In recent years, content marketing has become one of the most powerful techniques for growing your business. Because of its effectiveness, businesses are now allotting as much as 40 percent of their advertising budget on content marketing. The investment makes sense because well-executed content marketing can bring more traffic to a website, raise brand awareness among consumers, position your business as an expert, raise customer loyalty, and greatly improve sales.
However, in order to get the most of your content marketing efforts, you’ll need to have a clear and defined strategy. And, you’ll need to stick to it! This will not only make it easier to create more content but also help you analyze, set goals, and measure your ROI.
How to Build Content Marketing Strategy
Determine Your Objectives
The first step to developing a content marketing strategy is to determine your company’s objective. In other words, you’ll need to have an end goal. Are you trying to create more awareness about your brand? Or, are you trying to gain more subscriptions to a service you provide? Decide on one or two core goals that will affect your bottom line and two or three supporting objectives you want to meet.
Define Your Target Market
You want to market to the right customer using the right content at the right time. To do so, you would need to define your target market. You can do this by creating buyer personas and using them as a model for your content marketing plan. Conduct qualitative research to build these personas. Make use of surveys, customer feedback, focus groups, social media activity, and customer interviews. Even user profiles and transaction histories will help you in understanding who your real customers are.
Study What Your Customers Need
Make use of social media, search browsers, surveys, customer conversations and insight from your sales and customer service personnel to understand what your customers need. You can then use the collected data to segment your customers and send them content that is specific to their needs.
Decide on What Content to Prioritize
Once you have determined your end goal and identified your buyers, you can start focusing on content. There are a lot of content types to choose from—blogs, ebooks, infographics, games, courses, mobile apps, webinars, podcasts, and newsletters to name a few. Choose two or three types that are most suited or relevant to your audience to ensure you can always provide high-quality content. Once you have decided on the content channels you want, you can start creating a content schedule.
According to a 2018 B2C survey by Conductor, businesses use blogs and videos 3 times more than any other type of content marketing.
Develop a Plan for Executing Content
Utilize your buyer personas and customer information to design a plan for executing your content. Start brainstorming for ideas, like what keywords to use or topics for your blog. Think about how and where your audience will receive their information. Consider that customers require different kinds of content per funnel stage.
Design Ways to Measure Your Content Marketing
Your objectives will help define your metrics. Develop a measurement framework to help you keep track of how your strategy is helping with your goals. There are different categories of content marketing metrics that you can find online.
Amplify Your Content
It’s not enough to just develop content. Even an in-depth blog post or expertly edited video will fall on deaf ears unless you amplify its reach. Consider that there are at least 4 million blog posts published every day, how will you get your post to rise above the noise? You can get the word out through social media channels or explore other avenues, like using influencers or creating events.
3 Tips on How to Stick to Your Strategy
Once you have established your content marketing strategy, you’ll have to stick to it to reap the benefits. Unfortunately, this is where a lot of companies falter. Here are three tips to help youstay on your path:
1. Make sure everybody knows what to expect
Every departments’ goals should align with each other. For instance, the goals of the marketing and sales department should be in tune with each other and should fall in line with that of the upper management. Every member should also know the metrics that will be used.
2. Concentrate on initiatives that are already successful
Check which previous marketing strategies gave you the best results and build from there. After all, why fix something that isn’t broken? For instance, if one PPC campaign resulted in a good ROI, update it by either boosting the ad spending or launching a similar campaign using a different product.
3. Delegate or outsource
Good marketers know they should play to their strengths and delegate or outsource the rest. For instance, if you have good graphic design skills, make your own business logo or visual banners. If you are terrible at getting your ideas across in words, hire a writer. There’s no reason to do it all yourself when you can tap the services of others who can do a better job.
Conclusion
A solid content marketing strategy is essential to a successful business. Brainstorm for ideas and do not be afraid to experiment with different approaches or try a variety of tools. Keep track of customer engagement to ensure that you will stick to the strategy you devised. These will help in the continued improvement of your content marketing strategy and the success of your business.
SiriusXM reported record fourth quarter and full-year 2018 operating and financial results today. However, the best is yet to come for SiriusXM as their Pandora acquisition begins to impact the company. “Our combination with Pandora completely changes the game and gives us vastly more scale outside of the car in a way that we think is completely complementary to our existing efforts at SiriusXM,” said SiriusXM CEO Jim Meyer.
Jim Meyer, CEO of SiriusXM, talked during their earnings announcement about their plans for Pandora and how it will lead SiriusXM beyond the car and transform the company in the process:
Our Combination with Pandora Completely Changes the Game
We expect the Pandora merger to close Friday. The combined company will reach over 100 million listeners in North America, with nearly 40 million self-paying subscribers and 75 million trailers — trialers and ad-based listeners. The North American audio market is the most influential in the world.
The suite SiriusXM and Pandora bring to content creators and advertisers is a powerful promotional platform. The Pandora team’s continuing efforts to improve ad tech, add new content and features and to improve usability for both listeners and advertisers provides a solid foundation for Pandora’s future.
Needless to say, our combination with Pandora completely changes the game and gives us vastly more scale outside of the car in a way that we think is completely complementary to our existing efforts at SiriusXM. Together, the SiriusXM and Pandora brands are uniquely positioned to lead a new era of audio entertainment by delivering the most compelling subscription and ad-supported audio experience to millions of listeners in the car, at home, and on the go. I am incredibly excited by the opportunity in front of us to build a media company that will be competitive for decades to come.
We plan to close the Pandora transaction on Friday, and we will hit the ground running. I’ve made a decision to immediately consolidate the G&A functions and have the business units report directly to me. My goal is to streamline decision-making, increase the speed of integration and manage the businesses holistically from day one. These things are never easy. And just let me say, I have a ton of respect for Roger Lynch and the masterful job he has done at Pandora over the last 16 months. I want to personally thank him for his contributions.
Tremendous Opportunities That Combine Our Strengths
As we move closer to the combination, we are seeing increased opportunities for cost saving. By the end of next year, these cost synergies should exceed a run rate of $50 million per year. But this merger has never been about cost synergies. Let me reiterate my vision here. We see tremendous opportunities to create attractive and unique audio packages that combine our strengths, SiriusXM’s in-vehicle position with Pandora’s strong position out of the vehicle. There are strong prospects for cross-promotion across our combined North American audience.
Quite simply, I’d like to monetize at some level every single one of the close to 23 million SiriusXM trials we are running annually. Over the next decade, the vast majority of Americans will have experienced one of these trials, and I am thrilled to now have a complete stack of compelling offerings to offer consumers, from paid to free.
Pandora Brings SiriusXM a Tremendous Amount of Data
With our massive audience, particularly from the Pandora side, comes a tremendous amount of listener data that will be invaluable as we grow the combined company in the future. Let me give you just one example. Based upon our preliminary research, approximately half the owners of the SiriusXM-enabled vehicle fleet have used Pandora in the past 2 years. This is incredibly powerful.
Data from Pandora can significantly improve our understanding of these users’ preferences and behaviors when it comes to music listening. This kind of data should help us refine our marketing efforts for retention, conversions, win back as well as our streaming experience for SiriusXM subscribers over time.
Intends to Capitalize on Cross-Promotion Opportunities
We also intend to capitalize on cross-promotion opportunities between SiriusXM’s more than 36 million subscribers across North America and Pandora’s approximately 70 million monthly active users. In early February, we will begin a targeted promotion to SiriusXM subscribers and Pandora listeners. Select Pandora listeners will receive an offer to obtain a unique $5 a month mostly news — mostly music or news talk package in their satellite-equipped vehicle.
SiriusXM subscribers will also receive an extended 14-day trial to Pandora Premium. By midyear, we expect to deliver a new Pandora-powered channel to our SiriusXM app users based upon their favorite artist and a new radio channel, driven by the latest trend from Pandora’s billions of thumbs. This is just the beginning. We expect over time to create new, unique audio packages that will bring together the best of both services, creating a powerful platform for artists to reach their fans and to create new audiences.
Biggest Challenge at Pandora – Increase Listener Hours
Without a doubt, the biggest challenge at Pandora is clearly related to active users and, even more importantly, listener hours. This is going to be a tremendous focus for my management team in 2019 and beyond. The biggest opportunity for change here is through improved content and marketing. The launch of Pandora’s slate of podcasts is a great first step, and I’m confident Scott Greenstein and his team will add immediate value here.
We will also be looking to improve Pandora’s position in-vehicle, and you can bet we will look to continually improve the Pandora user experience and onboarding experience. We have an excellent track record of performance at SiriusXM. We focus on having the right strategy and business plan and then executing that against that plan. Growing Pandora and, more importantly, generating sustained and growing cash flows there will not be easy. But with the combination of SiriusXM and Pandora, we will have tremendous opportunities. And let me remind you that SiriusXM’s track record is second to none in audio entertainment.
Trust me on one thing: We understand the many new challenges that arise at Pandora. We’re excited to tackle them head-on, but we will in no way lose sight of our core business and the important opportunities for value creation that remain at SiriusXM. Great content is always the core of what we do at SiriusXM.
Groupon announced a business model transformation that moves them away from email and daily deals. Groupon wants their website to be a place for consumers to find great deals and information and also be a utility for merchants to use every day to grow their businesses, says Groupon CEO Rich Williams.
Groupon is utilized by customers who receive email deals around four or five times a year and Williams sees a huge opportunity to transform Groupon by getting customers to view the site as a deal and lifestyle platform, potentially increasing usage to four or five times a week.
Rich Williams, Groupon CEO, discussed Groupon’s transformation plans with Jim Cramer on CNBC:
Groupon Announces a Business Model Transformation
The core of our plan is based on our marketplace model and concept. That’s moving us away from email and daily deals really to being a utility for consumers and merchants to use every single day to grow their businesses, in the case of merchants. In the case of consumers, a place where they trust when they’re hungry, when they’re bored, when they just want something to do on the weekend with their kids, we’re where they’re going to find the best prices, the best deals, and also the best selection and inventory of those transactable offers local markets.
I think people have a very narrow perspective of what a turnaround is. Most of that it’s like hey we need to cut some cost or we need to just tweak our product around the edges. When I say it’s a transformation, I think we have a good business today, we’re trying to build an amazing business. We have a good product today, we’re trying to build an amazing product. We’ve got to transform how we work the products we deliver to our customers, really fundamentally change how consumers think about us every day. That’s more than your typical turnaround has to attack and the good news is we’re well on our way.
Still a Huge Opportunity in Local
Local is a huge space and it’s a space that got a late start if you think about the online and mobile revolution that we’ve gone through over the last 15 or 20 years. Products started first with folks like Amazon in the late 90s. It wasn’t really until folks like Groupon and Yelp came into the mix late into the 2000s where you started to really get people to push. For sure locals late and it is a challenging space. I would say we’re producing billions of dollars of value coming out of the local space. We’ve grown our inventory and our relationships with small businesses by 60 percent over the last three years. We’re making headway and we see that as a massive prize that’s worth fighting for and we like our position in the market.
People use us four or five times a year currently. Our opportunity in local where you shop most of the time is four or five times a week. That’s what we’re building toward and those are the metrics to look at long-term where we have a lot of customers buying more frequently in a profitable way. I think we’re we’re wildly undervalued. We have strong free cash flow and we produce a lot of adjusted EBITDA that’s not reflected in our share price today and just shows that we have a lot of opportunity to grow that for folks over time.
Twitter ad chief Matt Derella is at Advertising Week in New York City spreading the message that Twitter video advertising is the best platform to reach valuable audiences when they are most receptive. He says Twitter has never been more clear about what is our superpower.
Matt Derella, Global Vice President, Revenue and Content Partnerships for Twitter, discussed why Twitter is valuable for advertisers on CNBC at Advertising Week in New York:
Twitter Video Ads Now Generate Over 50% of Revenue
If you look back to our previous quarter our ads business is incredibly strong right now growing over 27 percent year-on-year and its broad-based all around the world. I think that’s because we’re continuing to innovate and bring new products to bear. Video, in particular, is now over 50 percent of our revenue and marketers are getting great results from using it.
I was just on stage here at AdWeek sitting down with the head of digital at Nestle and he’s talking about the fact that two of his biggest brands, DiGiorno and Lean Cuisine, Twitter was the number one platform among social platforms for return investment. As long as the results are there we’re going to continue to grow our business with our customers and continue to earn their trust.
We Want to be Really Transparent About Political Ads
Well, being completely transparent, I think Jack Dorsey (Twitter CEO) modeled this when he went to DC and actually talked to the regulators and the congressmen. We want to be really transparent about what we’re doing. There are some serious issues facing all services that are global in nature like ours we’ve taken some very tangible action just in the last few months.
You’ve heard about our Ad Transparency Center. This is a searchable database where anybody can go and see all the political advertising on Twitter and who is funding it. We’ve also introduced labels around all the political advertising so they’re clearly demarcated so you know and have trust in where that message is coming from.
Lastly, just on spam, we’re doing more than we ever have. Two times the amount of spam is being taken off the platform compared to just a year ago. This is what we’re talking to marketers about and content partners about to continue to get better.
Brands Can Target Very Specific Conversations
A big part of philosophically how we designed the platform is so that control goes in the hands of the advertiser. We have targeting that allows you to target just specific conversations. If you’re a brand who wants to connect with the NBA and all the conversation having around that that’s something that our tools allow to do.
I’m in charge of content partnerships and our content business has been flourishing. We’re helping partners grow their business. One of the great things about how we designed it is that marketers can actually choose the specific content that they want to align with and ensure that brand safety and brand alignment that’s so important for them.
We’ve Never Been More Clear About What is Our Superpower
The primary driver of everything we do is to help serve that public conversation that’s so unique to Twitter. Great content, whether it’s the World Cup highlights, that we had every single goal here in the US from the World Cup with Fox, is a great place for us to get video and bring that public conversation around it and it’s great for consumers. It also happens to be terrific for marketers who want to align with that passion here at Advertising Week.
I think for Twitter we’ve never been more clear about what is our superpower, we have the most valuable audiences when they’re most receptive. If you’re going to launch something new Twitter is the place to start because we have those valuable audiences when they are the most receptive. That’s the message we’ve been going with and we have the data to back it up. I think we have a very defensible position going forward with marketers.
We have to focus on the long-term and really what’s been incredibly encouraging is hearing from some of the most important influential CMO’s around the world supporting us as we make the decision to focus on the health of the service in the long term. Some of the decisions that we’re making, the hard decisions that might impact short-term metrics, but ultimately it’ll be the right thing for the platform.
Every year, millions of new websites are launched, and they’re directly or indirectly competing for the same visitors you are. That makes driving traffic your website, increasingly more difficult. Even major social networking sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are having trouble generating organic reach. But that doesn’t seem to be a problem with Pinterest.
Pinterest has become more than just a visual search platform. It’s more of a search engine now where prospective customers go to look for products.Statistics have revealed that 93 percent of account holders use the platform to plan what they want to buy while 50 percent have actually bought something after seeing a Promoted Pin. And with 20 million monthly users, it makes sense for marketers to take advantage of Pinterest’s power.
These seven marketing tools are among the best for helping generate more website traffic with Pinterest in 2018:
1. Canva
You need captivating images if you want people to notice your Pins, and Canva is just the design software to help you achieve this. Canva offers ready to use Pinterest Pin templates with a variety of layouts to choose from. The layouts are customizable, so you can easily change the font, text, and background image. You can also add more graphics or take out elements that don’t fit with your vision or website theme. You can use the app for free and just purchase new images or assets for $1. However, a paid version will give you more designs and photos to choose from, as well as the option of saving your logo or brand to make designing a board go quicker.
2. Hootsuite
Hootsuite makes it possible for you to create boards, make a publishing schedule, and post pins directly to Pinterest from its dashboard. You can also manage several accounts using this tool, making it easier and safer for your team since you’re just using one secure workflow. This full integration on a single dashboard saves time and makes it easier to reach a wider audience.
3. PicMonkey
Eye-catching images are what sets Pinterest apart from other social platforms. Retailers and service-based companies willhave more impact on this platform if they use a visual format for their content. PicMonkey is an online image editor that can help with designing and editing your brand’s images so that simple shots become more compelling. You can give photos a quick touch-up, resize images, create image quotes, and overlay photos with text. More importantly, it’s free so you won’t even need to hire a digital artist or invest in Photoshop.
4. PinFollow
You need a lot of followers to establish your brand’s credibility, influence, and popularity. One way to get more followers on Pinterest is to follow other Pinners and hope they will do the same. PinFollow will help you weed out which Pinners are not following you so you can unfollow these accounts. This will streamline your list and leave you with more loyal followers.
5. PinGroupie
One of the fastest ways to make connections on this social media platform is through groups, but finding the right group board to join is tricky. PinGroupie helps you establish the best Pinterest Group Boards for your brand. This tool lists live group boards, allowing you to reach out to the owners and see if they are willing to let you join or contribute to the board. PinGroupie also has an industry sorting feature that you can use to check what kind of content other brands are offering and see if there’s anything unique that you can provide.
6. Pinterest Analytics
This tool provides Pinterest users with the basic metrics about their Pins, like reach, impressions, and what people save from their website. It also shows how much traffic your site receives and indicates what your customers want. It’s very simple to use; just click on the stats icon on your Pins to get an overview of the essential metrics. You can use the tool to improve your marketing strategy and come up with ways to get more clicks, saves, and impressions.
7. Tailwind
Tailwind is one of the most essential tools you need to successfully market on Pinterest. This analytics and campaign management tool will help you do everything, from scheduling the content you need published, to pinpointing your most influential followers to determining the most popular pins. It can also monitor your competitors and track the engagements on your account. What’s more, it seamlessly integrates with Google Analytics.
The number of companies integrating social media into their marketing campaigns has been growing steadily over the past decade. Some businesses even rely solely on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to promote their goods and services. However, measuring the impact these campaigns have on their business remains a challenge.
A 2015 CMO survey underlined this difficulty, with only 15 percent of participating marketers being able to quantitatively measure the effectiveness of their social media marketing plans. Meanwhile, a recent MDG Advertisinginfographic shows that not much has changed with regards to measuring the effectivity of social media marketing and its impact on a company’s ROI.
According to the accompanying MDG report, only 20 percent of companies said they were able to determine the success of their social media campaigns while 44 percent could not determine social media’s impact on their business. This problem also affects marketing agencies, with 28 percent facing challenges in measuring the effectivity of social media. However, 55 percent of said agencies claim they could somewhat determine the ROI generated by social media while a mere 17 percent could accurately measure it.
Because social media is a relatively new (and constantly evolving) marketing channel, measuring its true impact of ROI remains a conundrum for many businesses. What’s more, a lot of companies remain unsure of social media’s place in the big picture.
There are other reasons why measuring social media impact remains complicated.
Businesses Have Different KPIs: Brands have their own goals, values, and propositions and the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) they want to measure depend on these. However, KPIs can change depending on the direction the company wants to take. This makes it hard to set specific metrics and data points.
Data is Limited: Each social media platform has its own set of analytics. Some tools engage followers while others show demographic information. It would also require companies to do a lot of mining just to put everything together.
Qualitative Results are Hard to See: It’s easy to see quantitative results such as the numbers of comments, likes, and shares. But the more important question is the kind of action consumers are actually taking — the qualitative results. For instance, are they buying products or just sharing content?
Business Impact is Hard to Determine: ROIs are about returns and investments. Even if companies are able to tie their social media campaigns to their KPIs and business goals, most remain confused as to what it means for their bottom line. Companies would have to consider the number of people working on social media accounts and their salaries, social media software, and advertising costs and compare them against KPIs.
Best Ways to Check Effectiveness of Social Media Drive
Despite the ambiguity, social media does have a positive influence on a company’s sales and revenue. The question now ishow to measure and quantify this impact. Knowing the following metrics of your campaigns can help you measure their effectiveness:
Click-Through Rate: While click-throughs are a key metric, companies should do more than just track clicks. They should also focus on metrics geared towards specifically designed landing pages and content. Companies should also look at click-throughs in relation to bounce rates. High bounce rates imply that the site’s content is not delivering on the call-to-action or headline’s promise.
Conversions: Whether it’s a sign-up, filling out a form, or an online sale, companies should have a goal when it comes to conversions, especially when creating paid ads. This is significant as it provides direct ROI numbers. Conversions are also relatively easy to track. Some companies utilize lead generation forms while others opt for pixel codes.
Engagement: This metric is more than just the volume of likes a page or post has since it doesn’t give a clear indication of commitment. A meaningful engagement that results in brand awareness, product interest or sales are the best testaments to the impact of social media activity. Companies should put real effort into having a dialogue with their audience and influencers.
Traffic: Identifying the actual value of traffic is about checking the share of driven traffic and the actions generated by click-throughs. Tools like Google Analytics makes tracking the impact of social media on site traffic simpler. Companies should look more closely at how much of the site traffic was driven by social media since this will provide you with concrete numbers that you can work with.
Remember, you can’t market what you can’t measure (at least not effectively). So, before you run a social media campaign, be sure to set up adequate analytic tools that measure the data that correlates with the outcome you desire. For many businesses, picking the right tools and correctly assessing the data they collect comes with a learning curve. However, once you get past that hurdle, you can use the data to grow your business by leaps and bounds.
The terms machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) have been cropping up more often when it comes to organic and paid search. Now a recent report by Acquisio has confirmed just how effective machine learning is for search results.
According to Acquisio, paid search accounts that have been optimised for machine learning have 71% higher conversion rates and have lower cost-per-click (CPC). But these were not the only benefits that accounts using machine learning enjoyed. The web marketing company also revealed these accounts were also able to reach their target spending levels and had lower churn rates.
The data implies that small marketing teams and CMOs now stand on an even playing field with more established companies now that ML is more affordable, effective and accessible to everyone.
This doesn’t mean that marketers should ignore organic search and original, value-laden content. Paid search might be the easiest way to rank high in search engines, particularly since AI will be doing the bulk of the work, developing campaigns that have greater odds of being seen by the right searchers at the proper time. However, organic search is more authentic and will last longer than paid searches.
The goal now is to understand how ML impacts the search system and how to take advantage of the technology’s evolution that made paid and organic searches more effective.
Paid vs Organic Search: Which Wins in the End?
There’s been an ongoing debate as to which is better – paid or organic searches. Interestingly, both have come out on top, but at different times and conditions. The results have depended on the type of research done and other outside factors. For instance, a study conducted in 2011 showed that organic search was more effective. However, paid search has outpaced its counterpart from 2013 onwards. But this appears to be due to the changes Google has made to its algorithm.
So which is better? Andy Taylor, the Associate Director of Research at Merkle, believes that flexibility is the best option. Instead of just sticking to one approach, companies should determine what search strategy is ideal for their business at the moment and the technology that’s currently available. After all, the ideal marketing strategy for your company now will probably change in a few months as customers change their expectations and technologies expand.
Machine Learning is Changing More Than Search
The rise of machine learning has also resulted in a shift to data-driven models instead of the conventional attribution models. This multi-touch attribution model (MTA) relies on an analytics scale that’s more descriptive and takes into account various touchpoint outputs, like ad interactions, ad creative, or exposure order. It also allows marketers to have a better understanding of how factors, like a distinct set of keywords and ad words, can affect a conversion.
But it’s not just search capacities that machine learning has an impact on. The technology is also being used to refine and make algorithm changes. It has been theorized that Google’s RankBrain utilizes machine learning to assess if the company has to revise its own rankings based on what the consumer searches for and whether the user was satisfied with the result.
Machine Learning Will Push for More Sophisticated Content
Because machine learning technology is developing more advanced SEM capacities and sophisticated algorithms, search engines are pushing marketers and content producers to deliver more refined content. This would eventually lead to search engines becoming more discerning to the quality of online content a company is putting out. This means producing high-quality content that particularly targets what the consumer is looking for becomes more vital than ever before.
Machine learning and AI are impacting every aspect of marketing. Companies should start understanding them and how to utilize ML-optimized tools effectively in their marketing campaigns.
With the inspirational mantra “Make Experience Your Business” and the goal of reshaping digital marketing for enterprises, Adobe announced the launch of their re-invented marketing cloud Adobe Experience Cloud at Adobe Summit 2017 this week.
“At Adobe, we make digital memorable, and today at Adobe Summit, we planted the flag for the next generation of innovation in experiences with our announcement of the Adobe Experience Cloud. Together with Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Document Cloud, Adobe provides enterprises everything they need to deliver exceptional customer experiences.”
“Adobe Experience Cloud” will bring together the company’s current marketing, advertising, analytics services into a package that the company says is broadly applicable across many segments of technology buyers.
“Four or five years ago, the chief marketing officer was underserved,” Brad Rencher, Executive VP and GM of Digital Marketing Adobe, recently told Fortune. “What’s happened since then is the principles of digital marketing, the need for real-time action, for data, for great content, for personalization for mobile apps in the store and in the car has gone way beyond the marketing department.”
Back then, the need to create content and get it to the right people in a timely fashion via the right channel was something that maybe 30% of a company’s execs had to worry about. Now that percentage is more like 90%, said Rencher. That means the sort of software Adobe offers, like its Analytics Cloud for gauging interest in web content, could be used across many departments. Analytics Cloud is based on Adobe’s $1.8 billion acquisition of Omniture in 2009.
By integrating all of Adobe’s Marketing tools and solutions in the Marketing, Analytics, and Advertising Clouds, with Creative and Document Clouds, Adobe’s Experience Cloud aims to help enterprises be much better “experience businesses“.
Pinterest continues to grow in popularity, having gone from 100 Million monthly users in September 2015 to 150 million today. Pinterest is also losing its status as a platform that is primarily for women, with men now making up 40% of all users, which is a 70% increase over last year. Even more amazing is that over 50% of all millennials in the US are now on Pinterest!
“As a Pinner once said to me, “Pinterest is for yourself, not your selfies”—I love that,” said Ben Silbermann, CEO & Co-Founder of Pinterest. “Pinterest is more of a personal tool than a social one. People don’t come to see what their friends are doing. (There are lots of other great places out there for that!) Instead, they come to Pinterest to find ideas to try, figure out which ones they love, and learn a little bit about themselves in the process.”
He added, “Personally I can’t wait to see what new ideas all these people bring to Pinterest, and find out what happens when they give those ideas a try. Thank you all so much for being here…each and every one hundred and fifty million of you!”
Pinterest is a Huge Business Marketing Opportunity
The company also noted that Pinterest now provides 10 billion recommendations daily, more than 150 million visual searches happen monthly, and there are more than 1 million businesses on the service with “tens of thousands” actively advertising.
They say that they now have over 75 billion pins and an amazing 75% of them were posted by businesses.
“Growing the number of people on Pinterest by 50% over the last year is pretty impressive especially when you consider that Pinterest is more a personal tool than a social one,” said Jon Kaplan, Head of Global Sales for Pinterest. “People don’t invite all their friends to join, and they don’t log in to see what their friends are doing (there are lots of other great places out there for that!). Instead, they come to Pinterest to discover and do the things they love, and learn a little bit more about themselves in the process.”
Pinterest is now able to offer marketers precise information what products people are searching for the most and who those people are and they are willing to let marketers link into that data.
“With so many people around the world saving and searching for ideas on Pinterest, we now know more about what’s trending—and with which audiences—than anyone else,” says Kaplan. “As a business, this means you have millions of new opportunities to connect your ideas and products to the people who are most interested in giving them a try.”
Marketing with Pinterest
Pinterest is a unique marketing opportunity for both large and small businesses. Pinterest can be used as a traffic driver like many other search and social platforms, but Pinterest can also uniquely be used to inspire and engage audiences with your brand.
Babylist, a unique baby registry service that allows you to put anything on your registry from ANY store, used Pinterest to rapidly grow brand awareness and engagement with their exact targeted audience. To reach the 43 million people on Pinterest preparing for a baby, BabyList optimized their website for Pinterest and included Pin-worthy content in every blog post from the start, according to the Pinterest ad team.
“We were surprised at just how many new registries Pinterest drove for us,” said Brittany Murlas, former CMO of Babylist. “I would describe our overall success on Pinterest in two words: Explosive growth.”
According to Pinterest, within the first 5 months of using Promoted Pins, they saw a 70% increase in account signups and a 40% increase in revenue and heir content has been saved by more than 50,000 people to baby-specific boards.
What’s Next for Pinterest?
According to Kaplan, Pinterest is evolving into a “truly worldwide (platform), with more men, more ideas and more sophisticated technologies to help get the right ideas to the right people.
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half,” said marketing pioneer John Wanamaker in the early 1900’s. That is why CRM software was invented and why it is used by every serious marketer. In today’s “Big Data” World, enterprises are making not just marketing decisions, but almost ALL decisions based on data analytics.
“Big Data holds the potential to describe target customers with an accuracy and level of detail unfathomable only a decade ago,” said Jean Spencer on the SalesForce blog, who is a Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft and was previously the content marketing manager at Kapost. “While old-school marketing efforts were limited to things like tracking returns on direct mail campaigns, or number of subscribers to newsletters, modern marketers can have data on people’s exercise habits, digital clicking behavior, time spent on various sites, purchasing history, personal preferences based on social media postings, time awake, time spent in the car, caloric intake, and almost anything else you can imagine.”
SalesForce is at the epicenter of data, marketing and sales. They offer this overview of the concept:
Using Data To Make Better Marketing Decisions
A report by the Aberdeen Group says that 44 percent of executives are dissatisfied with the analytic capabilities available to them and that they often make critical decisions based on inaccurate or inadequate data. That was in 2014 and fortunately CRM has improved dramatically since then and executives are now typically integrating CRM solutions into their marketing platforms.
“No longer do we rely on conclusions based on vague and imprecise relationships such as “we advertised last week and sales increased so it must have worked” or the common one that I’ve heard many times, “the objective was awareness and clearly many people are now aware of us”, said Gerald Chait who is Director/CEO of Marketing By Objectives. “In today’s world, this just does not cut it anymore.”
Chait added in a blog post, “Gone are the days when we would define roughly segmented target audiences and place an ad hoping someone would purchase something. Today’s marketing enables us to identify who to work with to make a sale, right down to the individual level. What’s more, we can personalize and customize our advertising and messaging to each specific person, no matter how many people there are. We can even customise and personalize website pages depending on who’s viewing them.”
It’s often referred to as predictive marketing, gathering data to learn what is working and what isn’t using precise analytical strategies and technologies in order to finely tune your marketing.
“Predictive marketing is the application of predictive technology to the entire marketing process, across the entire buyer’s journey, and across every channel of communication,” says Eli Snyder, Associate Technology Director of Strategy at Intelligent Demand. “It means not only having predictive insight into the future through predictive analytics, but also using that insight to make better decisions about who and how to engage, and then build better content, campaigns and programs.”
“In order to execute your marketing strategy in the most effective way, you’ll need your business management platform (or CRM) and marketing automation tools to work together seamlessly; using one to generate leads, and the other to maintain them, so you can get a complete picture of your business,” said Mark Sokol who is the VP of Product Marketing and Branding at ConnectWise.
The Intersection of Marketing & CRM is Leads
CRM and marketing are now tightly integrated in order to make marketing more efficient and and successful. “In the past, the marketing campaign stops here in the CRM software system and the rest is carried out externally,” said Denise Holland, VP & Senior Analyst of Genesys Advisory in the CRMsearch blog. “In today’s world, the right customer relationship management system can create the message, compile your target list, distribute your messaging pursuant to an automated schedule, capture the replies and inquiries from these marketing placements, route them to the right sales person or department, track the sale opportunity progress, record the successful sale event and calculate the campaign ROI.”
“This CRM system can also advise the best time to call or email your customers, what type of messaging will illicit the best response, if your customer is really serious or just shopping around, how you can improve your products and services, and what new products and services your R&D department should focus on next,” he says.
“CRM has one common component to help you make marketing decisions, Leads, says Joe CRM on the PowerObjects blog. “Lead data allows you to gauge how healthy your marketing is, what works and what doesn’t, and lets you understand lead quality. In today’s post, we’ll provide some lead data sources from CRM you can use to help make marketing decisions.”
Joe at PowerObjects says you need to know where your leads are coming from. “Some examples of lead sources include outbound cold calls, email, chat, website form submission, and events,” he said. “Keeping the lead source simple lets you use a different field, source campaign, to describe the lead source in more detail as needed.”
He says that knowing where leads come from drives marketing decisions such as:
Number of employees needed for the inside sales team
Budget disbursement for paid advertising
Landing page success
P&L for events attended
Create a Data-Driven Culture
“To cultivate a data-driven culture within your organization, it’s important to remember that without data, you’re simply another person with an opinion,” commented MeetMe CTO Jonah Harris on the NGDATA blog. “All too often, with valuable data and insights in hand, people remain invested in their own hunches and intuition.”
“Transitioning to a genuine data-driven culture is a challenge for many organizations, but one of the ideal first steps is to start leveraging the data your business has to guide evidence-based decision making,” added Vaclav Shatillo of Business Intelligence at Clutch. “When data reinforces or, better yet, contradicts the gut feeling, the conversation around the importance of a data-driven approach is bound to begin.”
At what frequency the data is needed to make actionable decision, and
How to package the data so it can be easily digested, analyzed and reacted to.
Find other great advice from a variety of experts quoted about how to create a data-driven culture here.
Darren Catalano, the CEO of HelioCampus offers some great tips on building a data-driven culture that can be applied to any business:
Data is Marketing Gold
“Data isn’t an overwhelming set of facts and figures,” said Megan Totka is the Marketing Director for ChamberofCommerce.com. “It’s marketing gold. It shows you what your customers want and how to get your customers to buy from you.”
Joe CRM says that the “data you receive from leads that turn into opportunities and then end up as customers is a goldmine.” He says, “This data alone can give your company direction and help you find your niche. That’s why when you use your closed as won accounts it should be for a macro view of your marketing processes. This is the data executives want to see from marketing because it helps prove ROI or that the money spent was worthwhile.”
Data that can power your successful marketing strategy is sometimes found in places that you don’t expect. “New marketing technology, measurement platforms and other advances have greatly expanded the sources that marketers can sift through for nuggets of information,” said Eva Rohrmann, the director of solutions and customer lifecycle marketing for PR Newswire. ”
Rohrmann says that the “most useful data that will turn strategic, positioning and tactical efforts into gold oftentimes is hiding right under your nose: with other teams within your organization.” She believes that ideas and data are “streaming” from many directions, “from sales to product to customer support.”
“Every team within your organization has a treasure trove of actionable marketing intelligence waiting to be discovered,” she says.
The marketing landscape is changing and that should make every CMO’s job easier because they are using justifiable logic instead of just gut intuition. In order for a company to reach their maximum sales potential they must utilize data-driven CRM strategies.
“Marketing is currently undergoing a metamorphosis from a once qualitatively measured art towards a quantitatively driven science,” said Eamonn O’Raghallaigh, the Managing Director of Digital Strategy. on the company’s blog. “This paradigm shift will indeed lead to significant impacts on the competitive landscape; with the bias towards companies who adopt and embrace a data-centric culture within their organization.”
Virtual Reality is in its infancy but will very shortly have a major impact on everyone, especially marketers. Every major tech company is focused on Virtual Reality and because of that the technology has rapidly improved over the last couple of years. Last year Facebook paid $2 billion for crowd-funded Oculus Rift in order to enter the space running. Other players include Sony, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, HTC, Nokia, Intel, IBM, Samsung, Qualcomm and hundreds more.
According to research by Digi-Capital augmented reality and Virtual Reality are predicted to be a $150 billion industry by 2020. The study forecasts that AR (augmented reality), a less intense experience, will take the lion’s share around $120 billion and VR $30 billion.
Virtual Reality headset shipments will approach 30 million by 2020, driven by video & gaming according to a September 2015 Juniper Research study, “Virtual Reality: Market Dynamics & Future Prospects 2015-2020.” The study predicts that the technology is poised to transform the entertainment industry including gaming and video over the next few years, while offering the potential to quickly expand into other markets such as industrial and healthcare. Report co-author Joe Crabtree commented, “The recent attention to and investment into Virtual Reality is helping to revitalize the industry and with major brand commercial launches imminent, there is huge potential for rapid market expansion.”
Google is actually doing something very low tech in order to increase public interest in VR, sending people Google Cardboard viewers. As Google says, it’s a VR experience starting with a simple viewer anyone can build or buy.
“Every single video on YouTube can be viewed in VR, making it the world’s largest library of VR content,” wrote Aaron Luber who is in charge of Google and YouTube partnerships in a think with Google report. “This is giving many people all over the world their first taste of VR, and mainstream interest is growing; global search interest for Virtual Reality on Google has grown by nearly 4X in the last year.”
Virtual Reality is a technology that can be very disruptive in that it has the potential to impact how we live and what we do and from a marketers perspective it opens up a whole new world. “The technology has the potential to change our daily lives—from how we communicate to how we spend our leisure time,” said Luber. “It’s early days, but it’s already happening, and now is the time for brands and creators to understand what it all means.”
The Future With Virtual Reality
“The promise of VR is what the industry calls “presence”—the feeling that you’re really somewhere else,” said Luber. “VR cameras like Jump can capture the entire experience of a place—every corner, every angle. In the not-so-distant future, cameras like these will be capturing experiences all over the world.” Google’s Jump is a camera rig consisting of 16 camera modules in a circular array that are optimized to work with the Jump assembler, which is a powerful computer that turns 16 pieces of video into stereoscopic VR video.
Luber explains that VR creates a time machine like experience where what you record now can be played back in the future and it will seem like you were there. For families, VR recordings of your daughters 4th birthday or your own wedding will let you relive the events, bringing much more emotional impact than traditional video.
This is why advertisers are so interested in VR. Emotion sells products much more than utility and that reality positions Virtual Reality as a game changer in the advertising industry.
“At Google, Cardboard was our first step toward this future,” says Luber. “Soon, our VR platform Daydream will enable even more powerful, mobile, high-quality experiences with a headset that’s comfortable at an accessible price. We’re also building mobile apps for VR like Google Play, Maps, and YouTube.”
YouTube is actually a great place to view many 360-degree videos where viewers can see the video from every angle just by swiping or moving the phone or tablet around—no headset required. Luber says that uploads of 360-degree videos are growing and have doubled over the past three months. He says that brands are also using 360-degree video with ads and to film events. “BMW used this technology for an ad featuring a 360-degree car race,” says Luber. “The “School of Rock” musical created a 360-degree music video. AT&T simulated a car crash to drive home its phone safety message.”
YouTube even categorizes 360-degree videos so you can conveniently browse through them.
The Power of VR in Telling a Story
“And this makes filmmakers– a lot of them are credible ones that have been around for a while– makes them freak out, like this is horrible, this is dangerous,” said Jessica Brillhart, the principal filmmaker for Google VR in a talk at Google I/O 2016. “But let’s just breathe for a second. Have we lost complete control? Or maybe it just lives somewhere else in this. Us humans have a knack for following what calls attention to itself, no matter where it is, no matter where it goes.”
“One of the fascinating challenges in these relatively early days of Virtual Realty is how to tell actual stories,” says a post on the Wevr blog. “The most common comparison so far has been to live theater, where an audience watches events unfold with no real time direction to focus their attention. It’s an aspect that allows for a new kind of experience, yet also seems to frustrate many experienced story tellers.”
Wevr is a company that believes “virtual reality has the power to alter people’s lives more than any other medium to date with the potential to deliver memories that stick.”
Brillhart says that “our control as creators is in this understanding of the potential experiences a world contains so that we can prepare for this, prepare for how someone might engage with the space.” She said that a videographer or directors craft is about responding to all “potential experiences”. She added that “our jobs as creators is not to preciously craft something that someone may never look at and then forget the rest of it, but instead to guide visitors through a crafted universe.”
Connor Hair, Award winning VR Director and Co-Founder of the VR production company Perception Square, talked about how he used VR to tell a story. “One of the reasons I went with the 180 degree view for the VR segments was that I wanted to maintain some of the control you have as a filmmaker,” Hair said. “To craft it like you would a film and directed the audiences attention and not worrying about what is behind them. It also enabled me to stand behind the camera and direct actors as I would in a film.”
After working as a cinematographer on six feature length projects, Hair changed his focus toward directing virtual reality experiences. In 2015 he directed two short films for virtual reality, “Real” and “En Pointe“. His bio states that he “is constantly experimenting with emerging technology and has a passion for telling stories in unique and innovative ways.” Watch out Steven Spielberg!
Real 2D Version – The 3D VR experience will soon be released as an app for the Oculus Rift:
En Pointe – 360 VR Short Film – Selected as a Winner of Samsung’s “There in 60 seconds” VR contest.
Storytelling with VR and 360-degree video is “an incredibly powerful tool to create empathy,” said Luber. “When a viewer feels like they are there, they have a greater sense of the situation. Messages become more impactful.”
Brands Can’t Wait for VR
Nothing tickles the fancy of brands more than learning of a new way to create personal, powerful and impactful marketing messages. Brands are learning more about VR everyday through research and by understanding the technology and its potential and some are already using it.
Cadillac is creating virtual showrooms where customers will find VR headsets and no cars. These high-tech showrooms will save tons of money because dealers won’t have to purchase inventory according to a WSJ.com article. “They can still sell the same volume,” said Will Churchill, owner of Frank Kent Cadillac in Fort Worth, Texas, and head of Cadillac’s dealer council. “They don’t have to stock the 15 cars and hope that they have the right one…the data shows they probably don’t.”
Time Warner and Nielsen are actually partnering up to study the emotional impact of Virtual Reality. “Given the increasing role that VR is going to play with our content and even with our advertisers in the future, I think that alone gives us an interesting opportunity to partner with Nielsen and an unparalleled opportunity to integrate both the biometrics part of research and also the neuroscience piece to help us understand how consumers are really engaging with the VR experience,” Kristen O’Hara, Time Warner’s CMO for global media told Adweek.
VR Can Be Very Powerful For Marketers
VR can be powerful for marketers. “Virtual Reality is not a media experience. When it’s done well, it’s an actual experience,” Stanford University, Professor Jeremy Bailenson said. “In general, our findings show that VR causes more behavior change, causes more engagement, causes more influence than other types of traditional media.”
“I think what our clients and I think this lab is going to be able to do very well is separate the sort of ‘wow factor’ of VR from really full-on engagement with content and advertising,” Carl Marci told Adweek. Marci is the Chief Neuroscientist, Nielsen Consumer Neuroscience at Nielsen Company. “How do you tell stories in a VR environment? How do you make someone who’s engaged in a totally surrounded and immersive environment go from a beginning, middle and end? How do you introduce characters?”
The New York Times actually has a VR app, which puts viewers into news events around the world. “Go underwater or on the campaign trail,” says the NYT promot. “Experience life through the eyes of a refugee or explore previously unseen worlds. Experience stories reported by award-winning journalists, all told in an immersive, 360-degree video experience.”
“For the brand and user the intimacy of VR is really dramatic,” GE’s CMO Linda Boff told The Guardian. “It’s a tool to tell a powerful story in a way that’s much more personal and up close than we’d normally be able to.”
Brands are also looking forward to technological leaps that are in works such as haptic technology which recreates the sense of touch by applying forces, vibrations, or motions for the user to experience. Apple famously includes haptic technology in its current versions of the iPhone, for example.
“You can see brands creating room-scale simulations where consumers will interact with branded content,” Anthony Batt told the Guardian. Batt is co-founder of the Virtual Reality firm Wevr. “For example, Airbnb could create sims for real rental properties so users could experience what it would feel like to stay there.”
Marketing has become the the breeding ground for Virtual Reality technology. “You have to start experimenting,” says Boff. “Marketing may be a proving ground, but if we can take this tech and make it a business application, that’s huge.”
Ominous Warning
A person named Zeigeist commented on an article about VR and delivered this ominous warning: “Way before the movie the Matrix was created, I realized that our concept of reality is entirely controlled by our ability to receive stimuli through our senses. If you are able to control the input a person receives, without their awareness that the input source was generated by something other than the expected “real world”, the person would never know.”
Of course, we aren’t expecting the Matrix to actually happen, but Virtual Reality technology and application are just getting started. Who knows what the future holds.
Accenture has a new report out called Organizing for Digital Success, which is based on the survey of over 200 digital executives in the U.S. at companies with revenue of $1 billion to over $75 billion. These include CMO CDO, CIO, SVP, VP, and senior digital executives at companies in the consumer-packaged goods, manufacturing, retail, financial services, communications, media and technology, SaaS, healthcare, hospitality, and travel industries.
The report found that nearly a third of companies are not satisfied with the skill sets of employees in their digital organizations.
As a spokesperson for Accenture told us in an email, “The study found there is a significant gap in the skill sets wanted and the skill sets possessed by digital organizations, and 4 in 5 (81%) of the digital executives surveyed voicing the need for additional hiring.”
“This data shows a clear disconnect between expectations and reality in the digital branches of many organizations,” they added.
To give you an idea of what these companies are actually wanting their employees to achieve, here’s a look at the KPIs being measured:
Despite a troubling amount of dissatisfaction, most respondents feel that their companies are either on par with their major competitors (42%) or that they are the sector leader (27%) in terms of digital capabilities. Only 7% think they’re trailing behind the majority of their competitors. 24% believe they’re in the middle of the pack.
Last month, Twitter announced the launch of a new “playbook” for app developers. It includes what Twitter describes as a series of how-to guides that walk developers through the process of building an app.
A spokesperson for the company tells WebProNews, “We know firsthand that it’s hard to build successful iOS and Android apps. We’ve built quite a few and we’ve learned a lot about how our partners build apps and tackle problems. At this year’s Flight conference, we showed off the power of some of the new features from Fabric with two apps that we created and open-sourced on GitHub: Cannonball, a magnetic poetry game, and Furni, a mobile-first furniture store. “Based on our experience building Cannonball and Furni, we’ve organized what we’ve learned into a playbook.”
The first part, published last month, covered prototyping, design and stability. Other parts talked about account systems and social login, creating a backend to manage services, data, and identities, and adding data from third-party APIs.
There’s a new part available now and it’s about making money from your mobile app.
“You can begin planning how you’ll earn money from your app even if you’re not ready to implement anything yet,” writes Twitter developer advocate Bear Douglas . “Lots of successful apps have wildly different strategies — from freemium models to ad support, to direct sales of goods and services. To decide on the right strategy, you need to answer a few questions about your app.”
Such questions include:
“Can you just charge people for it outright?”
“Are you selling anything, be it physical goods, in-app purchases, or subscriptions?”
“Do you have a good place to put ads in your app?”
As Douglas points out, you’ll also want to make sure you’re in the clear to monetize. In other words, you’re not prohibited fromusing certain APIs in paid apps or in conjunction with ads.
See what Twitter has to say about each of these scenarios in the new piece.
Adobe just released its Q4 2015 Digital Advertising Report looking at data for Q4 2014 to Q4 2015 from over 400 billion digital ad impressions from Google, Facebook, Bing/Yahoo, Baidu, and Yandex and over 4,000 branded sites across industries.
They looked at paid search trends, mobile spend patterns, Google vs. Facebook ad performance, and how digital advertising over the holidays drove online retailer revenues.
According to the report, paid search growth momentum is slowing, more money is being spent on mobile, and advertisers saw increased CTRs across Google display ads and Facebook News Feed ads.
It found that paid search growth slowed to 3% compared to a 12% increase seen in Q4 2014. In Europe, it was 5% compared to 17% in 2014.
“Mobile search spend increased by 23% YoY and helped further close the mobile gap,” a spokesperson for Adobe said in an email. “Mobile clicks increased by 35% YoY with smartphones contributing to most of the mobile growth. Google and Bing product listing ads (visual ad formats for online retailers) saw a healthy increase in spending (37% YoY) triggered by online holiday shopping.”
“Heading into the holiday season, Google display CTRs grew much faster from Q3 than Facebook News Feed CTRs – 219% vs. 77%, respectively, but a YoY comparison shows that Facebook’s CTRs are still outperforming Google (up 35% vs. 27% YoY, respectively),” they said. “Over the holidays, nearly $1 out of every $3 in retail revenue came from search and display advertising: Search and display combined generated 32% of all online U.S. retail revenue in Q4. Paid search drove 10% more revenue for retailers than direct traffic during Thanksgiving weekend.”
You can find more insights and analysis about Adobe’s findings in a post here.
Twitter recently introduced a new ad format that encourages users to tweet about brands and increase brand mentions and discussion throughout the Twitterverse for those who use it.
The format is called Conversational Ads. According to Twitter, advertisers can use them to drive more earned media and brand influence.
The format looks similar to the poll feature the company recently launched to users, so people will be used to seeing these kinds of buttons even if the functionality is different. When the user clicks one of the buttons, it opens a pre-populated tweet accompanied by the brand’s creative and hashtag buttons. The user can personalize the tweet. Once they tweet it, the consumer gets a message from the brand thanking them. The user’s followers will see their tweet in their timelines.
Twitter has been beta testing the ads and says the format has seen success over the last few months. It shares a couple of quotes from brands who have tested it…
Samsung Electronics Canada CMO Mark Childs: “As one of the first global brands to use Twitter’s new conversational ad unit, we’re excited by the opportunity to initiate more meaningful conversation. To stay ahead of the curve, it’s important to continuously evolve our social media engagement strategies to help our fans get closer to the Samsung Canada brand.”
Lifetime Director of Social Strategy Marissa Vinciguerra: “We are thrilled to join forces with Twitter as a partner to launch the conversational video tool for the upcoming premiere of our new series, ‘Pitch Slapped’ on January 5th. The Tweet features voting buttons encouraging fans to engage with our creative and is a perfect match for this campaign.”
The ads are still in beta and only available for select advertisers, but those with an account team can ask about using them.
In the U.S., ad performance can be tracked using Twitter Brand Hub.
At the very least, Conversational Ads seem like an interesting new format that could lend to some interesting brand experiments. On the other hand, not being careful enough with a campaign could lead to having to put out social media fires.
In many respects, Conversational Ads seem like a relatively minor addition – done right, they could deliver good results, but as with most automation or artificial-lead engagement options, getting it right is very, very difficult, and it seems more likely that it’ll be used in flat, uncreative ways that won’t see significant engagement. Even worse, getting it wrong could lead to a massive hashtag fail, similar to the #YourTaxis or #McDStories campaigns in which the hashtags were flipped and used for wide-scale derision. That’s probably the biggest risk of this new offering, that the ad could be so blatant and so flat that users could turn against it and make the hashtag/s a thread for criticism – note that you can edit your tweet after clicking on the hashtag option of your choice from the Conversational Ad, so you can alter the message you send out to whatever you wish.
In fact, he points out that the Samsung example Twitter itself shared even had people responding with criticisms of the company.
You have to remember, if you give the Twitterverse an opportunity to take a shot at you, there is always the possibility it will take you up on your offer. Of course this is much more likely to be an issue for big businesses, and if Twitter rolls this out to all, smaller businesses might benefit more.
Twitter is also reportedly working on a new ad format that would enable advertisers to utilize tweets from regular users and promote them.
This is according to DigiDay, which cites people who got a look at the offering at the Consumer Electronics Show. From the report:
The new product is based on what Twitter is calling a “brand enthusiast gallery,” which will house a repository of brand-related tweets for advertisers to pick through. Twitter will direct message the author of the tweet and ask permission on behalf of a brand to use the tweet before reposting it, said an ad agency executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity because discussions with Twitter were private.
The ad unit is a standard tweet from an advertiser on top of a carousel of related tweets from users.
It definitely looks as though Twitter is looking to better harness content from regular users to help advertisers. We’ll see how that works out in time.
Meanwhile, users are bracing for the coming lift of the 140-character Tweet limit and seeing what kind of an experience that brings.
Do you think these new ad formats will help businesses get better Twitter results? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Twitter announced a new ad format called Conversational Ads that encourage users to tweet about the brands that use them. According to the company, advertisers will be able to use them to drive more earned media and brand influence.
The ads look like this:
The format looks similar to the poll feature the company recently launched to users, so people will be used to seeing these kinds of buttons even if the functionality is different.
When the user clicks one of the buttons, it opens a pre-populated tweet accompanied by the brand’s creative and hashtag buttons. The user can personalize the tweet.
Once they tweet it, the consumer gets a message from the brand thanking them:
The user’s followers will see their tweet like this:
Twitter has been beta testing the ads and says the format has seen success over the last few months. It shares a couple of quotes from brands who have tested it…
Samsung Electronics Canada CMO Mark Childs: “As one of the first global brands to use Twitter’s new conversational ad unit, we’re excited by the opportunity to initiate more meaningful conversation. To stay ahead of the curve, it’s important to continuously evolve our social media engagement strategies to help our fans get closer to the Samsung Canada brand.”
Lifetime Director of Social Strategy Marissa Vinciguerra: “We are thrilled to join forces with Twitter as a partner to launch the conversational video tool for the upcoming premiere of our new series, ‘Pitch Slapped’ on January 5th. The Tweet features voting buttons encouraging fans to engage with our creative and is a perfect match for this campaign.”
The ads are still in beta and only available for select advertisers, but those with an account team can ask about using them.
In the U.S., ad performance can be tracked using Twitter Brand Hub.
Adobe Digital Index released its latest Digital Advertising Report finding that Facebook’s click-through-rates continue to grow more quickly than Google’s display CTRs.
Facebook has been leading Google in this area for the past year, and its growth continues to come more rapidly than Google’s. That said, Google’s recently announced Customer Match feature could help narrow the gap. Time will tell.
“Facebook ad click-through rates rose 35% year over year, indicating that targeting efforts are paying off,” said Adobe Digital Index principal analyst Tamara Gaffney. “Marketers are using the platform more, and impressions are rebounding.”
“According to ADI, Google’s display click-through rates (CTRs) are up 25% YoY,” the company says. “Here again, Facebook outperforms in terms of display CTR, up 35% YoY. The Customer Match announcement demonstrates that Google is under pressure to better leverage targeting data in order to improve its performance, ADI maintains.”
Customer Match allows advertisers to target people whose email addresses they have and others similar to those people across Google Search, YouTube, and Gmail. Advertisers upload a list of email addresses, which can be matched to signed-in users on Google, and build campaigns and ads specifically for these audiences.
“70% of online consumers agree that the quality, timing, and relevance of a brand’s message influences their perception of a brand,” said Sridhar Ramaswamy, Senior Vice President, Ads and Commerce at Google when the feature was announced. “Google is in a unique position to connect consumers with your business in the most relevant ways. Whether they’re searching on Google, checking promotions on Gmail, or watching videos on YouTube, we can deliver the most relevant information based on what they’re doing, wherever they are, when they’re looking, and on any device they’re using.”
Adobe Digital Index senior analyst Matt Roberts said, “Google’s CTR continued growth amid declining costs is likely due to the influence of programmatic media buying. It demonstrates that display remains a compelling opportunity. We’ll watch to see what impact Customer Match has going forward.”
LinkedIn has a new eBook out looking at the most in-demand marketing jobs based on research by LinkedIn itself and HubSpot. They looked at LinkedIn recruiting data and LinkedIn member profiles of marketers.
They found that the top three skills named in recruiter searches for marketing skills are SEO/SEM Marketing, Digital and Online Marketing, and Marketing Campaign Management. At the same time, only one of those (Digital and Online Marketing) actually matches the top three skills marketers name on their profiles. The other two are Social Media and Marketing Event Management.
According to LinkedIn, three marketing job titles have seen “tremendous” growth in the past decade: Digital Marketing Manager (+248.0 percent); Brand Ambassador (+147.5 percent); and CMO (+62.4 percent).
“Companies, led by Google and HubSpot, are offering certifications to marketers for learning digital and other skills,” says LinkedIn’s Sean Callahan. “Additionally, LinkedIn acquired Lynda.com to make it easier for marketers and others use online video to gain the skills they need to succeed in their jobs.”
“Over the past two decades — which has encompassed the rise of the internet, search, email, social, and mobile — marketing has been transformed,” the eBook says. “Ninety-seven percent of marketing executives, according to a survey from Forrester Research, expect that the pace of change will only accelerate. That means that the big changes marketers are grappling with will likely only get bigger, and the marketing world will remain in flux for the foreseeable future.”
It’s very hard to reach consumers on Facebook without paying for it these days. Luckily, as organic reach has decreased drastically for businesses over the past couple years, Facebook has dramatically improved advertising over that time period, offering numerous tools, targeting options and tweaks.
The company just made two major announcements that address concerns some advertisers have still had with the platform, including viewability and measurement legitimacy. In a nutshell, Facebook is giving advertisers a new 100% in-view impression buying option and has partnered with a third-party analytics provider to bring in some independent insights so advertisers don’t have to simply trust Facebook on data.
Facebook says the new announcements give advertisers more control over how they run and measure their ads.
As the company outlined earlier this year, it counts viewed impressions the moment an ad enters the screen of a desktop browser or mobile app (if an ad doesn’t enter the screen it doesn’t count it). Some advertisers don’t like this approach, as they (understandably) don’t necessarily want to pay for impressions in cases where the user didn’t even see the entire ad.
Facebook still sees its original method as the best course of action, but recognizes that not all marketers agree, so it’s giving them the option to buy 100% in-view impressions if they think that will work better for them.
“While it remains our belief that value is created for an advertiser as soon as an ad is in view, we also believe in offering advertisers control and flexibility over how they run their ads,” the company says in a blog post.
Just to be clear, the 100% in-view impression means the entire ad – from top to bottom – has passed through the user’s screen in the News Feed.
Advertisers will be able to buy all types of ads – text, photo, link, and video – with this option.
As mentioned, Facebook also announced a partnership so that advertisers don’t have to take Facebook at its word when it comes to measurement and reporting. That partnership is with Moat, which has also partnered with Twitter on video viewability measurement in the past.
Facebook is integrating Moat’s technology to verify its video ad views and view lengths so advertisers can gain “assurance” about their video ad campaign performance. The partnership will only cover video viewability for the time being, but eventually, it will expand to other types of ads. That includes 100% in-view impressions and the Instagram platform, which is now becoming available to all businesses and utilizes Facebook’s targeting capabilities.
Unilever CMO Keith Weed has been critical of Facebook’s handling of viewability and reporting in the past, but seems pleased with the new announcements.
He said, “Our position on this has been clear for some time: We need to get standards that help define viewability across different platforms and publishers, and those standards need to be third-party verified. It is very encouraging to see Facebook joining the ranks of digital media partners who are setting themselves apart – and this commitment continues the momentum. Our hope is that these steps will lead ultimately to 100% viewability through third party verification across the industry.”
GroupM Worldwide Chief Digital Officer Rob Norman said, “What we want is quite simple: Ads that are actually seen by real people. We want viewability standards across clients and publishers that honor that position, and we want publishers to be held accountable by independent third-parties. We’re very encouraged that Facebook is partnering with Moat as a third-party verified solution. We remain committed to view duration as well as verification of appearance of the ad in the viewable window and hope that all sellers will recognize and align on an appropriate measurement standard. Facebook’s scale moves the industry one step closer to the standards we’ve been seeking.”
Facebook doesn’t say exactly when the 100% in-view buying option will be available, but just that it will be available soon. It promises to keep advertisers updated on the Facebook for Business site, but also says advertisers can talk to account reps about it further.
Are you pleased with Facebook’s announcements? Do you feel better about advertising on Facebook now as a result? Let us know in the comments.
Meerkat and Periscope both quickly made names for themselves with their live streaming apps launched earlier this year. A lot of businesses have been testing the waters and trying to figure out which if either (or both) are best for them.
What are the differences? Is one better for something than the other? Which one should you use? Consider all the information in this infographic from Salesforce (via SocialTimes), and you might get closer to answering these questions for your own business.
The CMO of Chariot Solutions and Chief Digital Strategist at Bell Digital Strategies recently shared their thoughts comparing the two services after testing them out at a conference. Read this for some pros and cons they took away from the experience.
LinkedIn announced the launch of a new lead generation tool for Slideshare, which it says will enable marketers to identify key consumers of their content and connect with their audience, hence allowing them to build that audience.
“Our new lead generation solution helps brands convert their viewership on SlideShare into high quality prospects,” the company says in a blog post.
It’s integrated with LinkedIn Autofill, so viewers can fill out lead forms on SlideShare based on their LinkedIn profile information. The mobile and embeddable nature of SlideShare means more lead collection channels. You can customize the lead form, and the product is integrated with Marketo and Hubspot.
“Visual content such as presentations, infographics and videos serve as powerful marketing assets that can connect existing and potential customers with brands,” says SlideShare’s John Loof. “Content marketing has become a leading strategy for businesses, with almost 80% of CMOs citing content as the future of marketing.”
SlideShare gets 70 million unique visitors a month.
Amplify Your Content 
