See and be seen – the importance of marketing to machines

See and be seen – the importance of marketing to machines.

A brand is the identity of a company, a reflection of the visions and attitudes of the product to which consumers can relate. But today, brand awareness is no longer only about human perceptions. In this digital age, our brands are extremely dependent on machine predictions (algorithms) to make sure we are seen among the mass of content and competitors.

As in all marketing, we should focus on our human audience. Their perception, both emotional and rational, of a particular brand is highly connected to their own needs. This is also what the machines are trying to serve – and this is why marketing to machines is so essential.

Pull and push content

It’s important to meet two main types of audience needs;

those needs for which they are actively searching for a solution, and those needs for which they are not searching for a solution.

We can do this by combining pull and push content at the right stages of the customer journey. Pull content can be used to address what consumers are actively searching for, complemented by ‘thought leadership’ or push content to address the needs they don’t know they have (or aren’t actively looking for) through interruption and permission marketing.

We must be clear on one thing though; in both cases, algorithms play a crucial role. Search algorithms have an enormous impact on our brand visibility when it comes to pull content while social media sites’ feed algorithms impact the visibility of our push content.

We would argue that the modern marketer must have at least a basic understanding of how these algorithms work, and that it’s time to consider your role in marketing to machines as well as human audiences.

Making the best use of the most powerful machine

To effectively market to the ‘Google machine’ and reach our target groups as well as publishers and influencers, we must use our best marketing skills. A core concept behind Google’s algorithm is that your website and content earn digital authority in a very similar fashion to academic or scholarly authority, via references from other authoritative sources.

While Google has tested various methods of assessing digital authority, the number one method their algorithm employs is still links. The more digital citations (links) from authoritative sources that your content receives, the more digital authority it earns.

Our unique approach

To effectively market to the Google machine and reach our target audiences, we give particular attention to designing our campaigns to appeal to publishers and influencers. This not only offers us the traditional benefit of message amplification, but gives us much greater consistency in earning digital authority and successfully marketing to Google. Through the smart design of our content and campaigns, we are able to market very efficiently to a broader group of our target audience, as well as to Google’s machine which gives us an enormous increase in visibility and reach.

Contact us to learn more about how we do this