The Ins and Outs of Semantic Web Marketing

Web 3.0 and its endless possibilities will change how we reach audiences and tell stories for eternity. Let’s look at the future of marketing and advertising through the semantic web–a vision to enable computers to find information for users faster than ever before.

I recently wrote about the future of marketing through Web 3.0: the semantic web, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, decentralization and 3D. Today, I want to focus on the semantic web part of this.

The semantic web is an extension of the World Wide Web that provides software with machine-interpretable metadata of all the published information and data on the internet. Put simply, the semantic web allows for additional data to be added to existing and future content, allowing computers to make more meaningful interpretations of content and process information like a human. It’s a little bit scary, but a lot a bit awesome.

A great example that I found online is this: If you were planning a trip to the Eifel tower and searching for a place to stay, googling “Paris Hilton” might serve you no good. You’ll end up finding a bunch of pictures and articles of this blonde tabloid-obsessed woman. Not what you were looking for, huh? With the help of the semantic web and metadata, you’ll turn up the results that you’re looking for–a Hilton hotel in Paris.

But it goes further than this. When you combine enhanced information retrieval, the Internet of Things and Personal Assistants like Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri, you might start to see all of the possibilities on an interconnect life with your normal day-to-day habits and the internet. While the metaverse seems unrealistic and scary to most, a connected lifestyle seems intriguing and far more reasonable.

For marketers, the semantic web is the future of search, SEO and digital marketing. Incorporating semantic SEO will help improve content marketing, site navigation and local SEO. You’ll be able to better target users based on the keywords they are searching for, and ultimately lower your search spending while increasing your conversion rate. You can also improve branding and establish your subject authority by optimizing your content for semantic search.

Financial institutions and platforms across the world must adopt this technology to continue their market dominance. Let me briefly mention three key benefits the Semantic Web will bring:

“Findability”

One of the goals of the Semantic Web is to crawl the existing web and semantically tag regular web pages with metadata to better describe their meaning–helping computers easily identify and understand more content. This will allow brands to make themselves more well-known in their space by the content they have on their sites. Creating a well-determined relationship between their subject matter and the content on the site will allow them to rank higher and be more easily found by users who are searching for that content.

(Re-)Positioning

Positioning a brand is a challenging feat. Repositioning a brand is even harder. Let’s say, for example, a company is a traditional bank and is trying to break into the online banking space. A lot of time and money must go into repositioning to break into a well-established market like the online banking market. Jumping into, and optimizing your content for, the Semantic Web will give a big head start for companies who are trying to make this transition. Brands like Truist and Bank of America will be able to make a splash in the online space with the likes of Ally and Sofi if they take the Semantic Web seriously.

Enhanced Tracking

With increased content metadata through the Semantic Web, marketers will be empowered with enhanced tracking through the SW’s fine-grained user information, helping them make smarter decisions based on in-depth user interactions. The Semantic Web will allow marketers to better track website events to understand user intentions.

Here is a great resource on how to take advantage of the Semantic Web.

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My name is Matthew Rigsbee and I am a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill majoring in Advertising and Public Relations at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media. Ever since I invested in my first stock in high school, I fell in love with learning about the economy, stocks, and eventually cryptocurrencies.

My goal with this blog is to highlight the intersection of the finance world with the advertising industry. There are so many new advertising techniques that are emerging out of the FinTech and cryptocurrency spaces, and I want to be your guide to understanding how many companies are leveraging these techniques to change the way people, young and old, involve themselves in the markets. I will use real-world examples of how some of the top brands in the FinTech and cryptocurrency spaces are using game-changing advertising and marketing techniques.