Jono Alderson

As marketers and advertisers, we spend time and energy crafting our content, our ads, and our messaging. We try to convince people to believe our stories, prefer our brands, click our listings, engage, and convert. But people are only part of our audience. Increasingly, they’re not even the biggest part. Maybe they’re not even the most important part. Because to reach those people – to gain access to an audience and a market – we need to first convince systems, search engines and social sites that our brands and our content are a good fit. We need to market to machines.

Schema.org gives us access to a rich language for doing that, but barely anybody’s going beyond the basics. They’re chasing rich snippets and fancy search results, but missing the bigger picture. To access tomorrow’s markets, you’ll need to level up your structured data game. You’ll need to understand how to visualize connected data, build sophisticated entity graphs, and think like a search engine.