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.
In-application marketing has grown by leaps and bounds, thanks to the prevalence of mobile devices. With more people utilizing gadgets connected to the internet, companies are now spending more of their marketing budget on mobile web advertising.
One strategy on the forefront of mobile advertising is in-app marketing. As the name implies, in-app marketing is anycampaign or message that’s specifically designed to appear within a mobile application while the consumer is using the app. Unlike emails or push notifications, which engage the consumer outside of the company’s app, in-app ads take advantage of the moment and hook customers in real-time.
Digital marketing strategies, like geo-targeting, are still important but brands and marketers believe that in-app advertising is the way forward. As a matter of fact, it has been estimated that global in-app revenue will reach $189 billion by 2020.
Worldwide in-app advertising and app store revenues of mobile apps and games in 2015 and 2020
Aside from the fact that in-app marketing is a money-maker, there are also otherbenefits to utilizing this strategy.
Benefits of Using In-App Marketing
Consumers Spend A Lot of Time on Apps
Brands should take advantage of the fact that the majority of smartphone users are spending a lot of time on apps. According to a 2017 US Mobile App Report, people are spending about87 percent of their time online on mobile apps compared to just 13 percent on the Web. This gives companies that use in-app ads an opportunity to focus on a large market, boost their brand visibility, and improve lead generation and conversion.
Higher Click-Through Rates
Another advantage in-app ads have over mobile ads is their higher click-through rates (CTRs). As it stands, CTRs for mobile web ads is at 0.23 percent while in-app ads are at 0.58 percent. In-app ads also perform 11.4 times better than conventional banner ads. This means that in-app advertisements not only raises lead generation numbers, they also help capture and convert these leads.
More Focused Targeting
Advertisements displayed in the brand’s application are designed within the app’s context, making them look natural and more organic. Many apps also opt for interactive formats, which gives advertisers the option to choose when it will be shown. This ensures a seamless transition for users. In contrast, other types of mobile advertisements, particularly pop-ups, can be quite disruptive. They interrupt the prospective consumer and could cause them to be annoyed, thereby dissuading them from making a positive decision.
Marketing inside company apps also gives advertisers a specific view of their target market due to geo-location data and the apps’ capacity to pull in the exact demographics. This increases the chances that the audience reached is aligned closely with the company’s advertising and marketing efforts. Highly targeted marketing also means that less money is wasted on consumers who are unlikely to make a purchase via the ad.
Ads are More Memorable
Research has shown that in-app ads are more effective because they’re more memorable when seen on the application. This is due to users being more engaged in the app right from the start, particularly in the social network and gaming niches. The personal nature of mobile gadgets, which people use during their leisure time, also gives people a more positive attitude towards brands they see advertising in-app.
With in-app marketing, marketers can move away from generalized ads and instead focus on ads that are designed specifically for the brand’s demographic. This marketing strategy also reaches a lot of people in a very short time, thereby giving brands more reach and higher ROI.
Most small businesses want to spread the word about their product or service to as many people as possible. But after covering the cost of inventory, employee wages, utilities, taxes, and a host of other expenses, many of these businesses simply don’t have enough money left over to launch widespread advertising campaigns. The good news is…even if you’re running a business on a tight budget, you can still afford effective advertising; you’ll just need to think local.
Local marketing, or location-based marketing, is the process of optimizing your company’s website and online presence to drive traffic to localized areas. This is particularly useful now that Google’s algorithm utilizes location in its search results. People looking for goods and services online get results for nearby businesses relevant to their search request. This is a highly targeted, low-cost way for businesess—big and small—to reach customers.
7 Ways to Increase Your Revenue With Local Marketing
1. Optimize Your Website for Mobile
Small businesses need to capture the attention of mobile searchers. Increase the odds of converting these leads by optimizing your website for mobile so that whatever screen your site is accessed on, it will still be displayed seamlessly.
2. Get Your Business Listed
One of the first things you can do for your small business is to get listed on Google’s My Business or Facebook. Doing this will enable you to update and manage critical information like your business address, contact details, opening hours, and images.
3. Build Bridges With Local Businesses
Align yourself with an established shop in the area and come to a mutual marketing agreement. For instance, a consultancy group could offer a discount on one of its seminars to the top clients of a local accounting firm. Working with these businesses enhance your credibility and gives prospective clients a chance to learn more about your company.
4. Secure Testimonials
A lot of people rely on online reviews when they’re trying to assess whether a business is trustworthy. Try to secure a testimonial from a resident since it will carry more weight, especially if it’s from someone known in the area.
5. Use Social Media to Engage With the Locals
Social media has made connecting with people so easy. You can integrate platforms like Facebook or Instagram into your customer service and outreach efforts. For instance, you could use hyper-local keywords in your posts or hashtags to establish your current location or put the focus on local stores that you have partnered with.
6. Work With Local Publications
Work with local publications to engender more face time with the area’s residents. Find a publication that ties up with your product or business model. Check if they’re looking for ad placements or even guest blog writers. You can even ask them if they can do a write-up about your company.
7. Sponsor a Community or Charity Event
Sponsoring an event is an effective way to utilize one of the most fundamental advertising tactics—putting your name on something. Consider sponsoring a neighborhood team or donating to a known charity in exchange for putting your brand’s name on the marquee or t-shirts from the event. You’ll be giving money to a good cause while ensuring that your company’s name is seen by a captive market.
A local marketing strategy can be an effective way to generate sales for your small business without spending too much. Get your brand noticed by interacting with the community, whether it’s through local influencer, partnering with an established shop, or sponsoring an event.
Entrepreneurs today are busier than ever, working even when they’re away from the office. A good Customer Relationship Management (CRM) program goes a long way in helping to keep track of client information, manage data on deals (both past and present) while still giving access to all the tools they require to stay productive.
But with more business professionals on the go, there is a growing need for comprehensive mobile CRM apps that will give them a competitive edge. Here’s a list of the top five:
1. Agile
This CRM platform can easily automate your company’s marketing, sales, and customer service. The Agile mobile app also lets users get a real-time idea of your business process, track deals and manage relevant milestones. Managing tasks becomes simpler as the app allows users to check pending items, create new tasks, manage and respond to social media mentions, start email campaigns, place calls to customers and jot down notes minutes before a meeting. This CRM app is available for both Android and iOS. While it’s free for up to 10 users, you’ll need to sign up for the Premium plan if you want more people to use the app. Price: Starts at $8.99/month/user (also offers free service)
2. amoCRM
This cloud-based CRM solution assists users in managing their sales pipeline. They can receive reports and feedback regarding the performance of other people on the team, sales analytics, email integration, and lead scoring. AmoCRM also lets users organize their contacts and deals using unique tags and customized fields. Existing customer details are also uploaded from databases like Gmail and Outlook. The app can be downloaded on any Android or iOS device. Price: Starts a $15/month/user
3. HubSpot CRM
HubSpot initially made its mark developing marketing automation tools. Now the company has brought its expertise to customer management with Hubspot CRM, widely considered one of the best free CRM apps today. Get the information you need about a client or company by simply adding a contact’s name and email address or a company’s domain name. You can also customize fields by dragging and dropping them in the order you want. Use Hubspot CRM alone or alongside the company’s premier marketing services. Price: Starts at $50/month (also offers free service)
4. Pipedrive
Sales teams will undoubtedly find Pipedrive a godsend. The CRM platform is designed around activity-based selling. The app’s primary interface allows users to stay organized and in total control of the sales process. With the Pipedrive app, you can arrange and manage your contacts and to-do lists via a simple search. Get access to your deal history, create new tasks and take down notes wherever and whenever. What’s more, any changes made using the mobile app is immediately synced to the Pipedrive web platform. The program runs on both iOS and Android systems. Price: Start at $15/month
5. Salesforce
Salesforce is the largest CRM platform out on the market today. And now the company is extending its features to mobile. Take advantage of its easy to assemble custom apps and create features that are perfectly aligned with you and your client’s requirements. The app also allows you to easily access crucial CRM information, productivity tools, and customizations anywhere. Your dashboards and reports are also on-hand whenever you need them, thus ensuring that you have everything you need to make an informed decision. Salesforce is available for both iOS and Android systems. Price: Starts at $25/month
A mobile CRM app can do wonders for your company’s productivity and sales pipeline. While the five mobile apps we listed above work well for most entrepreneurs, there are dozens of CRM systems on the market to choose from. Depending on what you need to track and how you manage your team, you may find other apps that suit you better. So do your due diligence and carefully research your options before choosing.
There’s no question that smartphones have become a ubiquitous part of our daily lives. Studies have shown that 46% of Americans reach for their phones first thing in the morning, while 91% of people automatically reach for a mobile device to check on something when doing a task.
This reliance on smartphones has become so pervasive that many industries are putting more effort into targeting mobile users than those on conventional devices like a desktop. It’s a smart move since turning even a small segment of these users into customers can yield huge profits. An effective way for companies to profit from this group is to take advantage of “micro-moments.”
What are Micro-Moments?
Google coined the term “micro-moments” in 2015 to identify the exact points in time that lead to a consumer finally making a purchase. The company described these moments as “critical touch points within today’s customer journey, and when added together, they ultimately determine how a journey ends.”
Essentially, these are thecritical points where someone takes to their device (which is most often a smartphone) and takes steps regarding a need. It’s the intersection of what a customer wants and needs at the moment and what they know.
Google has determined four key moments based on the consumer: “I want to do,” “I want to know,” “I want to buy” and “I want to go.” Most decisions made by shoppers can be traced to one of those four moments. For instance, a shopper who’s headed to Turkey would research on what to “do” in that country. A travel agency can come up with a promo that will arrange a trip to Istanbul’s famous Blue Mosque.
[Graphic via Think with Google]
How to Capitalize on Micro-Moments
Now that the importance of micro-moments have been established and their constant evolution noted, companies have to think about how they can use these instances to their advantage. Here are some things to consider if you want tocatch that perfect micro-moment with a customer:
1. Put Your Business Profile Out There
It pays to ensure that your business profile is accurate and completely filled out on Google, particularly if you have a physical storefront. There has been an increase in “near me” or “right here” searches, as more users are looking for a place to go for a certain activity. Getting your business profile up will help with micro-moments where a customer wants to “do” something or “go” somewhere. Google’s Local Guides program assists users in verifying if your profile information is accurate.
2. Flaunt Your Value With Original and Significant Content
The need to know is one micro-moment that could hit you several times a day. This is why people are always looking for content on eCommerce sites. Having unique and relevant content is a great way to introduce your business to shoppers who are searching for information on either a particular product or on something that has captured their interest. Regardless of whether it’s a short how-to video or some DIY tips, make sure to flaunt your value by offering good content that appeals at the moment.
3. Speed is of the Essence
Speed is key if you want to use micro-moments to your advantage. When asked, almost half of customers admit that they will leave a website if it’s unresponsive or takes too long to load. People also don’t like having to go through different windows or steps just to get information. Optimizing your site for mobile devices and streamlining your buying process is a good way to entice consumers to go to your page and stay.
4. Improve User Interface
Another area that brands should focus on is how the user experiences their website and content. When a potential customer goes to your site or a specific page, what will they see? Will they be able to find what they’re looking for quickly or are they going to spend time wading through redundant information?
Aside from ensuring that information is accessed quickly, transactions should also be simplified. Complicated checkout pages or a cart that requires several clicks in order to finish a purchase will turn consumers off. There should also be fewer distractions on the checkout pages, especially those on mobile devices, as these further cut down the odds of conversions. The goal is to make shopping quick, fun, and simple.
Companies have to be ready to take advantage of micro-moments. This means that business has to do some forward thinking to anticipate what their customers would need. Changes may also need to be made to ensure that websites are optimized for mobile.
Mobile devices were named the leading digital platform in 2014, overtaking laptops and desktops. Since then, use of these gadgets just kept increasing. And even though some studies show the amount of time spent on mobile devices has gone down somewhat, non-voice mobile use in 2017 was still ahead of laptop and desktop use.
Reasons eCommerce Companies Should Focus on Mobile
Even though people are on mobile devices more often, companies didn’t put too much stock into using them to make sales. After all, most data showed that while people used their smartphones to check out products, most purchases were done on desktops, laptops, or tablets.
However, the tide is now changing, as last year’s Cyber Monday saw $2 billion in sales on mobile devices. Retail visits accounted for 37.6% of sales while 21% of sales were done on smartphones. Conversion rates on these devices were pegged to have increased by about 10% since the previous year.
Retailers have even morereasons to focus on mobile in 2018. Smartphones are expected to dominate this year, with about 36% of people around the world owning one. A large number of millennials are also foregoing computers and just using their smartphones to access the internet.
Companies are also expected to come out with better retailer apps that are designed to encourage more consumers to purchase. The rise in popularity of PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Wallet for mobile will also introduce fast and seamless transactions.
3 Ways to Boost Mobile Sales
Now that mobile shopping is on the rise, at last, retailers have to decide whether they are really going to focus on this trend or not. Retailers that don’t want to miss out on the growing sales opportunities of mobile devices, will first need to find the bestways to boost mobile sales. Here are some suggestions on how to go about it:
1. Improve Mobile App Designs
Even though most retailers have their own mobile apps, they often have bugs or are not designed for wide-scale consumer use. Because of problems with the interface and functionality, the apps have low conversion rates. Consumers also are not inclined to keep using them. One study revealed that more than 50% of retail apps are used less than 10 times and that 15% of consumers don’t even use shopping apps.
There are several factors that consumers find off-putting with retailer apps. One is the limited visibility they have when checking product images. Push notifications also tend to interrupt shopping time and many apps crash or freeze when the user gets a phone call or text message.
2. Optimize Websites for Mobiles
Companies that have not optimized their websites for mobile viewing miss out on sales opportunities. Consider the fact that 87% of shoppers would first look for the product online before going to the store. About 79% of shoppers actually check a product online while on the store’s premises and 35% after leaving the store. This is an issue that companies should take seriously, particularly as mobile traffic is expected to overtake desktop traffic in the first quarter of 2018.
Therefore, companies should make sure that their websites are optimized for mobile devices. One important factor that should be considered is the site’s layout and how it reacts to various screen sizes. Retailers should also take steps to minimize customer frustrations and mistakes. For example, offering alternative ways to input choices, like drop-down lists or tick boxes, will make for a more fun mobile shopping experience.
3. Offer More Payment Options
Giving consumers more payment options will also help boost mobile sales. Countries like China have already embraced mobile wallets and payments, and companies who want to tap into such a rich market should make sure they offer that particular payment option.
The increasing popularity of mobile payment apps like Android Pay, Apple Pay, and PayPal is also expected to result in people relying solely on their smartphones when they go shopping. Offering customers various payment options can also expand a company’s reach to the millions of shoppers who use alternative payment systems.
The number of email users have grown exponentially over the years, and there’s no sign that it will be stopping in 2018. Studies have shown that almost 90% of American consumers use email, and 65% or more have bought something online due to promotional emails.
This means the future of marketing relies on data-boosted content marketing. If you want to keep up with your competitors, you should watch out for these email marketing trends that are expected to dominate next year.
Increased Interactivity Inside Emails
Marketers forecast that emails will show increased interactivity in 2018, with the goal of making them fun to read so engagement rates are increased and bounce rates reduced.
One of the best ways to do this is to enhance emails by including image galleries, quizzes, GIFs, countdown timers, and add-to-cart capabilities. Quizzes and GIFS will lead to increased customer footprints while countdown timers create a feeling of urgency that will push recipients to take action within a stipulated time-frame. Meanwhile, including an add-to-cart function will shorten shopping time and enhance brand experience.
Email Marketing Programs Backed by Artificial Intelligence
It’s a given that artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technology will be a big part of the future. As a matter of fact, numerous tech companies have already invested heavily in developing AI technology that will make lives easier. Email marketing is one area that will reportedly benefit from machine learning.
It’s expected that machine learning programs can assist companies and email marketers by suggesting ways on how to better segment email lists, incorporate product recommendations and design more personalized emails that target specific customers.
Rise of More Plain-Text Emails
The trend of using HTML-powered email templates with images is over. Instead, 2018 will see the rise of plain-text emails. Researchers have found that this style of email is more effective than the HTML ones. Marketing campaigns using plain text emails have been found to have higher delivery and open rates, as well as better engagement numbers.
Marketing specialists have theorized that plain text emails look the same across various gadgets and look more personal. Recipients don’t have to open a browser to read a plain-text email. They’re also easier to format for mobile devices.
Mobile Becomes a Priority
More than half of emails are opened on a mobile device, and 2018 is expected to be the year when emails will be designed with mobile formatting as a priority.
Graphic via superoffice.com
Pretty soon, companies will be obligated to have a responsive design when it comes emails. This trend won’t be limited to emails though. Subscription forms will also become more mobile friendly while articles will start wrapping up their content with an email signup form to boost conversions.
Increased Significance of Gmail and its Subscriber-Level Filtering
Gmail is becoming the primary inbox provider for a lot of companies. Therefore, most customers on subscriber lists have a Gmail address. But due to Gmail’s system of filtering email, it becomes imperative for businesses to think about how it will be placed in the inbox.
In order for marketers to optimize clicks, opens, and conversions, they have to pay more attention to who they are emailing and how they’re sending their email.Questions like whether the subscriber is actively receiving and interacting with the email and whether they have economic value should be answered. Likewise, the frequency of emails sent, the order, and even the time that they’re sent becomes more significant.
However, the upcoming year will see more companies using more robust analytics to optimize results and foregoing conventional rules like not sending mail to those who haven’t clicked or opened an email in the past three months.
The year 2018 will see more emails that are deeply personalized and utilizing advanced automation technologies. The integration of AI and machine learning will also help marketers to harness the power of email marketing and use it to further their business.
Launching a startup is exciting for entrepreneurs, especially in this day and age where technology has made doing business easier and more efficient than ever before. Technology has opened up a ton of marketing methods that allow you to sell your products and services and build your brand. These days, a startup may be able to bypass traditional marketing tactics via print and TV but most will need to utilize a digital marketing strategy to reel in and retain customers.
If you have noticed the term “digital marketing” being used more often recently, it’s because this is the engine that drives today’s businesses, big and small. Digital marketing uses digital technologies, mainly on the Internet, but also mobile phones and other digital mediums to reach customers. According to Google, companies that use digital marketing strategies have2.8 times better revenue growth expectancy than those that don’t. This is because customers rely heavily on the internet when it comes to making purchasing decisions.
With all the opportunities that exist online, startups should be asking the following questions: what are the digital marketing activities that require low investment but let you reap maximum benefits, and how can you create a digital marketing plan for your startup? Here are some useful insights to help you in creating a digital marketing strategy that will bring you closer to your goals.
Establish Brand & Web Presence
In creating adigital marketing plan, it is crucial to define a category for your product or service and map out its key benefits. Ask yourself this, “who is my customer and what exactly should they buy from me?” This is a necessary step in order to structure the right look and feel for your brand, from the name, logo, URL address, and others. You can then apply it to your digital marketing strategies.
Next is to establish your web presence. At least80 percent of consumers use the internet to make their search for information more convenient. Create not just a functional website for your brand but also one that is accessible in multiple platforms including smartphones, tablets, and Smart devices.
Blog, Digital PR & SEO Marketing
Part of digital marketing is promoting brands and services through one or more forms of electronic media. This means you will need a rich blog site, a Facebook fan page, and a Twitter account at a minimum. Some businesses even create an Instagram account. These channels allow you to regularly communicate with your customers. Whatever it is you share on your profile, your followers will see, increasing brand visibility and retention.
Blogging should also be part of your plan. Around53% of marketers say that blog content creation is their top inbound marketing priority. Why not, when it is one of the best ways to increase traffic to your site. To further support your web presence and social media activities, you will need to plan out your digital public relation efforts, which include techniques like crowdsourcing. This will allow you to monitor your online reputation.
Digital marketing won’t be complete without incorporating search-engine optimization (SEO) and link building strategies. The main goal is to top the rankings in the search results when a customer types in keywords associated to your business. Early-stage companies should start with the on-page optimization of their site. Combine it with a strong social media presence, an engaging company blog, and strategic keywords and you’re looking at a plan that has a high potential for success.
Online Advertising for Greater Exposure
Lastly, yourdigital marketing plan should include the development of an effective online advertising program. Startups can take advantage of Google AdWords since it’s cost effective, flexible, and results-oriented. It is also highly-scalable, as it allows you to measure traffic to your site. You will know in real time what is or is not working for your online business. Thus, you will be able to find immediate solutions to improve your results.
Technological advancement has enabled more consumers to rely on handheld devices, web searches, and other online tools to make purchasing decisions. In today’s startup industry, you need to be competitive for your brand to be a hit. Get into the trend with digital marketing solutions. If you are not the strongest marketer, you can hire a professional outside of your organization.
From search engine optimization, the next evolution of online marketing is video. While mobile phones and social media are invaluable, they have created a generation with a relatively short attention span. A one-minute clip can explain a topic more than a three-page thesis can.
This is probably why 70% of businesses that use video marketing for their ad campaigns have reported an increase in the amount of traffic to their sites. In fact, people tend to be more patient watching a video than sitting down to read text. According tostatistics, the average length of an internet video is 2.7 minutes. Imagine what you can do with uninterrupted audience attention in that amount of time?
Facebook knows full well the value of video marketing. A staggering eight billion videos are beingwatched on the social media platform every day. And 45% of people worldwide spend more than an hour every week on Facebook or YouTube watching videos.
A video is much more likely to go viral in a short amount of time compared to written content or photos. In terms of organic reach, a clip is 135% better than photos.
But what type of video marketing should your company make? Here are some suggestions:
Company Information – This could also be your About Us video. In this clip, you should be able to sum up what your company is all about. Apart from being short—a maximum of five minutes would be ideal—your video should exude fun to retain the interest of your audience.
Employee Profiles – BuzzFeed is a great example of a company that includes its employees in their videos. As a result, they have developed their own respective fanbases. Customers also feel that they are part of the company after getting to know each staff member.
Raising Awareness – Another good use of video marketing is to educate your customers regarding the industry that you are a part of. It doesn’t matter if you belong in petrochemicals, education, or engineering. One example of useful content is to correct common misconceptions about the industry, or to educate them regarding your product.
Recruitment – If you are recruiting, video marketing would be a good platform to tell potential applicants what you are looking for. In this short clip, you should be able to share your company culture and vision. Another idea is to take a video of new recruits expressing their expectations for the company and why they applied for a job in the first place.
Virtual Tour – A virtual tour will give your customers the opportunity to view your business establishment or facilities. A short introduction of the employees and description about who does what will also be helpful.
Message From the CEO or Top Execs – It doesn’t have to be profound. Even a simple greeting during the holidays would be a great idea for a video marketing campaign. More than anything, this will present a “human face” to your company. People are always in awe of the CEO, but by letting people see that he or she is human like everybody else, it will make your business more relatable.
Video marketing is your best tool for rising above all of the social media noise. Of course, this means you may have to outsource this job to professionals. You can expect to pay somewhere between $1,000 to $5,000 per video minute for a low-cost option.
For small businesses, video productions will more likely be DIY clips, which can save an enormous amount of money. The good news is the huge number of downloadable apps online that you can have for free. With these programs, you can edit your clips for a more professional-looking video marketing campaign.
The popularity of voice-activated smart assistants is gaining traction, especially with Apple hopping on the bandwagon with its Siri speaker due to be released soon. This is why businesses should include voice search in their online marketing campaign, rather than focus solely on text-based searches.
In fact, voice search marketing isdescribed as the new norm, which would have been unheard of just five years ago. One major factor is the increasing efficiency of machine-learning technology in finding user patterns to anticipate their needs.
For instance, Amazon’s Alexa is billed to be capable of performing over 12,000 tasks, which is why it’s still the undisputed king in this increasingly competitive industry.
A Different Beast
In the past six months, 40% of mobile users have tried voice commands in asking questions or searching for products and services. Analysts believe this number will only continue to rise until such time when people won’t even be able to imagine how they survived without voice-activated apps in the first place, similar to how they feel about mobile phones today.
When it reaches this critical mass, Google will surelyintroduce an update to its algorithm that will take into account voice search in order to rank your page.
Voice search use among smartphone users in the U.S., as of October 2015*
For marketers, this would be an entirely different beast altogether. Whereas text-related keyword searches are much easier to document, recording how many people are looking for “best pulled pork sandwiches, Lexington, KY” using voice search will be a tall feat.
This will really turn the search engine optimization dynamic—which is the direct result of years of honing and polishing—up on its head.
Better Results
Unlike text queries, voice search will yield more accurate results. It basically pulls down the curtains, allowing internet users to skip one step. Instead of searching for “pulled pork sandwiches,” they can just go ahead and order the food from the best restaurant based on customer and critic reviews.
Instead of searching for a particular song you can’t get out of your head, it may be possible in the future to hum the lyrics and the smart speaker will play the whole song for you. This brings convenience to a whole new level, unlike in text searches where you have to choose and phrase your words in a specific manner to get the most relevant results—and still having to go to that particular website to order food.
Here are some quick tips to cope with the changes from text to voice search marketing:
Mobile Optimization – As voice search apps are gradually perfected, mobile optimization will become even more crucial. Website built with Flash will need to be redesigned and all websites will need to be responsive. Marketers will need to advise their clients of this major shift from traditional search to voice search. Another way to optimize the mobile experience is to make sure that their sites load fast. There’s no faster way to lose customers than a website that takes forever to display.
Snippets – In voice searches, snippets are short descriptions about the company or the brand. This gives the users a little bit of information before they move along or move forward. Using traditional SEO techniques, you will need to optimize so you end up high on the search engine results page for snippets.
Long-Tail Keywords – Voice search is different from text search in the sense that internet users will often talk normally as they would in a conversation, as opposed to using key phrases or keywords when they type on Google. This is where long-tail keywords are crucial because you can still reach your target market even with this major shift in the way people do their search.
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.
Facebook has added a feature within their Lookalike Audiences tool that helps businesses reach target customers in new countries who are similar to their existing ones. With the tool, a business can upload a list of leads or their current customers and Facebook will find potential similar leads. Prior to today, this was not available cross-country.
With the Lookalike Audiences tool, marketers can find potential customers to target their Facebook ads, now to many countries, based on:
People who like your Page
Custom Audiences derived from email or phone numbers
Custom Audiences created from website or app data
Similar location
Age
Gender
Interests
Facebook sees this as primarily a mobile advertising opportunity, where the majority of its ad revenue now comes from. According to an August 2016 eMarketer report, by 2018 there will be an estimated 2.3 billion people worldwide accessing the Internet via mobile devices. Facebook is one of the few platforms on earth that can market to almost all of these people, excluding Communist China. Although, Mark Zuckerberg is not giving up on China, having started his personal quest to learn Mandarin Chinese in 2010.
“On mobile, and on Facebook, people engage with the things that matter to them, even in other countries,” posts Facebook. “More than 1 billion people on Facebook are connected to at least one business in a foreign country, and 1.57 billion people visit Facebook monthly on mobile. In the US, 60% of people on Facebook are connected to a business in a foreign country.”
Facebook has also added extended location targeting capabilities, where advertisers can expand their website conversion or mobile app install targeting objectives to a worldwide region or trade zone. Facebook says it will “optimize delivery to the countries with the greatest return.”
They have added training tools as well to help businesses get started with global marketing including webinars and a handbook.
Googles Paul Muret, VP, Display, video & Analytics at Google, says that Google’s research shows that the average mobile site takes 19 seconds to load. If however, through optimization you can get your site to load within 5 seconds or less, Google estimates that you can earn twice as much revenue than those at the 19 second average.
“Think about that for a minute,” said Muret in a post on the DoubleClick Publisher Blog this week. “That’s a long time! Not only is this frustrating for users but it’s also a huge missed opportunity for publishers.”
A web surfers sensitivity to website speed have gone up significantly in the last few years. In a recent study of google.com search, the Google team found that every four hundred millisecond delay in delivering search results resulted in a half point drop in overall search volume. “It’s about the time it takes to blink and on mobile the situation is even more important,” commented Muret in a talk at the DoubleClick Leadership Summit earlier this week. “Creating a great user experience necessarily means making it super fast, but an alarming 77% percent of publishers today, their web pages take more than 10 seconds to load, and the average is actually 19 seconds.”
AMP for Ads
Google’s main initiative to make the mobile web faster is a the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP), launched last Fall, which is an open sourced global community of publishers and other tech companies. Google’s analysis shows that mobile web pages that use AMP HTML load four times faster and use 10 times less data on average than non-AMP mobile web pages. Over 145 million AMP pages have been created so far from 640,000 demands. Google sees AMP as a first step because it only covers publisher content, but not the ads, which means opening a web page still involves “much slower loading javascript bundles.”
At the DoubleClick conference Muret announced AMP for Ads, a new initiative to incorporate AMP technology into the ads themselves in order to make the entire mobile experience faster. In an example that Paul Muret gave the Washington Post, which is an early adopter of AMP and AMP for Ads, instead of the ad taking 4 seconds longer to load than the publishers content, with AMP for Ads it loads seamlessly at the same time as the mobile page content.
AMP for Landing Pages
Google announced “AMP for Landing Pages” to make the click-through fast as well. This much speedier experience is likely to significantly increase conversions for mobile marketers.
“Making experiences fast is the first step, but they also need to be really well integrated into their environments into the context that they sit in,” said Muret. “If ads are not integrated well it can lead to ad blindness, or worse, annoyance and ad blocking. As an industry we need to come together and think about creating better ads for all of our users.”
Muret believes that good integration starts with native advertising. He said that we need the ads to really fit into the context of experience.
DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM)
If you are a DoubleClick user this will be of interest to you, Muret announced programmatic native in DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM) which “brings the power of native to all advertisers to be able to run programmatically at scale across all their campaigns instead of delivering arbitrary of rectangles of content all over the place.” He said that advertiser’s can create asset bundles that can include headlines, images, and colors that are “dynamically fit to the form and function of the page it’s on.” This should make for a much more integrated experience which Google hopes will result in less ad blindness, less blocking and more clicks!
Google’s DoubleClick also wants to make sure that there is enough inventory for these dynamic programmatic ads. That’s why Muret also announced that DoubleClick was expanding their support for native and Double-Click for Publishers to include ALL app and web content and ALL deal types, programmatic and reservations. What this means for DoubleClick is that they now offer full coverage of the massive shift to native advertising.
Muret noted that DoubleClick’s new technology, in a test with eBay, caused a 3 times increase in user engagement compare to eBay’s normal non-native ads.
Programmatic Video
Video is the future of internet advertising without a doubt, and of course DoubleClick and Google are on top of this trend. Muret said that an amazing 85% of “Ad Age Top 100 Advertisers” have already bought programmatic video ads on DoubleClick Bid Manager. More importantly, they are seeing a 550% increase in programmatic video revenue from TV & media companies year over year.
Google, like many other tech media companies, is at the forefront of the video advertising revolution that has been long predicted, but is now finally happening. One of the key trends is multi-device viewing which Google sees as an opportunity to deliver video ads in even more places while users seamlessly move back and forth between different content formats.
“Over 90% of people use multiple devices sequentially to accomplish a task,”said Meghan Lee, Agency Development Manager for Google AdWords. “Adwords advertisers are used to a very simple and clear way of measurement and they have that same expectation on mobile.”
Outstream Video
Muret also announced a new product from DoubleClick, Outstream Video, which is for non-video content. “For advertisers this means getting additional reach with the power of sight, sound and motion,” Muret told the conference audience. “For publishers this means tapping into TV budgets and driving yield even when the the content is more traditional.”
Outstream Video ads are served outside of a video player, often between paragraphs of text, typically without sound. According to Google, interstitials, native, and in-feed are types of outstream video. An example of outstream video ads is the autoplay silent video on Facebook, for instance.
VR & AR Ads
Google is also very aware of another massive disruption and opportunity in digital advertising, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. Research by Digi-Capital predicts that VR and AR will 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 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.
“Obviously virtual reality and augmented reality are coming are are here and are being incorporated,” said Muret. “Rest assured we are going to be your partner in delivering those experiences as we get those built into our advertising system.”
“The promise of VR is what the industry calls “presence”—the feeling that you’re really somewhere else,” commmented Aaron Luber, who is in charge of Google and YouTube partnerships.
TrueView Discovery Ads
A prelude to true VR and AR is already here, 360-degree TrueView ads, which Muret announced they are now making them available to all advertisers. YouTube is king of 360-degree videos, of which uploads of 360-degree videos are growing and have doubled over the past three months, according to Luber.
Google announced, just yesterday, that they were changing the name of “TrueView in-display ads” to “TrueView Discovery Ads.” They didn’t stop with just the name change though, they also made significant enhancements to the product, TrueView Discovery Ads will now appear on mobile search results.
They’ve also made TrueView Discovery Ads more relevant on search results pages and are being used across the full inventory of YouTube videos, which Google says has increased ad click-through by 11%.
With TrueView Discovery Ads, your videos can be discovered across YouTube, YouTube search results, video watch pages and on the YouTube homepage, no matter what device you’re on,” commented Josh Rubel, Head of Brand Product Strategy at YouTube, in a promo video for TrueView. “Users initiate the ad by simply clicking your video, which takes them right to your videos watch page. By bringing the user to your channel environment, the level of engagement and activity… subscribes, shares, and additional views is impressive.”
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.
“Are you ready for the new mobile gold rush? Of course you’re not,” said Jim O’Leary, Sr. Manager Mobile Solutions Marketing at Cisco. “Though truth be told, the pending growth in mobile video may be more like a video tornado and only a handful of mobile operators are prepared.”
What Jim O’Leary is talking about is the rapidly changing landscape of content viewing. Multi-device viewing is now the norm and the dumping of the old cable content bundle is well under way. Over-The-Top content (OTT), where content is consumed without going through the traditional gatekeepers such as the cable or satellite provider, is bringing complete and utter disruption to the cable and broadcast companies.
Video now accounts for the majority of global mobile data traffic and is forecast to be the key driver of data traffic growth globally. To date, mobile video (and the ability to monetize the content) has been dominated by Internet players, such as YouTube, Netflix, with the operator role simply one of connectivity provider.
However, a number of operators are developing their own content delivery platforms. Singtel, Verizon and PCCW are three prominent examples of this trend, with their HOOQ, Go90 and Viu video platforms respectively. While HooQ and Viu are variants of the subscription-based model, Go90 more closely resembles the Internet business model, with a reliance on advertising for revenues and a focus on millennials. – Jim O’Leary, Cisco
“Mobile operators across the world face the same twin challenges of slowing growth and ongoing disruption of core services by new Internet & OTT players, even as the broader mobile ecosystem continues to see significant revenue growth,” O’Leary posted. “So if you are tired of being just an operator that carries mobile video and prefer to be able to monetize it, read on.”
Mobile Video Watching is Booming!
O’Leary sees a significant monetization opportunity for mobile operators with video for a very good reason, the exploding growth in using mobile devices to watch videos. An On Device Research study commissioned by the IAB in 2015 (Download PDF) confirmed the changing landscape for mobile globally, with 35% watching more video on their smartphone versus last year.
In February 2016 Cisco released a study predicting that by 2020 there will be 5.5 billion global mobile users which is up from the 4.8 billion currently, and those millions of new mobile users will be watching video too!
More astonishing, the study says that by 2020 there will be 11.6 mobile-connected devices! This is indicative of another emerging trend, connecting ALL devices to the internet via mobile operators where internet content and data can be consumed and sometimes produced on and by these devices.
Gartner estimates that the Internet of Things (IoT) is currently connected to 6.4 billion devices and will connect to 20.8 billion “things” by 2020. Some of these “things” will be video enabled devices as well. For instance, watching a video of how to make vegan scrambled eggs on your refrigerator door!
Mobile Operators Can Play “Central Role” in Content
So mobile operators have massive connectivity with virtually everyone 12 years old and up having a smart phone and if they can play a central role in providing content they can benefit from the “emerging online video value chain.” It’s about using great content to boost usage of their mobile broadband service. O’Leary believes that Verizon, Sprint, AT&T and others should take advantage of this “content opportunity” in order to cash in and drive business growth.
The biggest impediment for mobile phone companies entering the video content space is their tendency to charge high rates for large bandwidth consumption. Mobile broadband carriers should eventually come to the realization that their businesses are tied to consumers needing them and it is in their interest to provide inexpensive ways to consume high bandwidth mobile content or they will by bypassed by new mobile broadband competitors that get it.
Mobile is the New Video Distribution Platform
O’Leary predicts that OTT, where the internet is used to bypass traditional content middlemen like cable, is the driving motivation that should entice broadband providers to enter the content space more aggressively over the next few years. He advocates mobile operators creating a “cloud based platform” and then partnering with content producers in order to “scale their video infrastructure efforts and deliver high-quality, live video and on-demand content to consumers on any device — be it their smartphone, tablet or connected television.”
Content producers will likely consist of a wide variety of players from traditional sources like ESPN and Disney to well funded content upstarts such as such as Amazon, Apple, YouTube and Netflix. Content alliances between mobile operators may also include more direct deals with talent such as successful independent internet based content stars on YouTube, Vine and even Snapchat. Mobile is already the primary platform used to consume video content so the next step is to cut out the middleman and partner directly with popular content providers.
“In growing numbers, consumers are replacing their traditional cable and satellite TV packages with smaller, more customized, and often less expensive mixes of programming, cobbled together from an array of online and on-demand services,” said O’Leary. “As more consumers replace their big-bundle TV packages with à la carte online offerings, an opportunity is emerging for mobile operators and other service providers to combine mobile broadband (MBB) packages with compelling “over the top” content.”
Mobile operators should realize that they are the distribution platform for millennials, they are the network and they are the new cable and satellite companies. With that in mind, they don’t need the networks or cable to drive viewership and usage of their platform, they simply need great content however they can get it, even if it means becoming content creators themselves.
Marc Palmer, Marketing Communications Manager of Nissan UK, recently spoke in an Adwords promotional video for Google on the effectiveness of using Google Adwords for Nissan. “When you get your first car, suddenly, there’s that little bubble that you live in, where you can do whatever you like,” Palmer said. “I got this little old car: the top half was brown and the bottom half was gold! But what it meant was you could then start to just do things on your own. So there’s a sense of freedom.”
“Buying a new car is one of the more important decisions,” Palmer stated. “There’s this whole piece of discovery. At the start of their car-buying journey, they go to search. People turn up to the dealership pretty much in mind the car they want to buy.”
Puneet Vaghela, Search Account Director of Manning Gottlieb OMD, commented, “What AdWords is enabling us to do is fight the fight in the right place. We’re able to map buyer journeys.” “And that’s when the dealer has the ability to really make it brilliant,” said Palmer. “Now we’re able to find out that somebody searched for us and then they went and bought a car. That’s kind of getting close to the Holy Grail.”
“We know that people have a lot more confidence now in online research, but the main reason they still are going to dealers is for that personal aspect,” commented Vaghela. “It’s all about finding people and reaching them in their moments of intent.”
Vaghela added, “On mobile, we’ve seen 6.04% conversion rate store visits from search clicks and an estimated ROI of 25 pounds. When we actually go into AdWords, we can go all the way down to keyword level, which kind of keywords are actually driving people into dealerships from our search activity.”
“Customers do so much before they come to the dealership,” according to Rachael Gregory, Retail Marketing Manager of Nissan UK. “It’s really important that once they get here, we give them exactly what they need.”
“For the first time, really, this has given us a tangible connection between online and offline,” stated Vaghela.
Check out the Nissan UK video promo they did for Google Adwords below:
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.
According to Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes, Google is planning to rank mobile site speed separately from desktop. This means that if your mobile site loads quick and the desktop version of your site is slow you will rank better for the same query in a search done on a mobile device than you would on a desktop Google search.
Google added a mobile friendliness to their search ranking algorithm well over a year ago, but this is the first time that they are actually going to use mobile speed as a factor in their ranking and specifically for searches occurring on mobile devices.
Google offers a rich amount of information on how webmasters and web developers can make a site speedier and mobile friendly in general. Start here.[/subscribelocker]
Google launched a new tool today called “Test My Site” at testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com. The tool helps you find out how well your site works across mobile and desktop devices, but its primary purpose is to make the mobile web experience faster.
The new tool is part of the ‘think with Google‘ website that Google uses to announce studies and trends aimed in industry and to help webmasters and businesses make decisions. Google’s describes the site as a take on fresh marketing and a look at what’s next. It’s the place to go to find insights, trends and research in digital media and marketing. Google describes it as creative inspiration, industry intelligence and best practices for marketing leaders.
The new site testing tool provides 3 categories of measurement, MOBILE FRIENDLINESS, MOBILE SPEED and DESKTOP SPEED. Each of these areas receive a score of 1-100 and a link to view ways to improve. Here is an example from the Drudge Report, a site known not to be mobile friendly:
Here’s what Google says your scores say about your site
Mobile-friendliness: This is the quality of the experience customers have when they’re browsing your site on their phones. To be mobile-friendly, your site should have tappable buttons, be easy to navigate from a small screen, and have the most important information up front and center.
Mobile speed: This is how long it takes your site to load on mobile devices. If customers are kept waiting for too long, they’ll move on to the next site.
Desktop speed: This is how long it takes your site to load on desktop computers. It’s not just the strength of your customers’ web connection that determines speed, but also the elements of your website.
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.
uninterrupted audience attention in that amount of time?
bandwagon with its Siri speaker due to be released soon. This is why businesses should include voice search in their online marketing campaign, rather than focus solely on text-based searches.
internet users to skip one step. Instead of searching for “pulled pork sandwiches,” they can just go ahead and order the food from the best restaurant based on customer and critic reviews.
