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Unwrapping the Secrets of SEO: Brand Personas The New Phase of AI at Google I/O

Tesla founder Elon Musk deems it more dangerous than nuclear weapons. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg believes the technology will help save us from ourselves. Whether you’re onboard with advances in machine learning, few doubt true artificial intelligence is coming sooner rather than later. Upgrading won’t be optional once the paradigm shift happens. AI will soon manage whole businesses, oversee economic sectors and control brands. The next step? Building your brand persona. Find out why in this Unwrapping the Secrets of SEO.

Unwrapping the Secrets of SEO

Why a Brand Persona?

Artificial intelligence has long been seen as the next in line after mobile-first, the Internet of Things, smart assistants, voice and visual search, and the cloud. Google at its annual I/O developer’s conference from May 8-11 is expected to further detail plans for what the search giant believes will be a future where artificial intelligence guides everything from shopping and search to autonomous driving and home automation. The AI persona is a critical interface for voice search in particular, and could one day be a crucial factor in remaining competitive – even for small and medium businesses.

Upgrading certainly won’t be optional. A 2017 PwC study notes that where technology used to manage information in a business, AI will soon manage the whole business. Machines that are part of limited projects today will oversee economic sectors tomorrow, upending the way people communicate with potential customers. Yext’s Duane Forrester in a March talk issued a start wake-up call for marketers.: “If you are an SEO, you need to be deeply concerned about this. This is the bell chiming for thee.”

User experience, along with transparency, trust, and security are vital in this transition. It’s something many marketers intuitively understand. Yet one area where many already are behind the curve is the AI persona. In Hollywood, there’s the sinister Hal 9000 in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey or Jarvis in Marvel’s Iron Man movies. They point to the different faces and personalities of AI personas. On the tech front, Apple and Amazon have made Siri and Alexa household names.

To maintain your own brand, successful SEO and content marketing will require incorporating AI into your marketing strategy, including your website, and transitioning characters like Kellogg’s Tony the Tiger and the Geico Gecko from cute talking animals into personas that can accept input and make independent decisions about how to tailor messages specifically to the customer interacting with it.

 

Five Steps to Build Your Brand’s AI Persona

The days when a company merely adds a brand statement up on its website are gone. The coming new world will be one where the Geico Gecko can ask questions or look at past search behavior to quickly understand user intent, and create a strategy that meets that intent. AI engineering aside, there are five main steps to consider when creating your brand persona: the brand mascot model; the internet meme; mobility and voice; psychographic marketing; SEM strategies.

Forget Hollywood: A Brand Mascot That Thinks for Itself

Consider what your brand and your business would be like if they were a person? What kind of character would they have? What would their values be? You have to summarize the last decade of company development – and express future goals – through this single persona.

AI design company Kip says: don’t think of Hollywood. AI personas like HAL 9000 or the friendly R2-D2 from Star Wars are not that accurate or helpful. Instead, rethink the concept so that it is genuine, substantial  and original. One trick is to use novelists’ character creation techniques and to consult with creatives on brand character development.

Established marketers already should be adept at creating a likable spokes-character. Yet, remember cultural and local nuances are important. News outlets like Forbes often review America’s favorite and most-hated brand mascots. There is a fine line between creepy versus clever, funny or offensive, friendly instead of boring. For example, Business Insider found that Ronald McDonald and the Burger King are disliked by most customers.

The Internet Meme

An AI persona also incorporates potentially disruptive virtual marketing. Internet memedom can affect your persona’s performance. It’s a good idea to study memes and how they work with users’ instinctive responses. Heineken had huge success with their campaign, ‘The Most Interesting Man in the World,’ portrayed by actor Jonathan Goldsmith. In 2017, one of the top roaming Internet celebrities for hire was Grumpy Cat. In both cases, a psychologically appealing image, plus a catchy phrasal template appealed. The public urge to resend and repeat the character’s phrases spawned memedom, viral sharing, and contributed to the character’s longer term likability, bankability and durability.

Mobility, Voice Search, and Voice Appeal

Decide how your persona’s voice will sound. Does it have an accent? What gender would your brand have?

Google-owned GPS navigation company Waze made its chatbots big when they gave them celebrity voices. Stars like Morgan Freeman and Liam Neeson tell you where to drive. Waze users can also use their own voices if they prefer. The character voice should appeal to customer context; in this case, Waze needed a voice that conveyed a feeling of traffic and mobility. You can determine what priorities your customers have in relation to your brand through ranking keywords analyses:

 

Waze’s chatbot approaches platform status as it offers motorists local services and retail offerings, adapting ads to drivers’ direction Since March, small businesses can now buy ads on Waze Local to appeal to passing motorists. It likely won’t be long before mobile ads include an option for local businesses’ AI brand personas to speak to motorists as they drive by those businesses. Consider designing a persona that can engage in a positive and helpful way with bots and apps used by passing customer traffic.

When developing content, your AI’s technical capabilities and your AI persona, you should read and meet Google’s Voice Search Quality Raters’ Guidelines. Released in late December, Google explained how it uses humans to evaluate voice search rankings. The criteria were: information satisfaction, including the usefulness and length of a bot’s answers; and speech quality, the style in which answers are presented, especially elocution, grammar and sentence formulation. These guidelines are also applied to how Google Assistant prioritizes and offers “eyes-free” search results.

They can guide your own AI persona design. Make sure your persona speaks in a way that is appealing and accessible to a broad customer base.

Psychographic Marketing

[Lack of trust in Facebook: This example shows that Facebook user privacy is now related to scandals and other negative keywords. This is bad branding for such a big and successful company.]

Part of AI development includes giving customers what they want by adapting in real time to users’ responses and data. You can gather data on your customers by interviewing them or by reviewing your website analytics and SEO performance. Check what has already worked in your online presence and what hasn’t.

Customers are more likely to buy from a persona that resembles their own personalities. So when creating your AI brand persona, consider customer values first.

Customers like to be understood, not labeled. Understanding inspires trust, loyalty and empathy. The alternative is to get in to a brand-destroying series of scandals that erodes interest in your product, ads shown recently with Facebook and the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

 

The cloud allows AI to analyze vast data sets and use psychographics over demographics to understand people. Psychographics uses five OCEAN personality traits to analyze customers’ responses on social media: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.

The approach is truly global: shared beliefs, needs, and behaviors go way deeper than traditional demographic data like age, height, gender, nationality, and skin tone.

To make your old brand mascot and Internet meme model accessible and human, have your AI brand persona analyze and mirror your psychographic analyses. The five main types of brand persona are roughly analogous to OCEAN traits: excitement, sincerity, ruggedness, competence, and sophistication.

SEM Strategies: Micro-Niches and Long-Tail Queries

Marketers need to respect privacy concerns, but big data on social sites like Facebook will allow them to micro-target customers and find micro-niche markets.

Brad Parscale, digital director of Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral campaign, in an interview with 60 Minutes describes the power of finding micro-targets in big data: “I could find 1,500 people in one town that cared about infrastructure. Facebook lets you get to 15 people in the Florida Panhandle that I would never buy a TV commercial for. That’s micro-targeting.”

You can fine tune your AI persona by focusing on your customers’ personal queries to your website and examining their social media preferences and priorities. Google’s Voice Search Quality Raters’ Guidelines can give you strategies on how to earn Featured Snippets.

Similarly, SEM strategies that tell you how to dominate one specialized area of long-tail queries can help you prepare an AI persona to answer niche, fine-detail questions, that reveal how your brand or your products are specifically and perfectly suited to particular OCEAN sub-groups in your customer base. An example is this graph showing long-tail keywords for basketball shoes.

There are several ways to dominate a long-tail keyword set. One of them is to think from the customer perspective and analyze what they might be searching for, and then to modify your content and SEO strategy accordingly. Another option is to exploit an opportunity in Google AdWords. For instance, the ‘basketball shoes for men’ keyword set does not show any AdWords. Any competitive business could potentially occupy this area.

AI Becomes More Human, A Part of Daily Life

Artificial intelligence is not a fad. Virtual assistants and voice search are not going to go away. As Duane Forrester says, “This is a fast burn, fast-moving ecosystem.”

The aim is to make AI as human as possible. In 2016, Google trained a neural network model to string sentences together in a human way by making it analyze almost 12,000 eBooks, including thousands of fantasy and romance novels. The machine learned to express itself by writing creepy romantic poetry. A well-trained AI acquires nuance that shifts the machine from being creepy to friendly.

The other aim is to target micro-niches, to find customers for whom brand information is relevant to their personal needs. In April 2018, Amazon ran a competition for life hack skills developed for their virtual assistant, Alexa. The goal was to make Alexa match users’ specific needs in everyday life.

Pair this transit across the uncanny valley with fine-tuned AI analytics of big data to target individual consumers. This approach aligns a brand vision with psychographic analyses of a company’s customer base. Add an SEO assessment of the way the company’s website has performed in search already, and a business’s AI persona will come to life, bringing your brand into customers’ lives in seamless and positive ways.