When it comes to digital marketing, content is still king. Content marketing comprised 20.3% of the digital marketing techniques implemented so far in 2017, although big data (crunching numbers to reveal buying patterns, for instance) is quickly gaining a foothold in online commerce.
The point is, businesses that still do not see the significance of digital marketing to boost their presence and revenue will end up being left behind by the competition.
According to a report fromStatista, digital ad spending in the U.S. is expected to grow to $118 billion in 2020 from just a shade under $60 billion in 2015. That’s more than double in just five years. In the global scale, the amount is expected to reach over $250 billion by 2018.
Here are just five of the digital marketing trends to watch for this year:
1. AR & VR Technology
The potential of augmented reality and virtual reality in business applications has never been more promising. After the gaming industry latched on to the new technology to enhance the user experience for gamers, developers have released apps that can help boost businesses. For instance, architects can make use of AR to give clients a virtual tour of what the finished product would be like. In digital marketing, businesses can exploit VR to help customers get a better picture of their vision more than any other type of messaging could.
2. Live Videos
Facebook Live and Snapchat Videos are just some of the platforms that can be exploited by digital marketers. Video content will dominate the scene in the next few years with Cisco predicting that 80% of consumer internet traffic by 2020 will be cornered by videos. Meanwhile, Facebook Live is growing 94% each year in the U.S. with eight billion views daily.
Facebook was embroiled in a scandal when its video platform was used to broadcast several violent attacks, which prompted founder Mark Zuckerberg to announce the hiring of 3,000 more people to police the platform of any offensive content.
3. Apps for Data Visualization
Applications like Data Hero, Tableau, Dygraphs, and Visual.ly have been helping digital marketers package big data for easy consumption not just for businesses but the consumers as well. This is not exactly a new trend. However, for this year, it’s projected that businesses will make sure to exert more effort in using these tools to interpret the facts and figures at their disposal.
4. Viral Videos Won’t Go Away Anytime Soon
Last year, Samsung was the big winner after three of its video ads went viral. By December 2016, they already had almost 500 million views total. Viral marketing will continue to be an effective tool for brand recall. Google’s new updates, particularly on placing more importance on the social status for ranking, will really benefit businesses that invest in quality content. The downside is the short lifespan of viral video marketing. The trick is when to increase engagement, boost traffic, and convert them into income before interest wanes.
5. Content With Short Shelf Life
Businesses might dismiss expiring content as an effective means to build on the brand. After all, Facebook Stories or Instagram Stories only stay for about 24 hours before they are no longer seen again. Of course, this concept was copied from Snapchat, which has a similar feature. Digital marketers arebasically exploiting the “fear of missing out,” which is human nature. Nobody likes to be the odd man out when everybody is talking about the latest video or when they grab the latest product, which is the reason why Kylie lip products sell like hotcakes even if they don’t really offer anything new.
It seems Mark Zuckerberg’s $1 billion acquisition of Instagram in 2012 is paying off, as the social media site is expected to hit $5 billion in sales by 2018.
In fact, apart from Facebook or Twitter, Instagram has become the go-to platform for businesses seeking to increase awareness and engagement, not to mention sales. While other social media sites such as Twitter have suffered some fluctuations in sales and population, Instagram has benefited from piggybacking on the Facebook architecture.
Instagram users are only a drop in the bucket when compared to Facebook’s 1.9 billion users. But what Zuckerberg provides is stability. As Facebook grows possibly to be the first company to be worth $1 trillion, the photo-sharing site is bound to be carried along.
Below are some tips on how to leverage the platform in marketing your business:
1. Use Instagram Insights
Just like Facebook Insights, there’s a tool in Instagram which is invaluable to any business, providing important metrics such as the number of times your post or video has been viewed (impressions), the number of clicks your link is getting, how many followers you are getting daily, and more. The results of this tool also include demographic info, which indicates the gender and age of your followers. This gives you a quick peek into the general profile of your followers so you can customize your marketing campaign to match their preferences.
2. Engage Your Followers
Followers, particularly die-hard fans of a particular brand, like to be rewarded for their loyalty. This is why businesses should also assign an administrator to reply to relevant comments if they can’t do it themselves. Your customers will appreciate that their voices are being heard whether they’re giving suggestions or expressing complaints. It’s also good to follow your followers back to learn about their tendencies, likes, travels, hobbies, and any information you can use for your own benefit.
3. Link Your Instagram Page to Your Website
Some businesses don’t connect their websites to their official Instagram account and vice versa. This is a lost opportunity for further marketing. You should also avoid flooding your page with photos of your products. Instead, use it as an opportunity to show the “human side” of your business. Buzzfeed is well-known for using its employees in its videos. As a result, traffic has gone up because viewers now relate more to the company because they know the people behind it. Don’t forget to add the location to your photos and videos for geo-tagging or search engine optimization.
4. Contests and Rewards
Small tokens are a great way to reward your followers. You can hold contests like who can write the best caption or description for a photo or video that you share. You can also ask your customers to send their best photos during holidays or special occasions like Mother’s Day. This type of marketing campaign is considered “low-cost, high-reward.”
5. Make Hashtags More Relevant
Industry specific hashtags in Instagram marketing are a given, but try to find your niche in the industry to distinguish yourself from all the companies out there. There are websites such asSoldsie that help businesses tweak their hashtags for optimization. It’s important that your hashtag is related to the image or video to prevent it from being categorized as spam. Piggybacking on trending hashtags is also a good idea, but make sure you don’t overdo it.
One more thing to consider is timing. This is very important for Instagram marketing. Whereas peak hours will yield you more traffic (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday), sharing your post after 5 p.m. EST will likely result in more engagement. If your marketing campaign is geared for other businesses, weekdays would be a good time to go online. Posting at 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. would be worthless as this has been found to be the worsttime for engagement.
With the decline of traditional TV and the growth of social media, influencer marketing has become one of the fastest growing advertising mediums. A recent study by Mediakix found that Instagram alone is expected to be a $1.07 billion market this year and $2.38 billion in 2019.
In the past six months alone, Instagram added over 100 million users and growth shows no signs of slowing. With over 600 million global users and over 400 million of whom check Instagram every day, Instagram is one of the most far-reaching and highly engaged social media networks in existence today, according to Mediakix.
Though there is no official number on the size of the Instagram influencer market, the study tracked common sponsored hashtags, including #ad, #sponsored, #spon, and #sp. In the past year, there was an increase of 4.8 million uses of these hashtags over years prior.
In looking at a sample size of 500 recent sponsored posts, 58% were from accounts with more than 1,000 followers. The average follower size for accounts posting sponsored content was 32,000. Applying an average $10 cost per thousand impressions (CPM), an estimated $320 per post and an estimated total monthly spend of approximately $90 million resulted. This would put the overall total annual spend at over $1 billion.
With the current annual growth, the market could reach a $130M/month spend by March 2018 and up to a $200M/month spend by March 2019 (nearly $2.4B spent on influencer marketing on Instagram alone).
As the eCommerce industry has matured in sales and reach, it has realized it still has obstacles….namely engaging and persuading real people. To take this on, successful brands have embraced digital content to add a pop to their product presentation. But as recent survey from Episerver found, 98% of shoppers have been deterred from completing a purchase because of incomplete content.
Research has shown that video is a valuable content form for online shopping engagement. Put simply, it helps overcome the advantage of tangible interaction provided by in-store experience.
So that being the case, what kind of video content works best to boost eCommerce sales? A new study from the UK has found some insightful answers.
Alex Connock of EndemolShine North in MediaCityUK wanted to examine how differing editorial styles and durations would impact the customer journey. “Around the world there are many territories which have a more relaxed approach to brand integration into mainstream or OTT programming, and here it is possible that e-commerce ‘clickability’ will be included in factual and fiction programming of a mainstream variety. Testing what works in terms of functionalities and styles of integration of that technology is fascinating and seriously useful. We already have interest in this study from colleagues all over the world, from Spain and Holland, to the US and China” he recently told Prolific North.
A survey was conducted of 2800 UK respondents, in 28 standalone representative groups of 100 people each. Before they watched any of the test videos:
30% said have clicked on an online video to find out more detail
29% had actually made a purchase through an online video
49% usually have the sound on, when shopping online
They were then shown the video and asked: would you have bought the product?
The study found that among other things: short videos worked the best, videos with people work better, branded content works better than a hard sell, marketing multiple items works well and leads to more “buys”, and waiting until the video ends before offering click to buy.
“What didn’t surprise me was that short videos do very well as drivers to purchase, as I think we have seen that worldwide. But what was surprising was HOW short that took effect. Notably 15 seconds resoundingly beat 40 seconds as a shoppable video length,” Connock told Prolific North.
“I was very surprised, as are most people who see the survey, that user-generated content ranked so badly as a driver of purchase. It’s definitely one to avoid and that’s a real learning for many ecommerce platforms.
A lot of other surprising findings came from the study that are well worth any eCommerce/eTailer business to consider. The video below shows a summary of the research and results.
Google has purchased FameBit, a technology and marketing platform that helps brands link up with social media stars on YouTube and Twitter. This is part of a growing trend where Google and others realize that preroll video ads are not the future and that marketing integration into content is the smart way to reach millennial’s and even younger audiences.
Ironically, that’s how television started in the 1950’s, where every show was brought to you by a product and often that product was integrated into the content.
“We believe that Google’s relationship with brands and YouTube’s partnerships with creators, combined with FameBit’s technology and expertise, will help increase the number of branded content opportunities available, bringing even more revenue into the online video community,” noted Ariel Bardin, Vice President, Product Management at Google.
FameBit provides a modern version of this, telling marketers that it will grow your customer base via tutorials, comedic skits, mentions, routines, DIY videos, game plays, lookbooks, vlogs and hauls. What this means is that FameBit, and now YouTube, will connect your brand with YouTube stars and help popular YouTuber’s make additional revenue in the process.
“Every year, more and more brands are making YouTube essential to their marketing strategy,” said Bardin. “In fact, in the last year alone, the top 100 advertisers have increased their spend on YouTube video ads by 50 percent.”
Google knows that even though brands have increased their marketing on YouTube, what they really want are deeper connections with YouTube stars and through extension their fans.
“As brands continue to embrace the value of YouTube, they’re also taking their investments one step further, partnering with creators on branded content opportunities such as product placements, promotions and sponsorships,” he said. “As we look to the future, we want even more creators and brands to come together and realize the benefits of these creative collaborations.”
Unlike Google search, YouTube video is not inherently a lead generation opportunity, but rather is more like TV, promoting brand recognition and brand favorability. Fortunately for Google, that’s what Madison Avenue sells and Google wants to tap into more of their dollars.
According to eMarketer TV ad spending will be $72.01 billion in 2016 with digital ad spending just slightly under that. But with advertising in video formats from YouTube, Facebook, SnapChat, Twitter, etc…, digital ad spend will increase as a percentage. By 2020, it’s predicted that digital ad revenue will be 37% higher than TV.
Of course, digital delivery of TV is also on the rise, replacing the cable middlemen and ultimately making digital the primary way to consume video content.
Facebook sees a huge opportunity to become the marketing platform of record for businesses seeking to reach consumers and other businesses to promote cross-country sales. Facebook is uniquely positioned as both a social platform and a marketing platform that has an astounding 1.7 billion monthly active users, one-fifth of the entire world’s population. By 2018, according to eMarketer in an April report, overall internet users are predicted to grow 30% to 3.82 billion. If Facebook grows at the same rate which seems likely, they will have over 2.2 billion active users in less than 2 years!
According to a February 2016 study by McKinsey Global Institute, 361 million people worldwide have participated in cross-border ecommerce. This is a growing and huge opportunity for Facebook, finding ways to make international ecommerce seamless and practical for businesses. Internal Facebook data shows that nearly 50 million businesses use Facebook to find customers, and 30 percent of their a businesses Facebook followers fans are in fact from other countries.
Australia has a population of 24 million with over 21 million using the internet and of those one-third, or 14 million are active on Facebook. On average, people are checking their Facebook feed 14 times a day, making Australian’s an especially reachable target for cross-country businesses. They say that 92% of students below 25 years old access Facebook on a daily basis.
Brazil
Brazil has over a 113 million internet users, 80 million digital shoppers and 49 million smartphone users. According to Facebook surveys, over 70% of users want to receive offers and information about brands and products.
Canada
Nearly 30 million Canadian’s are on the internet and over 21 million of them are on Facebook. According to Comscore, 29% of all time spent on mobile properties in Canada happens on Facebook.
France
Close to 50 million people in France are on the internet and 31 million of those are active on Facebook. One survey showed that 25% of internet users considered Facebook as one of their favorite platforms for discovering
new content/ products or services.
Germany
Germany has 29 million active Facebookers and 82% of all internet users in Germany say that Facebook is their favorite social platform. Over 32% of Germans say they use Facebook while watching TV. There are big marketing opportunities for sports related businesses in this country, with 10 million soccer fans using Facebook.
Malaysia
Malaysia has a population of 30 million, 20 million of them are on the internet and nearly all internet users, 18 million, are active on Facebook. In Malaysia, the internet is Facebook!
Thailand
Less than half of the 68 million people in Thailand are even on the internet, yet Facebook says that it has 40 million monthly active users there. It’s total ecommerce spending is around $1 billion, leaving substantial room to grow considering the population. Over 95% of people in Thailand use at least two devices and a third use three: a smartphone, a tablet and a desktop or laptop.
Philippines
Almost all of the people on the internet in the Philippines are on Facebook, over 50 million with 1.2 more time spent on Facebook than TV, according to a Reach study commissioned by Facebook. Over 70% of internet users have seen or searched for product information on Facebook.
United Kingdom
Most people in the UK are on Facebook, over 51 million of them, and 37 million of those use Facebook. With the UK’s ecommerce market expected to hit $132 billion by 2018, this is one of the world’s biggest marketing opportunities for businesses.
United States
The US has over 200 million Facebook users, close to 77% of everybody on Facebook. The ecommerce opportunity for businesses will be nearing $500 billion by 2018 and Facebook is routinely used by US brands to promote their products.
Canvas is Facebook’s mobile marketing platform for companies wanting to present a more immersive experience to potential customers. It’s a full-screen mobile ad that Facebook touts as loading nearly instantly and is designed specifically for Android and iOS devices. Using the same technology for loading photos and video quickly in the Facebook mobile app, Canvas can load up to 10 time faster than the mobile web.
When Canvas launched back in February, advertisers had to have either a web click or website conversion objective. Making Canvas even more versatile for advertisers, especially for marketers looking to seriously gain brand engagement, marketers can now choose brand awareness or video view objectives. “This means brand marketers can use Canvas across their range of goals for their campaigns,” noted a Facebook post.
The future of Canvas
Facebook is seeking to make Canvas an extremely robust marketing tool, especially for companies looking for new branding and customer relationship opportunities. “The future of Canvas will include many more features designed to make this immersive, attention-grabbing format accessible to any business, regardless of size or creative resources,” said Facebook. “Recently, we introduced new metrics for Canvas to help marketers understand the performance of each component—videos, photos and buttons—within their Canvas. Marketers can now learn from each Canvas they run, determining which designs work best to achieve their campaign goals.”
They plan to make Canvas simple for any brand to implement by providing advertisers with templates that immolate how other advertisers have used the new platform. Facebook says that the templates will be available over the next few months, but they provided one as an example:
360 Videos Coming to Canvas
Facebook wants to make Canvas its most immersive ad format in order to attract the Madison Avenue brands. Soon they will be offering 360 videos that provide advertisers a unique way to engage people on mobile and interact with a brands advertisement. According to Facebook, ITAU, a Brazilian bank, used Canvas with 360 video in it to tell an immersive story for children, in order to let people know about the banks outreach and charity in the area of education.
They are also offering the ability to link Canvas ads to one another via linked buttons and images, instead of just linking to a website. The allows advertisers to create a multi-Canvas experience. “By linking Canvases, Beats by Dre could invite people to explore differently colored versions of its iconic headphones, designed after different countries’ flags,” noted Facebook. “When people tapped on their different Beats options, instead of being driven to a slow-loading website, they got another Canvas, loaded quickly, that they could explore. Beats saw an average of 39 seconds spent in the Canvas, and 73% of the Canvas was viewed on average.”
Brand Success on Canvas
Facebook released some statistics from a couple of brands that have recently tried the Canvas marketing platform. Royal Caribbean used Canvas to promote a contest to win a free cruise where the last Canvas screen provided an access code and a link to enter the sweepstakes. Their cost per action was $0.17 and the average time potential customers spent on their Canvas as 72 seconds.
They say that Canvas works for smaller localized brick and mortar businesses too. A company (Edifica) built a new condo complex (also called Canvas) in Peru and was looking to find buyers using Canvas. According to Facebook, they saw a 50% lower cost-per-click, a 15% lower cost-per-thousand impression, and a 2.3X click-through-rate versus their other link ads, and got a 46-second average time spent in their Canvas. It’s unknown how many of these clickers turned into condo sales.
Native advertising, sponsored content or branded news (all the same) is booming and with some online publishers it’s now their main source of revenue.
It’s important to note that native advertisingis notcontent marketing. Content marketing is a content strategy by brands where typically, they own the content, such as their blogs or content on a product website. Native advertising is sponsored content, more typically created by the publisher to be in alignment with an audience that the advertiser wants to reach. I think where the confusion happens is when an advertiser creates biased and conversion oriented content that is placed on websites for a fee. To me, that’s content marketing more than native advertising because content marketing has evolved to be measured by conversions, while native advertising looks at other metrics.
Fractl and Moz conducted a survey of more than 30 content marketing agencies and obtained cost data from more than 600 digital publishers and determined that “content marketing has a better overall return on investment.”
“Readers are necessarily less engaged with advertising vs. editorial content, and metrics show lower share rates, lower engagement rates, lower view counts, etc. in most cases,” said Kelsey Libert, partner and vp of marketing at Fractl. “You can’t simply push through a mediocre, thinly veiled advertorial. Content marketing puts the brand and the consumer on equal footing, and in the process necessitates the brand elevate the content they are creating. When done correctly, the result is a true match between brand and content consumer, where the content created has true value, and spreads based on the merit of the content. Through this, content can enjoy true virality in a way that is nearly impossible with Native ads.”
“The fact that people find it necessary to pit one form against the other is a little bemusing,” said Cas McCullough, Founder at Writally PTY LTD, in a comment on Adweek. “When used together, good content and native ads are very powerful. On their own they don’t get the same ROI. Our case studies prove this consistently, so we’ll stick with an integrated approach.”
Sites such a Buzzfeed and Vice have built their entire business model around native advertising. Slate says that it now relies on native advertising for nearly 50% of its revenue. According to Digiday Slate trained its 10-person sales team on a its new native ad product called Slate Custom, and also hired Jim Lehnhoff, the former head of Gawker Media’s native advertising strategy. The goal with Slate Custom is to make native ads that are aligned to Slate’s “edtorial DNA.”
“The differences between five years ago and now, in client expectations, are enormous,” said Keith Hernandez, the president of Slate, in a New York Times article on native. “Creating something that’s delightful and that’ll make someone stop and click and share…that’s really hard. But doing the easy thing is not fun.”
The Atlantic’s Hayley Romer, their Publisher, expects “native campaigns to drive 70 percent of its ad revenue this year, up from 60 percent in 2015.”
“We know that our audience is engaging really deeply with our native content on our site,” she was quoted as saying in a NiemanLab article.
The 2016 Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report, the largest study of its kind, based on more than 50,000 people in 26 countries, was released recently (PDF) and shows the rise of sponsored content. Here’s a chart from the Report:
The report noted that with existing models of online advertising increasingly broken, publishers have been trying alternatives such as “branded and sponsored content.” Sponsored content still has numerous legal and political obstacles, with labeling “sponsored” still an area of confusion. Geographically, the US and Canada are most accepting, while Germany and Korea branded content faces tremendous consumer confusion and resistance.
The New York Times has created a 100-person native ad unit, T Brand Studio, in a huge push for native advertising revenue. The Times is openly declaring “sponsored content to be an important part of their strategy.”.
The motivation for publishers in looking for a new monetization model for their digital properties is the continued weakness of online display advertising.
“Display still has a place, but we believe that the digital advertising of the future will be dominated by stories conceived by advertisers, clearly labelled so they can be distinguished from newsroom journalism, but consumed alongside that journalism on their own merits,” said New York Times CEO Mark Thompson in a commentary in the above report. “This is a more compelling and creative vision of digital advertising than conventional digital display, and it requires new skills, talents, and technologies, and substantial fresh investment. Audience scale and global reach will still count, but the audience which publishers will need to find will not be super-light users, the one-and-dones who spend a few seconds on many different sites, but truly engaged readers and viewers who are prepared to devote real time to content of real quality and relevance.”
Thompson is adamant that the editorial and commercial sides must work as one. “Editorial and commercial leaders need to work together on integrated strategies which combine editorial mission and standards, user experience, innovations in data, technology and creative design, and radically new approaches to monetization,” he said. “Not five different strategies, not even ‘aligned’ editorial and commercial strategies, but a single shared way forward.”
Sponsored content does not have to be biased content, but instead can be content that is paid for by an advertiser, because that advertiser wants to reach the type of people that read a particular content subject area.
Interestingly, a study (PDF) by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Edelman in June 2015 uncovered that consumer perceptions of sponsored content isn’t all negative.
Roughly 45% of those seeing sponsored content related to business or entertainment recognized the value-add.
The IAB study says that brand relevance, authority, and trust are the most important factors to driving consumer interest in sponsored content across all media. “Make the ads and product more on target… also give info [on] how to enhance the experience with the latest and best products,” commented one consumer interviewed in the study.
The value (or lack of value) for the advertiser is that the credibility of the site hosting the sponsored content is largely transferred to the advertiser.
Sherrill Mane, formerly of the IAB and currently Head of MAdTech Strategy, and Steve Rubel, Chief Content Strategist for Edelman recommend these steps for publishers that intend to incorporated sponsored content:
Control the experience and be prepared to walk away from advertisers who aren’t relevant/trusted
Encourage aligned brand marketers to work together in a more authoritative manner
Go the distance when it comes to transparency/disclosures
“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.
Email marketing is alive and well for brands. Over 60% of marketers are planning to use email marketing as their primary method of gaining new business, according to a new survey by Campaigner.
The power of first impressions should not be something that online retail marketers should overlook. This new survey illustrates the importance of a marketers first email message, right after someone provides their email to a brand.
The survey revealed that 39% of marketers send a thank-you-for-subscribing message and 50% of those companies say that 21% of their new subscribers engage with their welcome emails. That’s quite the engagement rate and is reflective of the fact that marketers typically offer enticement deals in these emails such as free shipping, free items with purchase, extra percents off for new customers, etc. These offers almost always are only available for a limited amount of time and are offered on first purchase only. Frequent online shoppers know that providing their email will result in these deals so they are accustomed to subscribing before purchase.
“It takes just seconds within meeting someone to form a lasting impression,” said EJ McGowan, general manager, Campaigner. “Unsurprisingly, first impressions for brands are just as critical and time-sensitive. Marketers who quickly deliver engaging welcome emails to new subscribers will see greater success in conversions, while also building brand reputation.”
Of brands surveyed, 55% offered news and content and their main incentive to entice subscriptions while 49% offered promotions.
It’s also important for brands to send a timely welcome message after a new subscription with 62% reporting they send their welcome emails within 24 hours. In my experience most major brands send their welcome emails immediately while the potential shopper is actively engaged with the brand. It is absolutely a horrible idea to wait as long as 24 hours, so I suspect the survey didn’t offer shorter response times as options. As I indicated above, it is an extremely effective sales strategy to send a welcome email with true and exclusive deals just for the new shopper, but it is also very important to send those while your customer is thinking about you and likely still on your website, in order to maximize their likelihood of becoming a customer.
In general, the survey found that it’s best for retail marketers to send their emails before 2 p.m. and 35% say that between 8 a.m. and 11 a.m. is ideal in order to generated the best response. Only 25% said that between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. is best. Again, the welcome email should be sent immediately following the subscription, even if it is 3 a.m., or you risk losing a hot prospective customer to your 24 hours a day online retail business.
Interestingly, 60% of marketers reported that they aren’t doing everything they can do to make their welcome emails most effective. The survey asked questions as to what marketers are doing to improve results in their emails:
Eighty-seven percent of marketers are including images in their welcome emails, while 26 percent are including videos.
Nearly a third (31 percent) of marketers report that geo-targeting is important for initial emails to contacts.
Additionally, more than half of the marketers ranked personalization and segmentation as the most successful tactics in driving conversions.
The survey shows that (unfortunately) even though email marketing is still a very powerful platform to gain new customers, it faces the challenge of the spam and clutter folders. Marketers reported that 47% of their emails to their own opt-in customers did not hit the inbox! Wake up Google and Outlook and other email platforms, when people subscribe to something they are expressly saying they WANT TO GET EMAIL, even if, and maybe especially if, they are sent offers and promotions.
A ComScore study focusing on podcasting proved to be good news for podcasters and advertising seeking to reach hard-to-reach audiences. In their study commissioned by Wondery, nearly on in five Americans aged 18-49 report listening to podcasts at least once a month, while nearly one in three men 18-34 do so.
Compared to the average consumer, podcast listeners are more likely to have:
a college or higher education
$100k+ household income
be early adopters in multiple categories including movies, electronics and CPG.
Hernan Lopez, Founder & CEO of Wondery commented, “Are you listening? Your hardest-to-reach consumers are.” Wondery has a reason to be excited about these results considering that it is a company focused on creating and curating podcasts and then integrating brands into the mix. Podcasts have often been a hard sell for marketers because they don’t typically generate a huge amount of direct response to offers. It’s much more of a brand play in my opinion.
According to ComScore, one in three podcast listeners expect to increase their podcast consumption over the next six months, following a similar increase in their behavior in the past six months.
Podcasts can be a very effective platform for marketing according to ComScore. The study reports that two-thirds of podcast listeners have engaged in various research and/or purchase related behaviors as a result of advertising exposure from podcasts. Among all forms of advertising on mobile devices, podcasts create the highest improvement in perception. And among all forms of digital advertising, podcast ads are considered the least intrusive.
“It’s clear that we’re in the midst of a new podcasting boom, spurred in large part by improved accessibility via mobile and a tidal wave of rich and compelling content,” said Andrew Lipsman, VP of Marketing & Insights, comScore. “This research provides strong evidence for why this sector is very attractive for advertisers. Not only do podcasts over-index on reaching some of the most valuable and hardest-to-reach audiences, but they also put consumers in a mindset that’s favorable to ad receptivity.”
“In a world of clutter, attention deficit and elusive audiences the work Wondery is doing adds another valuable string to our bow,” said Nick Emery, Global CEO of Mindshare.
“This study underscores the power of the podcast as a vital digital platform for brand advertising,” said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO, IAB. “We saw marketers and media buyers come out in strong numbers for first IAB Podcast Upfront Showcase. Now, with research showing the medium’s reach and resonance, we anticipate an even bigger turnout for the event later this year.”
“When we hear ‘podcast listeners’ we think of early adopters, passionate consumers, dedicated to deep cultural content; Wondery’s study confirms this view”, added Jim Elms, Global CEO, Initiative Media.
The study also asked about a listeners emotions before and after listening to podcasts. Many said they felt more “connected, intelligent and energized” after listening. The ComScore study was commissioned between March and April of 2016 among over 2,000 respondents in the US aged 18-49.
A study by Nielsen Scarborough released May 23, 2016 also found that podcasting consumption is on the rise. The study reported that the number of adults 18 and older listening to a podcast during the past month has doubled over the previous five years. Five years seems like a long time to only see doubling, but at least it’s not declining.
The Nielsen Scarborough study found that:
Podcast listeners are equally male and female
The majority (70%) are between the ages of 18-44
They are 39% more likely to be single
44% more likely to be a college graduate
33% more likely to be employed in a white collar occupation
Have an average household income of $83,700 exceeding the national average by about $12,000
Nielsen stats indicate that they could be good targets for marketers:
With higher average incomes than the general population, podcast listeners are particularly interested in investments and wealth management. More than 65% of podcast listeners have some type of investment, with nearly half participating in a 401K plan. In addition, podcast listeners are 25% more likely to have stocks, 105% more likely to engage in online investing/stock trading and 15% more likely to use a financial planner.
And while podcast listeners are serious about their finances, they are equally serious about giving back to their communities with three-quarters having contributed money to a cause during the past year. Their contributions focus on areas they are passionate about and where they can make an impact on society. These causes’ include education, social programs and arts and culture.
Last year, Microsoft released some research finding that the average attention span for a goldfish is about nine seconds and that for people of the smartphone era, it’s even less than that at eight seconds. It’s somewhat troubling, but not all that surprising when you think about all the content being blasted at you every second from a device that you keep close by at all times.
While marketers have more tools in their arsenals than ever, cutting through the noise (not to mention the content of substance) is no easy deed. Last fall, Wyzowl put together this infographic that takes this goldfish to human comparison into consideration and provides some advice on how to overcome the issue.
While the infographic has been out there since October, it has been popping up in a few places in recent days, bringing it to our attention (I first saw it at Social Media Today).
The eight-second rule for grabbing attention in videos is particularly interesting this week as Google just introduced a new six-second, unskippable video ad format.
Email on Acid recently released the results of a survey of 3,550 professionals (including marketers and developers) from last fall, looking at development, design, and marketing trends and behavior in email marketing. Based on this, email marketing is going to stay a top priority for businesses this year.
The company found that 71.8% are planning to spend more time on email production while 86.7% intend to increase email marketing budgets in 2016. Of those who identified as marketers, 91.2% of them are willing to spend more time on email marketing in the coming year.
The survey found that 69.1% spend between one and five hours developing a typical email campaign and that 30.6% plan to spend an additional 20+ hours per month on their email marketing programs. 23.5% will send an average of over 30 emails per month this year.
86.7% of all respondents intend to spend more money on email marketing this year. 60.2% expect to increase budget on technology and tools, while 38.4% expect to do do on list growth. 37.7% intend to increase dollars on development, and 32.5% expect to spend more on design.
“Responsive design is becoming increasingly popular, with 56.9 percent of survey respondents reporting to use responsive templates,” says Email on Acid’s Tanya Wheeler-Berliner. “Hybrid fluid design is less popular, with 7.9 percent saying they use templates coded with this technique and 19.9 percent saying they use both responsive and hybrid fluid design. Only 15.2 percent report to use neither coding method.”
53% expect to use dynamic content elements in their campaigns in 2016. 45.8% expect to use merge tags for personalization. 26.6% intend to use CSS navigation, while 22.5% will use HTML5 video and 20% will use carousel hero images.
“The survey revealed that a third of marketers believe strategy development (33.3 percent) will have the biggest impact on their email marketing program in 2016,” writes Wheeler-Berliner. “Additionally, improving email content and providing contextually relevant email experiences were cited almost equally by about one-third of all respondents as marketers’ number one goal. Finally-not surprisingly-coding for email was identified as a perennial pain point of the production process. Tools that can fix code for you was rated the top idea that would help the email creation process (39.8 percent), followed by a more streamlined testing system (24.6 percent) and better project management tools geared for email (22.3 percent).”
Email on Acid put out this infographic highlighting the survey’s findings.
Facebook announced updates to its branded content policy that will enable verified Pages to share branded content on Facebook, potentially opening up the social network as a way for publishers (and others) to better monetize content. Branded content for Facebook purposes includes text, photos, videos, Instant Articles, links, 360 videos, and Live Videos that mention or feature a third-party product, brand, or sponsored.
As Facebook notes, this stuff is typically posted by media companies, celebrities, or other influencers. They’re also providing a new tool that makes it easy to tag a marketer when publishing branded content. Facebook says publishers and influencers must use this tag for all branded content.
“This update is something that media companies, public figures, influencers, and marketers have been asking for, as branded content is a growing and evolving part of the media landscape,” Facebook’s Clare Rubin and Nick Grudin say in a blog post. “People will now be connected to more of the content they care most about on Facebook as publishers and influencers gain an incentive to share more quality content — of all kinds — with their fans. We know that many of our partners have existing partnership deals with marketers, and this update gives them the ability to extend their branded content business onto Facebook.”
“For brands and businesses, the new tool will introduce more transparency and allow them to better understand how their marketing initiatives are performing across Facebook,” they add. “Additionally, marketers can now leverage branded content creative for ads and actively engage in sponsorships to ensure their campaigns are useful, interesting, and entertaining to their target audiences. We are committed to ensuring that the branded content experience is engaging for people on Facebook and that the ecosystem thrives for our partners and marketers.”
To use the new tool, you can get started here. You can view the new branded content policy here and the updated ads policy here.
This week, Pinterest announced the launch of a new type of Rich Pin – the How-To Pin. Rich Pins, in general, are seen as a positive for both users and content providers, but is this one actually going to prove beneficial to the sites that enable them?
It’s a good question and one that was raised in a new article from Patricio Robles at Econsultancy. In that, a couple of interesting points are made. For one, the Pins appear to be a positive for Pinterest on the SEO front. Secondly, they may be a detriment to brands/content providers on that same note.
What are How-To Pins?
The pins include step-by-step instructions to help users accomplish whatever the pins pertain to.
As a Pinterest spokesperson tells us, “When you tap a Pin for a closer look, you’ll see all the info you need to try an idea on Pins in food & drink, hair & beauty, fitness and DIY.”
At first, users will start seeing How-To Pins from Home Depot, Food.com, Style Me Pretty, Greatist, ELLE, Marie Claire, Brit & Co., Sunset, Delish and others, in the home feed (only from brands they follow), in search or by visiting a brand’s profile.
“We’re building a catalog of +50 billion ideas, and this is the latest update to Pins as we add more rich data to make them as useful and actionable as possible,” the spokesperson says, adding, “Pinterest is increasingly the app for finding ideas. According to an IPSOS Survey of online adults 18-64, an overwhelming majority said Pinterest was the best app to find inspiration, plan, and try something new, while Facebook is about making connections and Twitter is about staying updated on current events.”
How-To Pins are rolling out to all Pinterest users in the US, UK, and Germany on Android and the web. iOS will gain support in the future.
Are How-To Pins Worth Implementing?
These How-To Pins replicate the content from a third-party website, placing that content right on Pinterest, leaving the user with little reason to click over to your site. This means potentially less referral traffic.
It’s not entirely unlike Google instant answers, especially when you consider Pinterest as a search engine rather than a social network (which Pinterest itself most certainly does). While using the How-To Pins may help you in Pinterest visibility, it may hurt you in Google visibility. That is if we’re talking about your actual site.
Robles points to an example of a How-To Pin from publisher Brit & Co.
“One of its how-to Pins, How to Make Easy, Cheesy Pizza Pull-Apart Bread, is based on an article it published on its own site under the same title in 2014,” he writes. “The how-to Pin, which is of course hosted on pinterest.com, appears on the first page of a Google search for the title while the article on the Brit & Co. appears near the bottom of the second page of Google’s search results.”
“This demonstrates the potential of how-to Pins based on third-party content to provide a significant SEO benefit to Pinterest at the expense of the third-party which owns the content,” he adds.
For some, this won’t necessarily make a difference, as long as they’re content is showing up in one way or another. For those depending on actual referral traffic, it might not be such a good thing.
It’s worth noting, however, that users can still click through to the original content from How-To pins. It’s just not clear that they’ll typically have much of a reason to do so.
Rich Pins Have Their Benefits
As noted, the pins could help you in the visibility department though. I don’t know that Rich Pins have ever been named as an official ranking signal in Pinterest’s search algorithm, but a while back, we talked to Vincent Ng, a marketer who has been engaging in Pinterest marketing since 2010, and runs a Pinterest marketing agency. He seemed to place a good deal of importance on Rich Pin usage.
“Rich pins for a blogger is a must, because rich pins are a factor in search rankings for Pinterest. Pinterest prefers to show blog posts or pins that are rich pins,” he said. “On top of that, rich pins also have more credibility and authority because rich pins for articles show off, in bold text, the title of the blog post article and the meta description when clicked through.”
“I worked with a hairstyle blog on improving their traffic, and we were stuck at getting 30 referral visits a day from Pinterest,” he adds. “The moment they were approved for rich pins, the traffic spiked up within two days to 70 referral visits from Pinterest.”
That certainly sounds appealing, but again, this is a new type of Rich Pin that puts the sought after content right on Pinterest, so I’m not so sure it’ll have quite that effect.
If these Pins help the content perform better in Google, even if it’s still hosted on Pinterest, there’s probably something to be said for that.
It’s entirely possible that some content providers will have great success with How-To pins, but the point raised by Robles is certainly worth considering. Pinterest can be a great referral traffic driver for some sites, and if this includes you, you may want to some thinking before implementing this.
Instagram commissioned a study to analyze how moms use its service, presumably to help advertisers plan their Mother’s Day campaigns.
It found not only that moms are active on Instagram in general, but one in four women over 18 on the platform in the U.S. are moms. Of this group, 93% use Instagram at least once a week. 68% use it daily.
“With their hectic schedules, moms are using mobile devices to manage their entire lives—from work to personal,” the company says. “In addition to managing their schedules, the average mom checks social media 15 times a day and checks Instagram six times every day.”
“Moms follow content based on their interests,” it says. “Looking at internal data, we discovered that moms are 5x more likely to follow accounts about cosmetics, 3x more likely to follow fashion, 2x more likely to follow hair accounts and 1.7x more likely to follow animal accounts when compared to dads.”
Over half of moms on Instagram follow businesses, the company says. 56% say Instagram is where they learn about products, and 78% of moms take action from business posts after seeing content on Instagram, according to the company.
In the U.S., ads shared from department stores convert 2.8x more often among moms, and with retail, apparel and accessories ads, moms convert 2.1x more often, it says.
For what it’s worth, Father’s Day isn’t really that far away either, and Instagram says dads are just as active with nearly half of them following businesses and 69% of those taking action from the content they see. Dads are 4.3x more likely to follow auto brands and 2.5x more likely to follow “leisure” accounts.
What are you supposed to do with all of this info? Adjust your targeting, of course. Mothers, New Moms, Dads, Fit Moms, Moms of Grade Schooler Kids, etc. are all available segments for Instagram ads. In a blog post, Instgram shares some examples of effective campaigns from Campbell’s and GapKids.
There’s been a lot happening with Instagram in the news this week. Rumors that its new algorithmic feed would go into effect this past Tuesday emerged, though the company said it was still a ways off (you may want to consider this in advance). The company also announced that sixty-second videos are on the way, and they’ve updated the overlay that appears on ads.
Instagram recently announced it surpassed 200,000 advertisers. Mother’s Day is on May 8th. Here’s a helpful infographic from WebpageFX that shows Facebook and Instagram ad specs for 10 different objectives.
Salesforce released its 2016 State of Marketing Report, finding that marketers are seeing increased ROI with email, mobile, and social media marketing. The report is based on a survey of about 4,000 marketers from around the world.
Of those who use email marketing, 80% agree it is core to their business. Nearly half of them say it’s directly linked to their business’ primary revenue source. That’s up 140% from last year’s report. 79% of marketers, according to this year’s, say email generates ROI, which is a 48% increase year-over-year.
The report says that intelligent email is driving higher revenue.
“As email personalization capabilities grow more sophisticated, the channel becomes even more integral for marketers to deliver a holistic customer journey,” it reads. “Eighty percent of marketers agree that email is core to their business.”
“Predictive technology is breathing new life into established marketing channels such as email,” the report adds. “Top teams are 4.2x more likely than underperformers to leverage predictive intelligence or data science to create personalized emails.”
What’s interesting is the diversity in the types of campaigns found to be effective. Take a look:
The high-performing marketers, Salesforce says, are 2.3x more likely to trigger personalized emails in real time based on events. The high performers in general take a “more sophisticated” approach to email, it says.
75% of marketers using social report that it’s generating ROI, which is a 166% increase from last year’s report. Unsurprisingly, Facebook is found to be the most effective social channel for high-performing teams. This is followed by Twitter, YouTube, Google+, and then Instagram. Considering that advertising on Instagram is in its early days, it’s likely it will gain significance if you ask me.
In terms of mobile, adoption of location-based mobile tracking saw a 149% increase while mobile push notifications saw a 145% increase. Mobile text messaging adoption saw an 111% increase, and mobile app adoption saw a 98% increase. More importantly, 77% of those who use mobile as part of their marketing strategy say it actively generates ROI, up 147% from lat year’s report.
The report found that 65% of high-performing marketers say they’ve adopted a customer journey strategy. 88% say such a strategy is critical to their marketing success.
The study found that 58% of high-performing marketing teams strongly agree they’re implementing digital transformations across the company. This compares to just 8% of underperformers. 63% of the high-performers also say they’re excellent at creating personalized, omnichannel customer experiences across all business units. It’s just 2% for the underperformers.
You can find the full 2016 State of Marketing Report here.
What’s a good way to get more engagement and higher CTR on your content on LinkedIn The short answer is to have your employees share it.
Do you encourage employees to share company content with their LinkedIn accounts? Let us know in the comments.
LinkedIn shared some findings after researching how CTRs differ when employees share versus when their company shares. They looked for instances where employees had shared the same piece of content that their company had, and compared the CTRs.
They found that employees get 2X higher CTRs from their shares compared to company shares of the same content. The impact is grater for larger companies, but improvements were seen across all company sizes.
“Companies of every size benefit when their employees share content, but not everyone benefits equally,” wrote LinkedIn’s Nick Mangum on LinkedIn’s marketing solutions blog. “In our analysis, we found that the biggest beneficiaries were large, enterprise companies with more than 10,000 employees. For this group of large companies, the median CTR was over 2.4x higher. Companies with less than 10,000 employees still had a considerable boost with CTRs over 1.8x higher than the original company shares.”
According to the company, the same benefits apply across verticals with Professional Services seeing the greatest CTR increase (2.4x). Education, Financial Services, and Technology all saw over 2X increases from employee shares as well.
“These data points highlight that employees have an increasingly important voice in company conversations,” said Mangum. “Whether your company is looking to improve content marketing, talent branding, or lead generation, the activity and authenticity of employees can help companies drive meaningful business results. And not only will it help with company engagement, but it also benefits the members by enhancing their professional reputation while driving more profile views and connections.”
Noting the benefits to both the company and the employees, Mangum points out that some companies have been creating employee advocacy programs. LinkedIn suggests identifying a cross-functional group of employees you want to regularly share content, educate them on the benefits of sharing, providing social media guidelines, and making it easy for them to share by providing them with relevant content, along with pre-populated comments ton include in ther posts (possibly in a weekly email digest).
This is a particularly good time to start gaining more referrals from LinkedIn, as some are already seeing increases in recent months.
In January, reports emerged that LinkedIn had made some changes that enable you to get more traffic. This includes tweaks to its Pulse news reader that have turned into traffic spikes for some. This includes the addition of a feature called Universal Links, which loads Pulse articles within the app rather than sending readers to the mobile web. Another is a recommendation feature added in the fall.
Big publications have benefited, but there is potential for anyone with a blog – particularly related to business. Make sure you include the LInkedIn InShare button. You should take a look through this Slideshare deck as well.
These days, if you’re not marketing on Instagram, you’re likely missing out, but at the same time, things aren’t as rosy in that department as they once were. For those trying to get more marketing bang from the photo and video sharing service, there’s good news and bad news, and the bad news is probably only going to get worse.
Have you found success in Instagram marketing efforts of late? Have things gotten harder than they used to be? Discuss.
Locowise released its latest findings on the subject of Instagram marketing, looking at the performance of 2,500 Instagram profiles over the course of January.
The good news is that they found Instagram follower growth rate to be at its highest level since August, which they consider to be good news for brands trying to grow organically. The news is even better when you consider that the prior month saw the smallest growth rate since Locowise has been analyzing it. There was a 60.87% difference from December to January.
Instagram’s follower growth also remains rather impressive when you compare it to other networks like Facebook and Twitter. The number for Instagram in January was 0.37% while Facebook was 0.16% and Twitter was 0.11%. Again, we’re just talking about organic growth here.
“Having ‘audience size’ as one of your KPI’s is not the most appropriate way of measuring performance,” says Locowise’s Marko Saric. “It’s very difficult to grow much without spending money on advertising, no matter how great your organic content efforts are. It’s worth considering this when setting your goals and targets for the year. Engagement rate may be a metric that helps you measure the results of your efforts better.”
And that’s where the bad news comes in. Engagement rate is down by 66.07% on Instagram over the past ten months. It fell by 12.04% just from December to January. And why is that, you ask? Most likely because of ads.
Over just the last five months, Instagram ad partner Brand Networks reportedly increased Instagram ad impressions by 13X, reaching 670 million in December, and that’s just one ad partner.
Instagram announced last week that it now has over 200,000 advertisers with 75% of them outside of the U.S. The company says this includes businesses of all sizes in over 200 countries.
“Instagram is a place where people come to be inspired and [find] things they care about, and that includes content from businesses,” a spokesperson told WebProNews in an email. “In fact, 60% of Instagrammers say they learn about products and services on Instagram and 75% say they take action after being inspired by an Instagram post—like visiting a website, searching…or telling a friend.”
Instagram considers itself a “home for small businesses”.
“It’s not just major brands that are seeing success on Instagram,” the company says in a blog post. “PetLove, an online store for pet products based in Brazil, wanted to increase downloads of its mobile app. After seeing success with Facebook ads, they ran a mobile app install ad on Instagram using the same targeting as their Facebook campaigns. After the campaign ended, PetLove saw a 30% lower cost per install compared to other channels.”
As we discussed in an article last month, Instagram has been making some significant improvements to its marketing offerings, including longer campaign options, longer videos, video view counts, and multiple account support.
Videos on Instagram haven’t been performing as well as photos in terms of engagement, according to Locowise’s findings, but the time users spent watching videos increased by over 40% over the past six months. The firm found that 91.83% of all posts in January were images, and image posts engaged 0.97% of their total audience compared to video posts, which engaged just 0.68%.
In addition to the aforementioned video-related improvements from Instagram, the service is also promoting video views by curating videos related to live events. Look for them to do even more with video as time goes on.
Do you expect to put more or less time and resources into marketing with Instagram? Let us know in the comments.
Yahoo has released some new findings from a study on marketing to Generation X. It aims to provide insight into how to better understand people from this generation, their interests and how brands can better engage with them.
“Generation X, made up of 81 million adults between ages 35-54, has the highest spending power today, controlling 29% of estimated net worth dollars and 31% of total income dollars in the US,” a Yahoo spokesperson said in an email.
According to the findings, Gen Xers are mobile-obsessed, multi-taskers, social butterflies, and brand lovers.
“79% of Gen Xers are smartphone users, and this is expected to grow to reach 88% by 2018,” the spokesperson says. “During primetime hours (7pm and 11pm), 84% of Gen Xers are using 2+ devices and switching between them 9.2 times per hour. The most common combinations of device usage during primetime are TV and laptop or TV and phones.”
“Nearly 80 million Gen X users visited a social media site last month. 75% of those users consumed content, including articles and videos, while 43% shared and reposted content created by others,” they say. “Nearly 1 in 3 Gen Xers consumed content posted by brands or companies on social media, and 30% are more likely to engage or click on an ad that is aimed specifically at their generation.”
