Alphabet released its latest results, reporting a strong quarter on rebounding ad revenue for Google.
Like many companies that rely on advertising, Alphabet was initially impacted by the pandemic. A year in, however, the company’s ad business has recovered and is continuing to grow.
According to the results, Google’s sales came in just under $45 billion, a 32% increase over the previous year. Alphabet’s overall revenue, including Google ad sales, cloud business and device sales, increased 34% from the previous year.
“Over the last year, people have turned to Google Search and many online services to stay informed, connected and entertained,” said CEO Sundar Pichai. “We’ve continued our focus on delivering trusted services to help people around the world. Our Cloud services are helping businesses, big and small, accelerate their digital transformations.”
“Total revenues of $55.3 billion in the first quarter reflect elevated consumer activity online and broad based growth in advertiser revenue,” said CFO Ruth Porat. “We’re very pleased with the ongoing momentum in Google.”
Microsoft Advertising has released its 2020 year-in-review report, giving a glimpse of the state of online advertising.
The company blocked some 300,000 accounts from its advertising platform, a 30% increase from 2019. Microsoft also removed 1.6 billion bad ads, as well as 270,000 sites from its system.
Given the year that was 2020, it’s not surprising what Microsoft’s five key areas of focus were: the pandemic, political advertising, third-party government services, tech support scams and advertiser safety.
Microsoft emphasized its approach to advertising, one that uses a combination of artificial intelligence and manual reviewers.
Advertising fraud is fast-moving, and we continue to see new patterns surface globally. We take an all-hands-on-deck approach to ensure we continue to deliver the highest quality content possible. We constantly update and refine our policies to ensure we meet evolving needs. Our fraud detection technology makes use of a wide variety of signals and uses the latest machine-learning algorithms to find fraud patterns which can otherwise be difficult to detect. We also have a geographically distributed team of experts working round the clock to help us conduct detailed investigations on any new patterns we’re seeing, by making use of smart and scalable tools. Detecting fraud before it has a chance to reach customers is one piece of our approach.
We also address escalations and complaints from customers to quickly remove low-quality ads. In 2020, we received a total of ~50,000 complaints related to ads not being compliant per our advertising policies. We investigated each complaint and found ~ 65% of the reported ads to be in violation of Microsoft Advertising policies. Most of the complaints were related to trademark infringements. As we continue to roll out new products and make it easier for brands to engage with audiences, we made additional investments to protect and respond to advertisers’ concerns around trademark use and were able to reduce the trademark related complaints by ~ 25% year over year. We also received a few complaints related to unlicensed gambling sites, phishing, unauthorized government service provider websites, and other user safety concerns. We have a highly responsive operations team working 24/7 to promptly address concerns relating to our ads. In response to complaints, our operations team took down nearly 400,000 violating ads from our network.
Microsoft’s 2020 report shows the challenges the advertising industry faces, as well as provides insights into how to manage those challenges.
Stitch Fix founder and CEO Katrina Lake says that “we are still early in the journey but have learned a lot in the last couple of years on the marketing front.” Stitch Fix, an online subscription and personal shopping service, was established in 2011 in San Francisco and went public in 2017.
Katrina Lake, founder, and CEO of Stitch Fix discussed their current marketing strategy on “Squawk Alley” earlier today:
Stitch Fix Enters the UK Market
I’m excited about heading into the UK. What we see in Stitch Fix Mens has given us a lot of confidence as we think about a new client base and a new set of inventory. We are now coming up on the two year anniversary of Stitch Fix Mens and now that we are in a place where that business is more mature and contributing to the business you can actually see it in our gross margin. We had the highest gross margin this quarter than we had in the last six quarters.
Then to add kids and now to add the UK we are really excited about planting those seeds. I think that the UK it is so important in the business of personalization which ours is. We understand each client and understand what each client is looking for.
There’s a lot of investment in localization, of localizing stylists, of bringing on merchants who understand the market and are buying from brands that our clients in the UK will expect. All of that localization definitely requires more work but we think really sets us up for greater success.
Revenue Per Client is Up
We are really excited about seeing revenue per client higher this quarter. What that means is we have high-quality clients that are spending more with us. Right now is a great time to see that because Men’s is getting to a place where we see greater maturity in that business. Kids, our newest business, has not blended into those client numbers yet.
Internally, figuring out how we can capture more wallet share and how we can make sure we are getting clients more what they love and capturing more of that revenue per client is a really big effort for us.
We Are Still Early in Our Marketing Journey
We are still early in the journey and we have learned a lot in the last couple of years on the marketing front. We’ve brought channels in-house. We have a lot of efforts around diversifying our channels. In the last quarter, we had national TV off for 10 of the 13 weeks which really helped us understand regional impacts, how much TV is adding directly and much it is helping our other channels.
We already knew that TV was an important part of the mix, but it really validated those learnings. It definitely helped us to plan in an accurate way going forward. That being said, even on the TV front, there is still a lot of opportunities as we think about diversification and different tactics.
Planning Brand Marketing Push Soon
What we haven’t done any of to date is brand marketing. We have a CMO who has been in the role for three or four months and as we are able to hone that marketing muscle and learn more about what’s working and what’s not working brand marketing is actually going to be another tactic that will be really helpful. This will not just be for activating and generating awareness but also driving more reengagement and driving retention.
We are part way on the journey on the marketing front but we are still really early. There’s still a lot of the addressable market out there, our awareness is still really really low. We are really excited how much more opportunity there is on the marketing front.
Sweden’s largest insurer, Folksam, has admitted to accidentally leaking the private data of one million of its customers to tech firms.
According to U.S. News & World Report, Folksam insures every second home in Sweden, giving the company access to vast troves of personal and private data on its customers. Unfortunately, the company accidentally shared that data with Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Microsoft.
Unlike the US, the EU has strict data privacy laws in the form of the GDPR. As a result, data breaches such as this one can result in hefty fines and penalties if not handled correctly. Folksam has assured customers that it does not appear any of the data was used improperly by third-parties, and vowed to do better.
“We take what has happened seriously. We have immediately stopped sharing this personal information and requested that it be deleted,” said Jens Wikstrom, Folksam’s head of marketing.
This data breach is just the latest example demonstrating the risks that come with the current state of the tech industry, and specifically cross-industry interdependencies that have become commonplace.
Twilio has announced it is acquiring Segment, a leading customer data platform.
Like many communication companies, Twilio has experienced significant growth during the pandemic. The company’s APIs make it easy for developers to add voice, text, video, chat and email communication to their services and products.
The acquisition of Segment will help companies better know their customers and use data to build a complete profile. This, in turn, will help them better meet their customers’ needs.
“Data silos destroy great customer experiences,” said Jeff Lawson, co-founder and CEO of Twilio. “Segment lets developers and companies break down those silos and build a complete picture of their customer. Combined with Twilio’s Customer Engagement Platform, we can create more personalized, timely and impactful engagement across customer service, marketing, analytics, product and sales. We are thrilled to welcome Segment to the Twilio team.”
“Together, Twilio and Segment have an incredible opportunity to build the customer engagement platform of the future,” said Peter Reinhardt, Segment’s co-founder and CEO. “We created Segment to help businesses set themselves apart in the digital age and deliver rich, connected customer experiences built on high-quality data. By joining forces and applying our customer data platform to Twilio’s engagement cloud, we’ll be able to make the entire customer experience seamless from end-to-end.”
The deal is an all-stock deal worth approximately $3.2 billion and is expected to close Q4 2020.
“Every company is going to need a Data Czar, a data leader, a Chief Data Officer, over time,” says Splunk CEO Doug Merritt. “One of the big points of digitization is you now get a bunch of data that you didn’t have before so that you can actually begin to act in real-time on these different signals. That needs somebody that understands data and guides data across an organization.”
Doug Merritt, CEO of Splunk, discusses how big data has spurred the need for every enterprise company is ultimately going to need a Data Czar:
Big Data Drives Society Forward
Almost everything in the world has got some type of WiFi or network connection so there is a ton of data that is flying around the stratosphere at this moment. The difficulty is being able to capture that data and begin to make sense of it so you can serve customers more effectively, reduce costs, optimize your supply chain, and hear signals from your employee base.
All the different capabilities that if you understand big data, and cloud certainly helps dramatically there, you can actually drive society forward. It’s what we call turning data into action, bringing data to every question, every decision, and ultimately into every action, so that we can keep our organizations and our society moving forward.
Every Company Needs A Data Czar
Every company is going to need a data Czar, a data leader, a Chief Data Officer, over time. One of the big points of digitization is you now get a bunch of data that you didn’t have before so that you can actually begin to act in real-time on these different signals. That needs somebody that understands data and guides data across an organization.
That pull from corporations is what pulls companies like Splunk and others forward to help the technical population within those organizations to actually make sense of data. We also help the sales, marketing, and finance departments, and any people in organizations that are leaning more heavily on data gathering and data science in making sense there.
Splunk CEO Doug Merritt: Every Company Needs A Data Czar
“Nobody was using machine learning to point at the underlying consumer data to help make sense of it and bring it together,” says Matthew Biboud-Lubeck of Amperity. “We put together cloud computing that was scalable with better economics alongside a machine learning algorithm that we were pointing at the data to help make sense of it. We realized that what we had was a pretty scalable solution to help brands get to that nirvana of a single view of the customer.”
Helping Brands Create a Single View of Their Customers
We are a CDP (customer data platform) based in Seattle that is helping brands create a single view of their customers and to unlock personalized experiences from that data. If you look back to the founding of Amperity about three years ago our founders were canvassing the marketplace. What you saw was a marketplace using a lot of buzzwords but having a lot of trouble executing them. You heard about personalization, customer 360, and a 360 view of the customer. Marketers across major consumer brands were super frustrated.
They spent a fortune trying to cobble some view of their customer. They invested in technology to help them send better emails, to make their media more targeted, and to unveil better analytics. All of those tools that they have invested in talked about the notion of a single view of the customer because they fundamentally needed that to operate. The reality was that nobody was getting to the solution. We came in to say maybe there is a better way.
Machine Learning Helps Brands Get To Nirvana
There were two things that changed in the marketplace that we capitalized on. First of all, it was that cloud computing got a lot cheaper. It used to be that if you were a big brand and got hundreds of millions of customer interactions, it’s just a lot of data. Part of the reason that no one was able to create an easy solution to putting that all together was because it was cost prohibitive.
The second really interesting evolution in the market is that machine learning has become much more mature. What we found was that everyone in the marketplace was using machine learning to make that last mile to the marketer a little bit better. It was used to decide which products to show a customer or to decide which offer to show a customer or to create a customer care solution that’s automated. You go online and type toward a solution and some bot talks back to you. Nobody was using machine learning to point at the underlying consumer data to help make sense of it and bring it together.
We put together cloud computing that was scalable with better economics alongside a machine learning algorithm that we were pointing at the data to help make sense of it. We realized that what we had was a pretty scalable solution to help brands get to that nirvana of a single view of the customer. That’s how we were born. What’s interesting is that the customer data platform space is a little bit confusing. You have a lot of companies that started as something else that rebranded as a CDP. We were purpose-built from the ground up as a customer data platform designed to bring all of a brands data, reconcile that data to create a notion of identity on it and then to unleash that data back to the brand anywhere that they want to use that data.
Twitter took a big step backward in its efforts to protect user privacy, eliminating user control over data used for advertising.
In an announcement that started showing up when users logged on, Twitter said the goal of the change was to help it continue as a free service. The announcement read:
An update to your data-sharing settings
The control you have over what information Twitter shares with its business partners has changed. Specifically, your ability to control mobile app advertising measurements has been removed, but you can control whether to share some non-public data to improve Twitter’s marketing activities on other sites and apps. These changes, which help Twitter to continue operating as a free service, are reflected now in your settings.
The move is disappointing for users who value their privacy, although users in the European Union are unaffected by the change. Thanks to the EU’s GDPR, companies are required by law to give users control over their own data and how it is used.
After Twitter’s announcement, it won’t be surprising if there are renewed calls for GDPR-style legislation in the U.S.
Google is facing yet another privacy-related issue, with New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas suing the company for collecting children’s personal data.
The suit stems from Google’s sale of its Chromebook devices to schools for their students’ use, along with the company’s G Suite of office software and email. According to the lawsuit, the company collects vast amounts of personal information, via the services, from students under 13 years-old and without parental consent.
“Student safety should be the number one priority of any company providing services to our children, particularly in schools,” said Attorney General Balderas. “Tracking student data without parental consent is not only illegal, it is dangerous; and my office will hold any company accountable who compromises the safety of New Mexican children.”
In a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Balderas expresses his concern about the dangers associated with the alleged data collection:
“Because the data Google has illegally collected can then be spread across the globe through both legitimate and illegitimate means, I am bringing a lawsuit to immediately stop this practice. Data brokers and marketing technology firms that do business with Google have been credibly accused of targeting children under the age of 13 with age-inappropriate advertising. Worse yet, some of these same firms have suffered significant data breaches, causing personal information to end up for sale on the dark web, hosted in countries well beyond the reach of law enforcement. As Attorney General, I must take swift legal action in order to protect our children.”
According to Reuters, Google has denied the allegations, calling them “factually wrong,” although they did not elaborate. We will continue to monitor the story and provide updates.
According to researchers at privacy firm vpnMentor, millions of Americans’ data is at risk following the discovery of a breached database belonging to TrueDialog. TrueDialog is “the leading SMS provider for mass text messaging, SMS marketing and personalized 2-way SMS texting at scale.”
vpnMentor’s research team, led by Noam Rotem and Ran Locar, discovered the database, which was linked to “many aspects” of TrueDialog’s business. The database had “millions of account usernames and passwords, PII data of TrueDialog users and their customers, and much more.”
The researchers found the database as part of a web mapping project, using port scanning “to examine particular IP blocks and test open holes in systems for weaknesses.” As ethical hackers, the company tries to identify breaches in an effort to make the web safer. Once a breach is found, they verify the database’s identity and alert the company who owns it.
In the case of TrueDialog’s database, vpnMentor was able to access it because it was left “completely unsecured and unencrypted.” The database was 604 GB in size and “included nearly 1 billion entries of highly sensitive data.” The entries included account login details, full names, TrueDialog account holders and users, message contents, email addresses, time stamps of sent messages and more.
vpnMentor says the type of data could make it possible for bad actors to take over TrueDialog customer accounts, engage in corporate espionage, steal identities, run phishing scams and blackmail users.
Once the researchers verified the threat level, they reached out to TrueDialog to notify them and offer assistance in securing the database. Shortly after, access to the database was shut down, although TrueDialog never contacted vpnMentor.
The Takeaway
There are several lessons to be learned from TrueDialog’s data breach.
First and foremost, it is beyond shocking and inexcusable for a company of TrueDialog’s size and resources to be so irresponsible with customer data. There is simply no justification for leaving data—let alone highly sensitive data—unencrypted and exposed for the world to see.
As a general rule, when privacy researchers alert a company of a data breach, it’s never a good idea to ignore them. Even if steps are taken to fix the issue, ignoring the researchers who found it gives the impression the company doesn’t care or has something to hide.
Going silent is never a good response. TechCrunch was just one outlet that reached out to TrueDialog’s chief executive, John Wright, for comment. At the time of writing, John Wright and TrueDialog had not returned requests for comment or even acknowledged the breach. Wright also did not answer any of TechCrunch’s questions about what steps would be taken to alert impacted users, or notify regulators.
In short, if there’s a single point to take away from TrueDialog’s experience, it’s this: Don’t do anything TrueDialog has done in this case.
“DataWallet is basically a digital wallet that holds all of your personal data,” says DataWallet CEO Serafin Lion Engel. “If Twitter was to give you a DataWallet you would see exactly all of the data that you create on Twitter. At the end of the day what DataWallet does is put you in control of your data. What it cannot do is protect you from anything that may happen illegally. So if Twitter really tried to cover up the fact that they were collecting their two-factor authentication data in order to advertise to you it wouldn’t show up but it would be all the more of a scandal.”
Serafin Lion Engel, founder and CEO of DataWallet, discusses his mission of putting consumers in control of their data in an interview on CNBC:
DataWallet Puts You In Charge of Your Data
DataWallet is basically a digital wallet that holds all of your personal data. If Twitter was to give you a DataWallet you would see exactly all of the data that you create on Twitter. You would see all of the data you created yourself that they have collected about you through third-party vendors. Then you can see all of the use cases that they use that data for and you can actually set permissions for how exactly your data can be used. You can download your data and you can delete data. It puts you in full control of the data that you have created on the Twitter platform.
At the end of the day what DataWallet does is put you in control of your data. What it cannot do is protect you from anything that may happen illegally. So if Twitter really tried to cover up the fact that they were collecting their two-factor authentication data in order to advertise to you it wouldn’t show up but it would be all the more of a scandal.
Data includes anything that you post, your IP address, your email address, what device you are on, etc. It’s all-encompassing. Twitter also buys a lot of data about you in order to enrich their targeting capabilities. They may buy data from Acxiom about, for instance, your financial situation, whether you have applied for credit or not all in order to more accurately show advertising to you.
Corporate Trust Is Rooted In How They Use Your Data
We work with a lot of companies in the advertising industry because a lot of companies do want to do things differently. In ad tech, they are pretty upset about the fact that a lot of companies are doing things that are unethical and they do want things to change. We work with companies in CPG, in consulting, and in a variety of different industries.
It definitely is a tough sell to companies that try to do things with your data that they would rather not have you know about. There are a lot of companies that in the past have been good data custodians and have not gotten any credit for that. They have not gone out on a limb in order to monetize their users’ data even though they could have. Up until about two years ago, it was not a hot topic, nobody was really paying attention and companies were making a lot of money selling their consumers’ data.
However, the companies who have been good data custodians and who have said we do not want to do anything that our consumers wouldn’t give us expressive consent to do with their data are jumping on board with what we’re doing right now. They’re the ones reaping the benefits because consumers will switch to companies that are putting them in charge of their data. Over 87 percent of customers say that the amount of business they do with a company depends on how much they trust it. That trust is rooted in how they’ve used their data.
New Regulations Don’t Cover Data Usage
The regulations in California and Nevada are very much focused on the sale of data, which is still a good thing. You can now issue an opt-out request for companies to not sell your data. However, it doesn’t cover usage. If, for instance, you wanted to direct the company to stop using your data for internal marketing purposes you wouldn’t be able to do that. Any data privacy regulation that is intended to put consumers in control of their data is a good thing. However, we also have to take into consideration that a lot of companies like Facebook and Amazon are really profiting from this because they are not a third party vendor. They have their own data and that really benefits them.
DataWallet Puts You In Charge of Your Data, Says DataWallet CEO Serafin Lion Engel.
In 2019, you need to think differently about your content marketing strategies. Google has so much content on the same topics that it’s difficult for average content to rank. You need to constantly create new fresh content that is unique. More importantly, according to Neil Patel, you need to aggressively promote your content. He says you should use the 80/20 rule, 20 percent of the time writing, 80 percent promoting.
Neil Patel, one of the original internet marketing influencers, released a new video (below) that offers tips on how to successfully do content marketing in 2019:
Content Marketing Strategies for 2019
In 2019 content won’t rank as well as it used to. Yes, they say content is king, but we already know there are over a billion blogs. Google isn’t just picking from, hey what content do we want to rank because we lack content. They’re like, we have content on everything under the sun and the same thing a hundred other times. So now they’re just not picking what content do we want to rank. They’re looking at authority and user metrics and their even looking at when the content was created.
Tip 1 – Create New Fresh Content
Why would they want to rank content that’s two years old when they can rank something that’s less than one week old? When it comes to content marketing in 2019 you need to make sure that your content is also being up-to-date. If you don’t update your old content you’re not going to get as much love as people who are continuing to put out new fresh content.
Tip 2 – Don’t Regurgitate the Same Information
The second tip I have for you is don’t regurgitate the same information over and over again. People are tired of reading 12 SEO Tips That Will Double Your Traffic. You can Google it. There are probably different variations of that number but there are probably hundreds of articles on that subject. Write something new and fresh that hasn’t been seen before and you’re more likely to get traffic rankings and even social shares.
Tip 3 – Create Video and Audio Content
I know you’re not gonna like this third tip, but the third tip is to create video and audio based content. Text is overrated. It doesn’t help you connect with people as much as video. I still love text and I still crank out text, but the future is video. It’s much more personal and people get to know your personality and your company better. Create video-based content, upload it to YouTube, LinkedIn, and you can even do Twitter and Instagram if it’s short enough, and of course Facebook.
Don’t share the same video over and over again like sharing your YouTube video on Facebook. You’ve got to take that video all over again and re-upload it into Facebook. With LinkedIn, for example, you have got to re-upload the video all over again versus sharing the link to that Facebook video or that YouTube video.
With audio, you want to create a podcast. It’s easy. You can just bust out your phone, create an audio file, upload it to iTunes or Libsyn, and you’re off into the races. Same with video. You don’t actually have to go into a studio like I am and shoot all these fancy videos and pay money. You can just bust out your phone. I would even say most of the times from all the tests we’ve run that the videos that you end up running on your iPhone convert better if you’re selling a product or service. There’s nothing wrong with doing that. Just look at Tai Lopez. He’s known for just busting out his phone and recording videos and it does very well for him.
Tip 4 – Spend More Time Promoting than Creating
The fourth tip I have for you is promoting your content. In 2019, you’ve got to spend more time promoting than writing. Again, I can’t emphasize this enough. There’s too much content on the web. It doesn’t matter how good of a content piece you write it’s not going to be seen unless you promote it. so spend more time promoting than writing. Use the 80/20 rule, 20 percent of the time writing, 80 percent promoting.
One way to promote content is to email all the people who link to your competitors content and ask them for a link. You can use tools like BuzzSumo. Just type in a keyword related to your space and see all the other popular articles within your space. You then take that and put that URL into Ahrefs. It shows you all the people who link to that URL. Then you hit up all those people who link to it contact them asking for a link also.
Tip 5 – Get Social Shares
You also need to get social shares. Getting backlinks isn’t enough. Facebook, Twitter, all these social sites drive a lot of traffic. You then want to go to BuzzSumo and click on the view shares button and it will show you every single person who shared those articles. That simple thing will help you get more social traffic.
You Can’t Just Do the Old Stuff That Worked Before
In 2019, if you don’t leverage these tactics you’re not going to do well. A lot of people have the old mentality of, hey, I’m just going to keep creating new content and just crank out ten posts a day. If you do that you’re probably going to regurgitate content and you’re not going to get rankings. Google already has more authoritative sites to choose from. You can’t just do the old stuff that worked in 2018 and 2017. You have to leverage these tactics.
Even the video stuff I described, I know a lot of you’re like, I don’t want to create video it’s too much work. But you know what, with YouTube SEO I get over a hundred thousand visitors a month just from YouTube SEO. It’s amazing. It’s a channel you have to leverage. Best of all, unlike Google SEO, with YouTube SEO you can get results in less than a week. I kid you not. I created a video on SEO and I started ranking for the term SEO on YouTube in less than one week.
Neil Patel’s Content Marketing Strategies for 2019
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.
“Without data, there’s no great AI, says Amit Walia, President, Products & Marketing at Informatica. “Now that AI is really becoming pervasive and at scale, you really need to give it relevant good contextual data. We see that happening a lot in the world of enterprise. Finally, enterprise is arriving at the point where they want to use AI for B2B use cases, not just consumer use cases that we are used to. AI is a part of everything that we do in data.”
Amit Walia, President, Products & Marketing at Informatica, discusses how data is the lifeblood of the enterprise in an interview on theCUBE at Informatica World 2019:
Without Data There is No Great AI
The language that AI needs or speaks is data. Without data, there’s no great AI. This is something that we’ve known all this while, but now that AI is really becoming pervasive and at scale, you really need to give it relevant good contextual data. We see that happening a lot in the world of enterprise. Finally, enterprise is arriving at the point where they want to use AI for B2B use cases, not just consumer use cases that we are used to. AI is a part of everything that we do in data.
It has really helped to improve productivity and automate mundane tasks. There’s a massive skills gap and I think you look around the economy is fully saturated with jobs. There is still so much work to be done with more data and different data. AI is helping make some of those mundane activities become a lot easier and autonomous.
Data is Becoming a Platform of Its Own
Our data scientists have gone from heroes to superheroes. Think about it. What we are seeing in this world is that data is becoming a platform of its own. It is getting decoupled from the databases, from the applications, and from the infrastructure. To truly be able to leverage AI and build applications on top you cannot let it be siloed and be held hostage to its individual infrastructure components. We’ve seen that fundamental change happening where data as a platform is coming along.
In that context, the catalog becomes a very pivotal start because you want to get a fuller view of everything. You’re not going to be able to move all of your data to one place. It’s impossible. But understanding that metadata is where enterprises are going and then from there you can have a customer experience journey with MDM. You can also have an analytics journey in the cloud with an AWS or an Azure. You can have complete governance and security and privacy journey while understanding anomalous activity.
Metadata Is the New OS
Data is everywhere. It’s like the blood flowing through your body. You’re not going to get all the data in one place to do any kind of analytics. You’re going to let it be there. We say that metadata is the new OS. Bring the metadata, which is data about the data in one place, and from there let AI run on it. What we think about AI is this; LinkedIn is a beautiful place where they leverage the machine learning algorithm to create a social graph about you and me. If I’m connected to John I know now that I can be connected with you. The same thing can happen to the data layer.
When I’m doing analytics and I’m basically searching for some report, through that same machine learning algorithm at the catalog level now we can tell you that this is another table or another report or another user and so on. We can give you help back ratings within that environment for you to do what I call analytics on your fingertips at enterprise scale. That’s an extremely powerful use case of taking analytics, which is the most commonly done activity in an enterprise and make it accurate at enterprise scale.
Without Data, There is No Great AI, Says Informatica’s Amit Walia
How does a startup compete with a huge brand like Victoria’s Secret which by some accounts has nearly a 50 percent market share? By being different and utilizing technology and data.
That’s what Heidi Zak, co-founder, and Co-CEO of ThirdLove, says is key to their growth and success.
Third Love co-founder and Co-CEO Heidi Zak recently spoke about how her company is competing effectively with Victoria’s Secret.
ThirdLove Seeks to Be Different Than Victoria’s Secret
We are a direct-to-consumer ecommerce vertically integrated brand that makes very comfortable bras and underwear. Our differentiation from Victoria’s Secret and others happens in a few different ways.
One is really focusing on product quality and a range of sizes. We have 70 sizes while Victoria’s Secret offers about 36. We have more than double including half sizes. I always say that shoes have half sizes, so why shouldn’t bras?
Another differentiator is our marketing where we use real women in our marketing instead of models with a lot of diversity. We also leverage data to help women find their fit online. What we have done is digitized that experience.
ThirdLove Leveraging Data to Compete With Victoria’s Secret
We created Fit Finder so that in under 60 seconds you can answer questions about your breast shape, body type, fit issues and we will recommend the size and style. Over ten million women have actually done the Fit Finder. We have a massive amount of data with over 700 million data points.
We use the data for product development and design, for thinking about sizes and specs, we use it marketing and personalization, and we use it in inventory management. Across every aspect of the business we are using data day in and day out.
ThirdLove is a Blend of Tech and Beautiful Products
ThirdLove is a company that is a blend of apparel and tech, for sure. Absolutely, data and tech are at the core of what we do, but we also create really beautiful products.
At Google, I really learned to push the boundaries and to think about new ways of solving problems and applied that at ThirdLove. Also, I had been in traditional retail in New York at Aeropostale after business school. So it was really that blend of retail and tech coming together in terms of my background that I think made me comfortable to start this company.
We’ve been growing over 300 percent year-on-year since we were founded in 2012 so we have seen substantial growth. We have 1.5 million customers and we continue to take on more and more market share.
Victoria Secret’s, depending on the numbers you look at, owns somewhere between a third to 50 percent of the market, so there is a substantial amount of market share to be taken given that they are the worst performing stock on the S&P this year. Our current market share is a few basis points, I would say.
If you are just starting your career as a search marketer, Amanda Richman, CEO of Wavemaker which is the second largest media agency network in the world, says that you should “reframe it around precision marketing instead of search.”
Richman adds, “Folks coming up from the ranks the search have this great understanding around consumer intent. They understand how to optimize against certain signals. They should broaden that beyond the digital world to think about what insights they’re saying that they then act on that they could bring earlier into the strategy and planning process.”
Wavemaker CEO Amanda Richman recently reflected on her career with Geoffrey Colon, Head of Brand Studio at Microsoft Advertising, and offered advice to those new to search marketing:
What To Tell Young People Just Starting Their Career in Search Marketing
It’s about the journey, not the destination. If you’re very linear and you think about your career and levels of advancement and steps and hard goals and in your mind at 24 you think here’s where I’m going to be in 20 years, prepare to be blown away and maybe blown out as well.
You have to stay relevant and I’d say have a certain humility too. Acknowledge that you’re not going to master anything in this space. It’s constantly evolving, stay nimble, surround yourself with really smart people that you can constantly be learning from and your career is going to take some really interesting twists and turns and you’re going to enjoy the ride.
Search Marketers Should Reframe Around Precision Marketing
I would say first to step back and reframe it around precision marketing instead of search. Folks coming up from the ranks with search have this great understanding around consumer intent. They understand how to optimize against certain signals. They should broaden that beyond the digital world too to think about what insights they’re seeing that they then act on that they could bring earlier into the strategy and planning process.
They might consider how they think holistically across an addressable television and other formats and obviously, within search itself, voice and other means, to actually get to that consumer intent and pay it off for brands. That is a tremendous skill set and an opportunity for them to really reframe from search expertise to broader precision marketing experts.
According to a new study by the Pew Research Center, eight out of 10 Americans now shop online. This means that the traditional ways of marketing—cold calls, trade shows, TV, radio—are not as effective as they used to be. In fact, more companies are now turning to inbound marketing to generate leads and close deals.
To stay ahead of your competition, it’s now essential to have a good inbound marketing strategy in place. Here are four B2B marketing tactics you should be using right now:
1. Create and Curate
Useful and well-written content is apowerful weapon in B2B marketing. Posting long-format articles and discussing issues more deeply attracts more visits to your website and leads to higher conversions. A study by Moz showed a distinct correlation between social shares and content length.
According to the data, readers love this type of content and are more likely to share it.
You should also post articles to your blog more frequently. AHubspot report showed that businesses that blogged 10 or more times a month enjoyed three times more traffic than those that blog only once a month.
And, you can continue to reap the benefits of your old blog posts for years to come. Assuming that they’re good, consider repurposing older posts to generate more organic traffic by sending the content to your email list or posting them on social media.
However, creating good content takes time and effort, and sometimes a company might not have enough manpower to handle this. No need to worry, though, as curating content will work just fine. It’s a strategy that some marketers have used very effectively.Content curation involves sourcing content that is already on the web and organizing it in a meaningful way for your audience. Curating helps add new content to your site, builds value, converts readers, and helps generate traffic.
2. Collaborate With People Who Matter
Connecting and collaborating with experts and influencers creates more opportunities for your brand to be shared with a bigger market.
Look for authorities or influencers in your niche and reach out to them. Discuss how working together will benefit all parties involved. Invite an influencer to host a podcast, write a guest blog or take over your social media page for a day. This will add more quality content to your site and boost awareness of your brand.
3. Get Video Ready
Scientific research shows that most people process the information they see 60,000 times faster than what they read. So it’s a good idea to incorporate videos and eye-catching graphics inyour marketing strategy.
In 2017, video became the most popular type of content on social media, and the demand for it will only continue to rise among consumers. Because of this, more companies are using the medium to showcase their product, disseminate information, teach consumers, and reach prospective clients.
Don’t forget other visuals like infographics and slides. Infographics have become popular over the last few years because they are an effective way of communicating a lot of data within a short time. These visuals are also easy to share and can be used to recycle your content and make them fresh and engaging.
4. Improve Your Site’s Speed and Load Time
A fast website is crucial for any business. People prefer sites that have a quick loading time. Studies have shown that consumers are only willing to wait three seconds for a page to load. Any slower and they are highly likely to abandon the site and search elsewhere. Plus, Google also takes into account the site’s speed in their rankings. So if you want to keep your visitors and rank high in search engines, make sure your website is optimized for speed.
Consumers today know what they want and how to get it. If you want to capture their attention, you have to step up your inbound marketing game. Adding visuals and writing longer posts are simple tactics but they can go a long way in generating leads and traffic.
Compared to the larger social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, Snapchat is a bit like The Little Engine That Could. That’s because it’s been underestimated by numerous brands and marketers alike. They dismiss Snapchat as a viable advertising tool because of its reputation for being a purely social platform, used mostly by teenagers and young adults. But the image-sharing app has the potential to generate leads and keep profits rolling in.
In the first quarter of 2018, Snapchat reported 191 million active daily users—that’s a lot of potential customers. One survey also showed that 86 percent of the platform’s users fall into the 13 to 37 age group and more than seven billion videos were viewed on it daily in 2016.
Despite these numbers, businesses are still not overly fond of Snapchat. AClutch and Smart Insights study found that only 21 percent of businesses have Snapchat accounts. Compare that to the 89 percent of companies that are on Facebook, 80 percent on Twitter, and 56 percent on Instagram.
But this means that brands have fewer rivals and more room to maneuver on Snapchat. The platform is also evolving continuously, changing its user interface, featuring Stories for up to 24 hours, and adding eCommerce features. It’s also gaining popularity among older users as the teens who started using Snapchat when it launched in 2011 are becoming working adults.
Savvy marketers know that Snapchat can be a powerful tool for rising above the competition. Here are four tips to help you tap into the benefits of Snapchat:
1. Concentrate on a Younger Audience
Snapchat developer Snap Inc. designed the multimedia messaging app for teenagers. Recent data has shown that the company is doing a great job of keeping their young demographic engaged. A Pew Research Center study revealed that 78 percent of the respondents between 18 to 24-years-old are using the app. Meanwhile, only 45 percent of the same demographic use Twitter.
You can leave your competition in the dust by learning how to catch the attention of younger consumers. While a carefully worded call-to-action can be effective, creating an intriguing story or using entertaining filters in your Snap can exceedingly better.
In 2016, Taco Bell rolled out a comical Snap filter that turned the user’s head into a giant taco. The Cinco de Mayo promotion generated a whopping 224 million views. Now, image how that type of attention could change your business.
2. Launch Products and Push Promos
Snapchat has a high engagement rate. As a matter of fact, it gets almost 4 times higher engagement than Instagram. This makes it a great place to launch your latest products or to push promos. Makeup brand NARS launched their new product line to great success on the platform. The company drummed up excitement by giving followers a quick look at their new line. Snapchat allows you to create short, informal videos that look unpolished but relatable to more users.
3. Collaborate With Influencers
Influencer marketing is a very effective strategy. Companies can draw in a big audience because their content will be viewed by followers of the brand and that of the influencer. It’s a quick way of develop a large following in a short amount of time.
One company who successfully leveraged an influencer’s popularity was Audi. The car manufacturer partnered up with the popular show Pretty Little Liars and quickly amassed 115,000 followers on its Snapchat account.
You can also have an influencer take over your Snapchat account and make posts on your behalf for a specific time frame. For instance, music producer Pharrell once took over one of the Adidas events.
4. Keep Followers Interested Longer
Snapchat is all about drawing people in and engaging them. You’ll have better sales results the longer people stay on your page or account. Other social network platforms keep followers engaged by having them take additional steps, like clicking on a link to send them to another website.
Snapchat keeps followers interested much longer because they have integrated eCommerce features in the app itself. For instance, users can use the app to call people, make dinner reservations, grab an Uber, or explore brands and their locations.
With its impressively high engagement levels, business-friendly features and low competition from other brands, incorporating Snapchat into your marketing strategy could prove to be a worthwhile investment.
Do you really know who your customers are? You might believe your product is popular among millennials when in reality your main consumers are 50-year-old housewives. Not knowing who buys your products will lead to disappointed consumers and an ineffective marketing strategy.
Unfortunately, a lot of companies do not understand what their customers want and need. In one survey,Brandshare discovered that more than half of 11,000 of respondents who took part in one brand engagement activity felt companies don’t do enough to find out about their needs.
This disconnect with consumers can have dire consequences. Anotherstudy showed that a lot of consumers have “broken up” with their favorite brand because of irrelevant or poor marketing messages. One way to avoid such a disaster is to have a buyer persona.
What is Buyer Persona?
Buyer personas are generalized, fictional representations of a brand’s ideal customers. Also known as marketing personas, they help companies understand the customer they’re trying to attract and relate to them as real people.
A buyer persona helps all aspects of your business. It is essential in developing a solid marketing strategy and coming up with relevant content. It also helps in product design and development, the follow-up of sales leads, client acquisition and retention, and improvement of customer service.
But do not think of a buyer persona as a simple profile or you’ll end up with too many personas and not enough information to devise a marketing strategy.
Why is Knowing Buyer Persona Important?
Buyer personas are important because they can help brands understand their customers and prospective clients. Once you have nailed your brand’s buyer persona, you will have crucial insights into what your customers think about your business and how they feel about conducting it with you.
These details will assist you in aligning your content, product development, messaging, and services to that of your customer’s needs and expectations. For instance, you know your target market are millennials, but what are the specific interests and requirements of your ideal customer? Are they looking for a product that will last them for years or do they expect to buy a similar item again in a few months?
However, you’ll have todevelop a detailed buyer persona to really understand your customers and their needs,
How to Identify Different Types of Buyers
The strongest and most reliable buyer personas are created using a combination of market research, insight, and information gathered from your actual client base.
Here are some ways to extract this information and define your buyer’s persona.
1. Start by Asking the Right Questions
Developing an accurate buyer persona starts by asking the right questions. Coming up with relevant questions will guide you in your quest. For instance, you want to ask current and prospective clients about the features they care about, their everyday concerns and responsibilities, or the position they hold in their organization.
Use surveys, in-person or phone interviews, or web surveys to get answers. The information you generate can then be utilized to evaluate the characteristics and traits of particular markets and buyers that you have successfully closed deals with. By identifying common elements, you can start plotting out possible buyer personas.
2. Utilize Site Analytics
Make good use of analytic tools like Google Analytics to generate data. Your site’s analytics will show you the search words visitors used to discover your site, where they came from, and how long they were on your web page. This data can be used to create good buyer personas as it shows the keywords that led prospects to your site and the platforms and devices they used. You can then harness this information to plot your marketing plan more strategically.
3. Expand Your Research
Developing your buyer persona would sometimes require you to go beyond what information sales and marketing experts can supply. You might have toexpand your research and look into other areas. For instance, you can check the LinkedIn profile of a previous customer or the company website of a recent associate. A social network profile will give you information about a person’s career background and skill set while a company page can tell you about the business’ size, values, and motivators.
4. Focus on Creating an Ideal Primary Persona
When it comes to buyer persona development, the best practice is to limit it to four main personas at most. Think of these primary personas as the clients responsible for starting or approving a purchase. They are your point of contact during the entire sales process.
5. Develop a Persona Template
Once data has been collated, analytics checked, and insights gained, it’s time to develop a buyer persona template. Make sure that your template has a persona name, job title, demographics, goals and values, proposed pitch and marketing message. Try to bring your persona to life as it will help humanize your marketing and sales efforts.
Buyer personas are a critical tool that companies should take advantage of. They can give brands insights into how to improve user experience, develop compelling copy, or come up with good pricing models.
Mattel is one of the largest distributors and brands sold on Walmart.com. Meredith Wollman manages the customer experience and all of the digital marketing for Mattel products that are sold through the Walmart.com channel. Wollman was interviewed at the eTail Conference by Tammy Everts, Senior Director of Research at SOASTA, now part of Akamai.
How do you deliver the high conversion rates that Walmart and Mattel expect?
If you don’t have the fundamentals down no campaign is going to be successful. Before we consider an ad campaign we go back to the cradle and look at setting up the items. We make sure that each item has the correct title, correct brand attribution, the right content in terms of A+ asset, beautiful imagery, lifestyle imagery, package, out of package, the right videos, whether we have short TV commercials, and any user-generated content.
Whatever the case may be, making sure that those items are set up and that they are optimized properly is very important to do before we even look at a campaign. No campaign will be successful if the item isn’t set up properly and they aren’t engaging for the consumers and there aren’t reviews already on the product.
How do you plan a campaign for Mattel on Walmart.com?
We are looking at what are our big bets? Where do we have the biggest investment in terms of the products that we want to put in front of the consumer? Every campaign looks at our on-hand inventory and where we are hoping on having the consumer lean in big. What we do is set up the campaign around that. We determine that if we can only have 5 or 6 hero images, what are those going to be? What are the products that we are going to use as the enticement for the consumer to come in and look at more?
Then, which brands are we going to focus on? We also look at all of the analytics in terms of geo-targeting. In this particular zip code, are consumers leaning in towards our latin Barbie? Are they leaning in towards our African American Barbie? We want to really personalize what shows up on the screen for the consumers so they are seeing what they want to see and what they didn’t even know that they wanted to see.
It’s Definitely a Data-Driven Process…
I think the days of gut testing everything have gone the way of the Dodo Bird. Everything has to be data-driven now. That doesn’t mean that you can’t test something new, we do that all of the time. We really look at the data first to determine which products, where, who, when and how. All of those key factors are looked at when determining what we are going to put forward. It has to be data-driven.
Most Mattel Shoppers Start on Mobile in the Store
About 75 percent of our consumers start their journey on mobile. They are either in the store looking at a product and then they go on their phone and look for reviews or they are in the store and looking at products to see how quickly it could be shipped. A lot of people start their journey online which is why it’s so important to be mobile optimized.
They don’t all necessarily buy online but that’s where they start their journey. Some will buy online but then go pick up in the store, which is actually considered a store purchase.
How are conversions for Mattel on Walmart.com?
They are slightly higher than the norm of 4-6 percent. If you are hitting the consumer when they want to see the product and with the product, they want to see you will, of course, have a greater conversion rate. It comes down to being scientific and artful at the same time about not necessarily telling the consumer what we want them to know, but giving the consumer the information that they want.
Those two don’t always mesh as easily as we’d like because we have things we want to share at certain times, but that’s not always what works best for the consumer. The better we understand the consumer and what they want and when they want it the more successful the campaign. It’s always the case when we are communicating something that we want them to know in the time frame that we want them to know that it’s not nearly as successful.
Akamai Study Shows Load Time Impacts Revenue Significantly
A study by Akamai shows that every 1 second of load time improvement on Walmart.com equaled a 2% conversion rate increase.
Also, for every 100ms of improvement, incremental revenue grew by 1%. All ecommerce sites can benefit from increasing both the speed and efficiency of the consumer experience.
Google and Unskippable Labs cooked up a new project that has marketers salivating with new ideas.
The company created a fake pizza brand, “Doctor Fork,” as a way to challenge conventional marketing strategies and see how far they could push the advertising envelope.
According to TechCrunch, Google conceptualized and ran 33 ads on YouTube. The clips were made from stock footage and images, focused mainly on two things—the perfect “man vs. food” ratio and whether the number of sensory cues affected the effectiveness of the ad. In layman’s terms, the former deals with the ratio of human images against shots of food while the latter deals with the cues that stimulate our senses (ex. shots of stringy mozzarella, the sounds of vegetables being chopped).
Google created a fake pizza brand to test out creative strategies for YouTube ads
Google’s Unskippable Ads team has been testing out ad effectiveness in a compelling new way: It created a fake pizza brand called Doctor Fork, used stock footage to create… https://t.co/iVlG5SonJhpic.twitter.com/UOM8g0Yp8F
The bogus Doctor Fork ads generated 20 million impressions and led to some useful and revealing conclusions. For one, the experiment showed that immersive experiences that utilized multiple senses provide better recall. This means advertisers should try to stimulate all of the consumers’ senses (ex. audio, text, and video).
The company also concluded that separating audio and visuals has more of an impact in terms of brand favorability and recall. So does giving explicit instructions to the customer.
The Doctor Fork ads also showed that when it comes to food commercials, close up shots of food get people’s motors running. The experiment also proved that the bite and smile axiom that has been strictly followed by marketers is not the sole way of presenting a pleasant food experience. This finding gives food sellers more leeway when it comes to showing people enjoying their food.
Google’sdecision to use a fake company to study how people would react to their ads was an inspired one. Legitimate companies are constrained to following certain ad styles. For instance, food commercials usually don’t show someone chewing their food while looking at the camera. But this unspoken rule has never been tested so it can’t definitively be said that chewing and looking at the audience is bad. Unfortunately, brands are not willing to branch out in terms of style since an ad that flops is costly.
Since Doctor Fork is not real, Google didn’t waste valuable ad time or lose any real customers. The fake pizza brand provided the company with the freedom to take risks. Ben Jones, the creative director of Unskippable Ads, explained it quite well when he said that “Doctor Fork can do whatever he wants.” He added that they used “the freedom of the unbranded ad to be wrong, to push in directions and ask questions that a brand will not.”
