of its programs can be Marketing’s biggest challenge. But as student needs and the education market evolve, rebranding your school may set you on the path to full enrollment classes.

Creating a new brand identity is an intensive process itself. But the work doesn’t end there. Once your school has developed its new brand and the key messages, you know need to let the world know! Invest as much thought and effort into your roll out. Otherwise, your school’s image is only transformed in your own minds. You need to start letting other people know.­­

Where Do Your Personas Fit?

Did your personas drive the rebranding effort or do they need freshening up now that it’s done?

In some cases, schools may have learned so much about their personas, their pain points and motivations, that they decided to revise their image to better suit where their personas are now. More likely, a school wants to transform its image to appeal to different, more target-rich, market.

Either way, don’t start planning a roll out until you have your personas updated. This includes identifying the meaningful questions and topics your new personas have for each stage of their enrollment journey, and how to frame them in the context of your new messaging.

Need to make your student or parent personas still? Try this free template for schools >>

Translate Your New Messages into Content

Now you’re ready to trumpet your new image to the world. You do that through your content. Start by reworking your SEO and PPC strategies to reflect your new key messages to attract the right people.  After you’ve identified new keywords to target, you can freshen up some old blog posts with a new message spin and keywords. You also want to build out a new blog editorial calendar that reflects the work you did both on new persona topics and your new keyword strategy. 

Your rebranding effort probably includes a new visual scheme as well, requiring a major website overhaul of its aesthetics, text, and photos. An updated website anchored by your new image and messages is worth sharing. You can write a press release announcing the new website and how it reflects the school’s mission and message.  

Repurpose your press release content as articles to go out in alumni and staff/faculty newsletters. Base an email campaign to your current database promoting your new image and directing them to a blog post or video you’ve made presenting your school’s new story. 

You also want to attract new prospects who will be motivated by your new image with a couple pieces of new anchor content. Anchor content is high-value, gated content you promote to generate leads into your database. This could be an analysis of education or employment trends that play into your new image, or preparation and application tips for a certain student population you want to encourage to apply.

You can build a landing page around the anchor content, as well as promote on your website and via social media. With anchor content, you not only get your new image out into the marketplace, you’re actively using your new message as the draw to get the right kind of prospects to identify themselves to you. 

The Roll Out Becomes Habit 

Living your school’s new image extends far beyond the roll out. The roll out is the announcement. While active promotion of your new image as “new” will eventually end, using your content to deliver your school’s message never stops. In fact, as your school brings in classes under the new vision, your school will start to collect the real-life stories of your students, faculty, alumni and school life that reflect this vision. These will all become stupendous sources of content you can use to emphasize and reinforce the reality of your school’s image.

So every plan needs a timeline, where you can chart the roll out steps, as well as how to proceed after you hit the tipping point when you’re no longer in roll out mode.

• Prior to formal announcement: You should already have researched and created a new SEO strategy. You can start seeding old and new blog content with this strategy. Think of it as a stealth roll out.
• Generating excitement for the new image: You might decide you want to share with alumni, faculty, staff and current students the upcoming changes. In addition to newsletter articles or internal emails describing the backstory and hopes of the new image, you can include calls-to-action for them to share linked content through their social media accounts. If you don’t want this to pre-date your formal announcement, time this to occur shortly after it.
• Formal announcement: This is timed to the roll out of your new website, along with a press release.
• In the months following the formal announcement: Run social media ad or PPC campaigns. Continue to encourage internal stakeholders to promote new image content via social media. Publish new blog, newsletter, and email content centered on more personal stories that emphasize the new school values you want associated with your school.
• Further down the line: Two, five years down the line, your new image is no longer new. Ideally by this point, your school is truly seen in the light that you’d hoped when you started the re-imaging process. These are the years where your new image either solidifies or you risk it never attaching. Either way, this isn’t the time to slow down. Especially now that you’ll have a good body of metrics, feedback, and other research you can use to refine how and when you deliver the right value messages in ways that attract prospects and drive enrollment.

Recreating your school’s image in the eyes of alumni, current community, and the wider public is never going to be an easy task. Yet keeping clear, consistent messaging throughout your content will go a long way to staying on track.

Hiring marketers for your company is not an easy job. Ironically, a lot of it is actually about marketing to potential candidates. But the best marketer’s out there know when they’re being marketed to, and are therefore tuning out the old-school recruiting noise.

Those copy-pasted job descriptions filled with buzzwords and new challenges aren’t going to suffice anymore, which is why HubSpot Academy and Udemy for Business teamed up to bring you: How to Hire and Train Marketing All-Stars.

In this ebook, you’ll learn how to focus on career context to attract your target candidates, as well as how to spot future marketing all-stars who will be able to make their mark on your company.

By the end of this ebook, you’ll know:

• How to reach your target candidates.
• How to spot future marketing all-stars.
• The inbound recruiting framework.
• How to deliver on your promise with career training.
• A new model for career training.

Download your copy of How to Hire and Train Marketing All-Stars now.

Not all creative insights are useful.

For instance, if you decided to design a four-story car with one wheel, no one would deny that the invention is creative, but it’s not likely to be hailed as the next big thing in transportation.

Creativity needs to be informed by real perspectives and grounded in a real-world context. If you want to change the way people drive, you need to fully understand how they drive now, what they find challenging, and why they drive in the first place.

Ultimately, good design means creating something that people actually want to use. It’s really quite simple in theory: If you consider the unique pain points and experiences of those around you, you’re better able to devise creative, applicable solutions to their problems. The big challenge lies in stepping outside of your own calcified biases to adopt a more empathic perspective.

Applied Empathy

At Sub Rosa, a Manhattan-based strategy and design studio, enabling employees to escape their biases and develop a more empathic form of reasoning is vital to the agency’s core philosophy and daily practice. Not only have they launched a successful podcast on the topic, they’ve also made empathy an integral part of their office’s culture.  

Michael Ventura, Sub Rosa’s founder and CEO, recognized a deficit in the way empathy was discussed and practiced in agency culture.

“So many of the articles that we read and see out in the world are very theoretical when they talk about empathy,” Ventura said. “It sounds very squishy. It sounds very loose, sometimes a little hippy-dippy. We really wanted to think about how empathy can be practically applied, and what is the process that would take.” 

Born from Ventura’s desire to make empathy a tangible business practice and cultural cornerstone at Sub Rosa, applied empathy is essentially a method of detatching from your personal biases and tuning into the greater context of a situation. 

“It’s fun to have the ‘wouldn’t it be cool if,’ type conversations,” Ventura said, “[But] you can’t blue sky something if you don’t have a perspective. Empathy is a great way of allowing creative problems to be solved with a grounding in the reality that they need to be deployed within.”

An Empathic Framework for Creative Projects 

While it may seem easy to dismiss applied empathy as another marketing buzzword, Sub Rosa’s commitment to empathy is backed up by an impressive portfolio. The agency has worked on high-profile projects for Pantone, Pepsi, and HP, among others. 

Ventura credits their sustained success with a strategic framework developed to objectively employ empathic reasoning on their clients’ projects. Centered around asking the right questions prior to writing the initial brief, the three-pronged process aims to help the agency develop a deep understanding of what a client wants to solve for or accomplish.

“The way we look at problem solving is really across these three buckets — company, consumer, and context,” Ventura said.

1) Consider the Company’s Structure and Culture

To begin to understand where their client is coming from, Ventura and his team ask questions that reveal a client’s cultural challenges and potential structural hurdles in their business model. Is their culture set up to support their objectives? What are their current strengths and weaknesses? Do they have the right team in place?

The goal here, Ventura explained, is “getting out of our own perceptions and getting into [the client’s] vantage — really understanding from the client side: what do they have that’s going to help achieve this and where their deficiencies exist.”

When examining a client’s internal environment, Ventura stresses that it’s also important to excavate their indigeny — their history, underlying values, and central identity. Understanding what’s indigenous to the client and their organization is crucial for crafting authentic work that accurately reflects the business. If the client’s company isn’t actually the most innovative product in the world, don’t make a campaign that claims they are. 

2) Consider the Consumer’s Perspective

Next, Ventura‘s team turns their attention toward the client’s target consumers, delving into their perspective to gain a deeper understanding of their interests, desires, and challenges.

What do the client’s customers or consumers care about? What kind of content do they read? Where do they go out for fun?

“Whatever it might be,” Ventura said, his team is focused on “getting ourselves empathically into the eyes and the minds and the hearts of the consumer, and looking outward from them to see the rest of the problem.”

3) Consider the Greater Context

According to Ventura, it’s not enough to simply make something that people want to buy. “You can have a business that has a good product and a customer who wants to buy it, but if they ignore the context, they’re missing a very important third leg of the stool,” he said.

To underscore the importance of grounding your work in a real-world context, Ventura likes to use the now-defunct SUV company Hummer as an example.

Back in 2008, Hummers were one of the most popular cars on the road. “There was a company who thought that big, aggressive, gas-guzzling vehicles were something to make and something someone would want,” Ventura said. “Low and behold, they were right. There were a certain group of people who thought that car was great.”

Despite their initially enthusiastic niche, Hummer’s business plan had a major flaw: They ignored the rising eco-consciousness of the world and the impending gas and financial crises.

“Unfortunately, Hummer goes out of business,” Ventura said. “Because while they had a willing audience to buy and a product that was interesting to that audience, they ignored the critical third leg of the stool, which is the context that they’re operating within.”

Recognizing Empathic Deficits

Cultivating an empathic practice isn’t always natural or easy, but the first step is beginning to recognize specific empathic strengths and deficits in yourself.  

To communicate these challenges more effectively and concretely, Sub Rosa’s team has developed a series of empathic archetypes that characterize individual components of empathy.

“For some people, they’re an optimistic problem solver,” Ventura said. “For some people, they’re better at looking for the chinks in the armor. There’s a million scenarios in between. What we set out to do was understand a set of archetypes that one would need to embody in order to be comprehensively empathic.”

What they ended up with was a set of seven empathic archetypes: 

• Sage: Be present — inhabit the here and now.
• Inquisitor: Question — interrogate assumed truths.
• Convener: Host — creatively anticipate the needs of others.
• Confidant: Listen — summon the patience to observe and absorb information.
• Cultivator: Commit — purposefully nurture and actively develop.
• Explorer: Dare — be confident and unafraid to take risks or pivot.
• Alchemist: Experiment — constantly test and try.

“The development of those archetypes was a way for us to almost create a scenario where we can play outside of our own biases or proclivities and actually work through problem solving with a different hat on,” Ventura said. “That type of process has allowed our organization to really learn a lot about ourselves as individuals who work and solve problems because we can understand where we most often land in those archetypes.”

As a starting point to figuring out which archetype you default to, ask yourself: Which of these archetypes am I more naturally inclined to? Which ones feel less natural?

Ventura explained there is immense value in knowing where you currently stand: “If someone was very inclined to be an explorer — which is about being daring, being confident, unafraid to take risks — and they are not very naturally inclined to be a sage — which is about really listening before speaking, absorbing information — one might actually force himself into the sage archetype more regularly so that they can have a bit more empathy for a problem from all sides.”

Discussing empathy isn’t always easy — particularly with your colleagues — but these archetypes provide a straightforward and common language for talking about the usually abstract topic. 

“We all speak the same language,” Ventura said. “Everyone at Sub Rosa knows these archetypes and has an understanding of how they play a role in problem solving. If I say to my colleagues, ‘I’m never really good at the explorer in these types of situations. Can someone help me work through that?’, we’ve now created a shorthand for the deficit. We now have this muscle memory and this shorthand that allows us to solve problems collaboratively by being self-aware.”

Feature image courtesy of Sub Rosa.