The Stack is a weekly podcast where we share and discuss the latest trends, news, and content from the world of marketing, sales, and tech. In each episode, Sean, Tim, and Ryan sit down to chat about the hard-hitting questions related to sales, marketing, and tech. You can subscribe on iTunes and Soundcloud.

In this episode, we share ideas on how to improve customer experience, what to do with old blog content and, Facebooks news feed. 

We would love to hear your thoughts so make sure to comment or tweet us at @Sylvestrer1, @SeanHenri, and @Tendrecroppes or @PepperlandMKTG.

How to improve customer experience: 2019 trends, strategy, & examples

By David Peralta on Hotjar.com

Hotjar recently asked 2,000 customer experience (CX) professionals about the state of their company’s customer experience strategies, methods, goals, and obstacles.

Key Takeaways:

  • The one thing customer experience leaders prioritize above everything else
  • The main drivers & methods they use to create and execute their CX strategies successfully
  • The biggest obstacles that keep them from achieving their CX goals (and what they’re doing to overcome those obstacles)
  • The #1 frustration customers face throughout their overall experience

Google Hides Search Results for Some Queries that Involve Time, Calculations, Unit Conversions

By Matt Southern for Search Engine Journal

Google can and is perfectly willing to remove search results from the SERP if it decides that a query or search doesn’t warrant a variety of answers. While this is likely to improve user experience and save searchers time, it’s also going to detract clicks to certain websites. This appears limited right now to specific types of searches, but could easily be expanded.

“Google has begun hiding full search results for certain types of queries and providing only direct answers instead. This change appears to be affecting queries that involve time in different cities, math calculations, and unit conversions.”

Key Takeaways:

  • Even though the larger issue is Google taking away traffic from other sites. This traffic is likely unqualified.
  • If your company deals with issues related to these types of queries, be sure to differentiate yourself so you show up in search queries.

What to Do with Your Old Blog Posts

Laurel Taylor for Moz

Back in the day, quality and algorithms were just not up to speed like they are now. We’re talking back when stuffing your content with keywords would give you a good ranking.

So what are you supposed to do with old content that may not be up to par to today’s standards?

“Around 2005 or so, corporate blogs became the thing to do. Big players in the business world touted that such platforms could “drive swarms of traffic to your main website, generate more product sales” and even “create an additional stream of advertising income” (Entrepreneur Magazine circa 2006). With promises like that, what marketer or exec wouldn’t jump on the blog bandwagon?”

Key Takeaways:

  • Spring Cleaning – look back and decide what to keep and ask yourself these questions:
    • Is it beneficial for users?
    • Is it beneficial for us?
    • Is it even good?
    • Is it relevant?
    • Is it causing issues throughout the site?
  • With posts you deem good enough to keep you should be doing a few things:
    • Improve
    • Expand
    • Update
    • Promote

Life After the News Feed: Why Facebook is Shifting to Stories (And Why Your Business Should Too)

Ash Read  for Buffer

This will be a hard switch for Facebook to make because their main source of revenue is coming from advertising living in the news feed. Even though they have already rolled out story ads, they will have to rethink how they display their mobile video ads in order to remain successful.

“For nearly a decade, the News Feed was the jewel in Facebook’s crown. However, over the past couple of years, Facebook has been locked into a battle with misinformation, troubled by privacy issues, and found itself trying to counter a decline in original content (photos, videos, status updates) shared by users. It even admitted the News Feed can have a negative impact on mental health. This wasn’t the way it was meant to be.”

Key Takeaways:

  • The news feed has been struggling to keep people interested and entertained.
  • The story format that was rolled out by Snapchat has been adopted by almost every major social platform
  • People are now posting more than one billion stories a day and posting less on their page
  • They shifted the default screen to stories help them be more authentic in their communication with friends and family.

Lighting Round

In this section, we quickly run through some other updates that we didn’t have enough time to deep-dive on, but we still felt were noteworthy.

  1. Google Map biz reviews now allow for hashtags
  2. Amazon makes its machine learning courses available for free
  3. Why Apple removed the headphone jack
  4. Instagram Lets Users Share Audio from SoundCloud to Stories

Listen or watch for new episodes each Friday, or check out the archives to watch past episodes on-demand. Like what you hear? Leave us a review or let us know in the comments!

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