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Watch Now: What Makes for Effective Audio with Ciarán Cunningham

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Sourced from Association of Advertisers in Ireland

On May 31st, Ciarán Cunningham joined us to host ‘What Makes for Effective Audio.’

Ciarán Cunningham was appointed as CEO of Radiocentre Ireland in January this year. Radiocentre Ireland is a new organisation, funded by RTE and the Independent Broadcasters of Ireland with a remit to promote audio as a marketing medium. Ciarán will take us through research that contains insights on what makes effective audio from a creative and media planning perspective.

Ciarán became the CEO of Radiocentre Ireland in January this year after spending 25 years in the media agency sector working in Dentsu, Carat, dentsu X and Initiative Media. Ciarán has worked with many clients including Unilever, Diageo, Vodafone, ESB, Heineken and Bank of Ireland. Ciarán started his career in RTE back in 1989 so it is great that he is back again working on the media owner side.

Sourced from Association of Advertisers in Ireland

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How creators have become strategy consultants for publishers on TikTok

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By Kayleigh Barber

TikTok can be a scary place for publishers.

Its algorithm segments audiences into interest-based groups, making best practices for the social video platform antithetical to best practices publishers have successfully honed for the other platforms and channels.

“Traditional video publishers have an editorial team, they have a content calendar, they’re producing and editorializing video content based on different stories or trends that are happening, and it’s typically a little bit more polished and far more regimented,” said Nick Cicero, vp of strategy at streaming and social intelligence company Conviva, which works closely with publishers, brands and independent creators on tracking post-performance on social media. “TikTok does not follow the same methodology as traditional video platforms that publishers [use].”

With that in mind, some publishers have turned to creators native to the fast-paced and rough-cut platform to help guide their strategies. Publishers including BDG, Team Whistle and Gallery Media Group, have grown their followings by doing so — and have incorporated TikTok into their daily output and distribution strategies.

“A lot of our foundation was built on working with creators who we thought aligned with our brands and were people that we would post naturally, learning from each other,” said Wesley Bonner, BDG’s svp of marketing and audience development. “And a lot of them were very eager to get into an opportunity to make money from their work.”

Since first posting on its TikTok channels in May 2020, BDG’s lifestyle brands have accrued between 440,000 to 2.7 million followers each, largely by forming deep relationships with creators, including through its TikTok Creator Network, which pays TikTokers to produce content for the company’s handles. The model is structured the same way it pays freelance writers to produce content for its websites, Bonner said, but would not disclose the range at which the TikTok creators are paid per post.

Right now there are 100 creators in the BDG Creator Network, all of whom are in the early stages of building their online presence since their rates tend to be lower than creators with millions of followers, and they are eager to grow online, Bonner said.

And other publishers agree that giving creators the driver’s seat is the correct strategy.

“The companies that are winning right now are allowing talent to do that super nimble work” of identifying their audience, figuring out what they want to see and how much of that content they want, said Owen Leimbach, evp of strategy and innovation at Team Whistle.

Here are some of the strategies that publishers have learned by collaborating closely with TikTok creators:

Give the ending away

By working closely with creators, Bonner said he has learned to share the end result with the audience immediately. Whether the video is about a beauty hack, a coffee recipe, a dress-up fashion video or an interior design reveal, a key way to get viewers to stop on your post is by making the attractive end result the first thing that catches their eye.

“I find [it] just a fascinating human tick where we’re scrolling so quickly, if you start a 15-second video that’s [about] the perfect eyeliner, but we don’t show you the eyeliner [in the beginning] you’re not likely to make it to the 15-second mark,” said Bronner. “That’s a unique strategy that we apply a lot to our videos of incorporating whatever the finale is first in the title, and then show them how you got there. It works quite well.”

Stop romanticizing brand image

TikTokers “are not romantic about their brand or voice the way that a lot of Fortune 500 brands and publishers are,” said Ryan Harwood, CEO of Gallery Media Group, which publishes PureWow and ONE37pm. They “have taught us that it’s OK to have multiple personalities depending on where you are.”

Because of how rapidly the platform develops — and with how solo creators operate — creators can hop on trends as they emerge and post several times a day because it’s their full-time job and their living depends on it, he added. But TikTok’s audience also appreciates the authenticity that comes from creators not taking the time to overproduce a video.

“Brands need to act more human because humans are winning on the platforms,” said Harwood. “We have teams set up that are spending a large portion of their time on the platform, which allows for us to be well versed on what’s culturally relevant and understand what our audience wants to see. TikTok is one of the greatest avenues to find out what consumers are thinking, saying, consuming, buying — which is something we haven’t seen since the early days of Facebook.”

Post fast and post often

Because TikTokers are less romantic with their image online, they’re able to post faster and more frequently than many publishers had previously been comfortable posting on their owned and operated channels, as well as on social media.

But this is also partially because TikTok’s algorithm itself doesn’t penalize the creators for using the platform at a higher volume. Unlike Instagram, which penalizes accounts with low engagement on some posts, getting 1,000 views on one TikTok won’t prevent you from getting 5 million views on the next, according to Harwood.

“The key trait[s] among all of the top-performing industries on TikTok right now [are] strong personalities that do bring a voice to the platform and posting fairly consistently, which means that for a publisher, you actually have to react to trends, produce something meaningful and get it out onto the planet a lot faster than your typical editorial cycle might entail,” said Cicero.

Publishers might have to hire dedicated TikTok managers or create a separate editorial calendar that is updated on a regular basis. And content guidelines might need to be updated as well to allow for more flexibility in language and voice.

Harwood’s team has been applying these practices to their organic channels as well. “For us, it encourages volume. Back in the day, [high volume] used to have this connotation with [low] quality. It doesn’t have to be one or the other at this point. Creators have taught that to brands and publishers quite a bit. Plus, it’s very clear that the more volume you do, the more at-bats you’re getting to find virality and organic reach, which means the more chances you have at growing your following massively,” he said.

Keep it familiar to the platform and natural for the creator

Team Whistle was first established as a YouTube channel in 2014 and considers its editorial team to still operate with a creator mindset, according to Alex Korn, vp of strategic partnerships at the company. Now, however, the third-party partnership team works with creators outside of its in-house talent in a number of ways, from creating co-branded content to managing the distribution and syndication of creators’ content on channels that aren’t their primary platforms.

“[We’re] taking a co-creation role with [creators], where we will help [by providing] larger resources that might be just out of the reach of their nimble style,” said Leimbach. This includes providing commercialization and distribution services, as well as including them in networks to secure premium media sales that creators can’t hire the staff to do on their own. That is the monetization strategy that is the most organic and works the best for Team Whistle, he said.

This business has taught Korn’s team to be very cognizant of which platforms creators shine on and where they have the most audience, especially when creating new content that features their likeness.

“Doing a YouTube series with a very well-known TikToker may not necessarily relate to the audience as well as doing an original series with a well-known YouTuber,” said Korn. “Taking that and programming our original content has been really beneficial.”

Translating editorial expertise into brand deals

Ultimately, the close collaboration with creators all ladders back up to publishers’ confidence and knowledge in the platforms as well, which ultimately enables more experimentation and innovation in the social offerings they can provide brand partners.

All three publishers have branded content businesses that connect clients with content creators, and Gallery Media has even launched and operated white-labeled TikTok accounts on behalf of clients — which is approaching the 8-figure benchmark for revenue, Harwood said — as well as created a business where they compose original sounds for brands to use in TikTok campaigns.

The company has run influencer marketing deals for over seven years now — amassing hundreds of campaigns per year and working with thousands of influencers during that time — but in just a few years’ time, TikTok has risen to account for the lion’s share of those campaigns, he added.

That said, brands are in a different business than media companies. “The thing that [brands are] selling is a physical product. As a publisher, you’re really selling information and entertainment. Your product is the TikTok,” said Cicero. There is a “natural fit for more branded content and ways to really well integrate that that, [but] also co-sponsorship [posts] have seen a ton of success.”

This article is part of a cross-brand Digiday Media series that examines how the creator economy has evolved amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Explore the full series here.

Feature Image Credit: Ivy Liu 

By Kayleigh Barber

Sourced from DIGIDAY

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How to Use Small Media to Build Your Brand

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Your job as a new company is to get your brand everywhere in the least amount of time.

Building a brand from scratch is never easy. But, there are missteps that can definitely make your path more difficult. It’s hard enough standing out as a startup. But if you make these mistakes — from my perspective -— you are sabotaging your brand on day one.

Let me start with a conversation I often hear with startups: Are we making a mistake by giving an interview to this smaller media outlet? Shouldn’t we wait for a bigger media outlet to give this exclusive interview to?

On the surface, it sounds rational. If something is scarce, it’s historically more in-demand. But that doesn’t apply to branding, especially in the early startup stages. And unless you’re Jeff Bezos or Marc Lore, you shouldn’t be offering up exclusives as a startup. Your job as a new company is to get your brand everywhere in the least amount of time.

In February, we launched a media campaign for a digital health startup. Their CEO is fairly experienced and successfully sold his previous company for over $1 billion. That’s great from a PR perspective. He has credibility as an entrepreneur, making our job easier.

And we got interest in his story out of the gate. Writers and editors with Benefits Pro, HR.com, Forbes, StrictlyVC, Biz Journals, Stat News, Pharmacy Times, Pharma Shots, Popular Science, Fierce Healthcare and ZDNet all expressed interest or asked to speak with the founder. Yet this CEO turned down the majority of these interviews because he thought the publications were too small. I won’t share our internal conversations, but this approach created self-imposed obstacles.

If you’re a startup, you should be accepting all media opportunities — big and small. You haven’t earned the right to be picky. Your story hasn’t been told as a startup and every media opportunity is a chance to scale your brand. These news stories also help your website with SEO.

How smaller publications help build your brand

Let me use StrictlyVC as an example. If you’re a startup trying to raise money from investors, or get on the radar of VCs, your targeted audience will be reading outlets like StrictlyVC. Sure, StrictlyVC has a smaller reach — less than 50 thousand readers/month, compared to VentureBeat, which reaches roughly two million visitors/month. But I guarantee you, writers and editors are reading stories published by their competitors. It’s a part of their job to know what the competition is writing. And by speaking with smaller publications, like StrictlyVC, you are effectively pitching the larger outlets, like Venturebeat, at the same time.

A common excuse I hear for rejecting interviews is the CEO is too busy. If the CEO is busy, find a new person within the company to speak with the reporter. That’s called delegating.

Again, sticking with a real-life example to demonstrate the why. In the case of this digital health startup, the editor of Pharmacy Times was intrigued with the storyline we pushed and asked to speak with the CEO. We coordinated the interview, but unfortunately, the CEO missed the interview. A few days later, he said he didn’t want to do the interview because he thought the publication was too small after looking at their website.

Don’t judge a media outlet solely on its website design

MSN, Yahoo and others frequently pick up stories from smaller news outlets and publish them on their home page. And I’m not talking about stories in Google News or Yahoo News. I’m describing stories where Yahoo News places its logo on the story and syndicates it to consumers who have a specific interest in this topic. Think Yahoo Lifestyle or MSN Money. If you look there today, you will see many stories from smaller publications featured prominently.

This syndication approach also applies to TV. If your publicist secures a segment booked on a TV station in St. Louis, don’t assume that is a waste of time. Local features are placed on the affiliate feeds all the time and shared with the rest of the country. As a line producer in Phoenix, I turned to ABC NewsOne to find promotable ideas. Sometimes the syndicated story was cut down to a 45-second voice over. But it doesn’t matter. This is additional exposure your brand needs at the start.

I might get some heat for saying this but you’re not as big as you think. I don’t want to sound disrespectful or condescending. I’ve just seen it. Brands aren’t built in a month. Media coverage, along with a brand, are built over time. And if that’s not enough reason, use these smaller outlets as an opportunity to perfect your messaging. The experience of speaking with more inexperienced writers at smaller publications will refine your storyline. These conversations will make you even more prepared for the day the larger publications want to interview you.

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Twitter Pursues Anxious Advertisers Amid Concerns on Musk’s Era

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By Joaquin Victor Tacla

Twitter pursues a sceptical audience in the Digital Content NewFeronts when it pitches its upcoming premium video content slate to anxious advertisers who are concerned about the future of the social network’s “brand-safe” platform under Elon Musk’s era.

Anxious Advertisers

The company had already pitched some of its projects in NewFront in the previous years, however, this time was a more challenging one after the emergence of reports that Twitter advertisers were already planning to stop their spending on Twitter once Musk took over.

In fact, several activist organizations have released a letter containing “non-negotiable” standards  that Twitter advertisers must commit to since they are worried that  Musk’s acquisition might turn the platform into a “megaphone of extremists.”

Musk has openly declared that he is a free speech absolutist, and it may not sit well with some of the advertisers, given the current political climate. If Musk’s takeover deters the existing content moderation controls of Twitter to address misinformation and abusive speech, it may not align with the interests of these advertisers.

For example, in 2020, big-name brands like Verizon, Unilever, Boeing, Microsoft, Levi Strauss, Adidas, HP, Pfizer, and many more joined in an advertising boycott to Facebook due to their content moderation policies and called the platform to increase its combat against hate speech.

However, Twitter has assured advertisers that the social network would remain a safe place for them in the future and making sure that their ads will not be aligned with any harmful content but the social network has also noted in an SEC filing that the loss of ad revenue is one of the risk factors brought by the takeover.

Pitching Time

Twitter did more than just pitching their content but they also had to face the challenge of convincing advertisers that they have a promising project to guarantee their partnerships.

The company had to emphasize in their presentation that their content would operate in a brand-safe zone on Twitter because of its upcoming premium video partnerships.

“I hope that you see that we are going to continue to invest in the parts of our business that bring scroll-stopping content to the timeline,” Twitter’s Chief Customer Officer Sarah Personette said during the presentation, reported by TechCrunch.

“We’re committed to growing our audience. We are committed to investing in our product innovation, and we are committing to increasing the velocity with which we ship products. We’re committed to deepening the relationships with the top rights holders and premium content publishers in the world and also across this country.,” Personette added.

She also highlighted how this project is “extremely important” to the social network because she claimed that it matters to the advertisers in connecting their brands to people “that matter” to them.

Feature Image Credit: (Photo : LIONEL BONAVENTURE/AFP via Getty Images) This photograph taken on October 26, 2020 shows the logo of US social network Twitter displayed on the screen of a smartphone and a tablet in Toulouse, southern France.

By Joaquin Victor Tacla

Sourced from Tech Times

 

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Stop worrying about AI bias all the time, says Deloitte’s AI ethics lead

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AI that discriminates against people is a big problem, but Beena Ammanath, executive director of the Global Deloitte AI Institute and head of Trustworthy AI and Ethical Tech, says AI ethics is about a lot more than bias.

You won’t see many people with my background talking about ethics,” said Beena Ammanath, executive director of the Global Deloitte AI Institute and head of Trustworthy AI and Ethical Tech at the global consulting company.

A computer scientist who worked as a database and SQL developer and held data science and AI-related technology roles at Bank of America, GE and Hewlett Packard before joining Deloitte in 2019, Ammanath wasn’t always gung-ho to talk AI ethics. Then she decided to write a book about it.

“There has arguably never been a more exciting time in AI,” she wrote in her book, “Trustworthy AI.” “Alongside the arrival of so much promise and potential, however, the attention placed on AI ethics has been relatively slight. What passes for public scrutiny is too often just seductive, click bait headlines that fret over AI bias and point to a discrete use case. There’s a lot of noise on AI ethics and trust, and it does not move us closer to clarity or consensus on how we keep trust in AI commensurate with its power.”

Ammanath calls the book, which attempts to move beyond hand wringing over AI’s problems toward practical ways to develop AI with ethical considerations in mind, “a synthesis of especially the last 10 years of my professional experience.”

Protocol spoke with Ammanath about why ethical AI practices should be part of every employee’s training, the limitations of providing internal guidance inside a sprawling consultancy and why she finally gave in and joined the AI ethics conversation.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

There’s no shortage of guidance, advice and lists of principles for ensuring AI is ethical or responsible. Why did you want to join the fray?

I really didn’t want to.

You really didn’t want to?

I didn’t want to, but it reached a point — just like I didn’t want to join the ethics and bias conversation four years ago, but I got pulled into all these discussions.

By training, I’m a computer scientist. In my prior lives, I built AI products, then [took them to] market. A lot of work at GE and HP. So, I have very much been focused on all the cool things and the value AI can bring to humans.

I realized that a lot of what was getting out was just one side of the story. When you think about AI ethics, the first thing that comes to mind is fairness and bias. And, yes, those are important, but that’s not the only thing. Fairness and bias doesn’t even apply in every possible scenario. Some of the work that I’ve done in the past was very much around predicting jet engine failure, or predicting how much power will a wind turbine generate, optimizing your IT servers and doing document management. And those are scenarios where it’s not so much about fairness and bias, but it is more about, say, reliability — the robustness, the safety and security aspect of it.

Do you think that some of this ethics conversation is steering people to think AI is just inherently bad and they should just avoid it altogether and be scared of it?

That’s the message that’s going across: that it’s a terrible thing for humanity. And I don’t think it’s all bad; either is it all good. There are risks with it, and we need to address it. I want to bring more of that balanced perspective, a pragmatic, optimistic perspective.

I’ve talked to companies that do deep learning for detecting defects in manufacturing, for example. Those are some really practical things.

We hear about bias in the context of health care a lot, right? Just think of two scenarios where AI is used. One is in patient diagnosis — AI being used to predict health and diagnose a disease earlier. In that scenario, bias is a terrible, terrible thing. But if you’re using AI to predict when an MRI machine might fail, or X-ray machine might fail, so that you can proactively send an engineer to go fix it, then, bias? Not so much. So anywhere where there is no human data being used, usually, bias doesn’t come into play.

The other one you hear a lot about is facial recognition. If it’s biased in a law enforcement scenario, where you’re flagging people as criminals, bias is a terrible thing. We want it to be absolutely fair. But if you’re using facial recognition [in] traffic lights to identify potential human trafficking victims, in that scenario, do we still want to use it because it’s 60% better than just humans trying to do it by themselves, even though it is biased? It’s more weighted, and it’s more nuanced. It is not a one-size-fits-all.

Some companies that create AI technologies, especially if they are controversial, promote “AI for good” — pro bono donations of data or tech for COVID, cancer or climate research, for example. It can be seen as a red herring, like, “Look, we’re doing good work, don’t pay attention to the fact that we are working on controversial AI or have military contracts.” What are your thoughts about that kind of approach?

I think of AI at companies or organizations at the high level [as] two categories. There are the ones who are building the AI tools, Big Tech. They are building AI tools, they’re pushing the levels on it, building those core capabilities. And then there are a lot more companies that are just using those tools in their specific context — the facial recognition example. The company that uses it in law enforcement is probably different than the company that uses it for human trafficking with identification.

We tend to think it is just a Big Tech problem. It’s just a problem of the company that’s building the tool. But the companies that are using it are equally responsible, and there are things they can do and consider and weigh, because at the end of the day, the tool and its ethical implications, the risks, are going to depend on how it’s used.

How are you applying some of the concepts that you discuss in your book in a concrete way at Deloitte?

The first step you can do, which we’re doing at Deloitte, [is] training — making sure every employee in the organization understands the ethical principles that the company believes. Every company has integrity training, day one. So just add an extension to it on what are AI ethics principles. That does assume that the key stakeholders, the C-suite, board members, have agreed upon the principles.

The next step is making sure every employee — not just your IT team, not just the data scientists, [but] every employee … should know what questions to ask and whom to call if he or she is not getting the right answers. It is that intern in your marketing department who’s evaluating an AI tool for recruiting. So every employee should be empowered, because in some form or the other, they’re using AI in their daily work.

Every project I’ve worked on, there’s always a column or section which talks about the ROI. What’s the value this project is going to bring, whether it’s cost savings or new revenue. Add just one additional step which says, what are the ways this could go wrong? Who is it going to leave behind? What are the vulnerabilities?

In today’s world, there is no thinking of the bad things that can happen. I’m an engineer by trade. Trust me, I like to focus on all the cool things technology can do. It’s not in my DNA to think of, what are the ways this could go wrong? That’s the bare minimum you can do.

Deloitte got a $106 million contract with the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency in 2020 to build the Pentagon’s AI development platform. Are there Pentagon projects that you’re working on in any capacity? Is “what could go wrong?” a question that is asked in those kinds of environments?

I don’t do client work. What I’m doing is internal transformation, so that team serving a client would reach out to me. In fact, I think I have one in my mailbox about another government client [asking] what are the ways that the team should be thinking about [these issues] and what should we be asking our client. The other one is making sure we are including an element of thinking about the ethical implications, the risks, the ways it could go wrong as part of the project.

I have to wonder if that actually gets translated. Sure, they’re asking you, but do they actually bring that to the customer — especially when the customer is the U.S. government or the Pentagon? What’s the real impact?

I know the conversation is happening. The team is offering scenarios that could go wrong. They can inform the client that we are going to be putting in the guardrails. It’s not a single playbook. It really depends on the exact scenario, the solution that you’re building. So even for me, it becomes very hard to be just very prescriptive. It’s more initiating that conversation, putting that in the back of your mind and proposing that and weaving in as much as you can.

Feature Image Credit: Beena Ammanath wasn’t always gung-ho to talk AI ethics. Then she decided to write a book about it. | Photo: Deloitte

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Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of “Campaign ’08: A Turning Point for Digital Media,” a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Sourced from protocol

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12 Tips for Marketing Automation in 2022

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By Joe Martin

Many businesses are not taking advantage of technology that can improve marketing results. With marketing automation systems, they can send thoughtful communications at the right time to nurture leads and convert them.

Marketing automation is one of the best ways to run your business. It allows you to:

  • Create a definition to send personalized emails to your leads and customers.
  • Choose from thousands of templates for the one that works for your business.
  • Follow up with your prospects automatically and nurture them until they become customers.
  • Manage your entire list of subscribers from one place with ease.

The key is to start using it today and avoid most marketers’ mistakes. Here are 12 tips to get you going.

1. Develop a Marketing Automation Strategy

Marketing automation has many benefits, but you can’t jump in without thinking. Don’t try to automate every part of your business — not all your processes are ripe for automation right away.

Plan ahead. Make sure you have a strategy in place. Ask yourself questions like:

  • How will I measure the effectiveness of my marketing automation?
  • What metrics will I use to determine success?
  • What do I want to achieve with marketing automation?

Take some time and write out your goals and objectives. Then, consider what activities you need to automate, the tools available to you, and how you want to start.

2. Implement Marketing Automation Gradually

Getting started with marketing automation can be intimidating for any company, especially those that are unfamiliar with the technology. While some companies dive into marketing automation at full speed and send out dozens of emails or publish countless social media posts immediately, it can be best to take a slower approach to the process.

Deciding how — and how quickly — to integrate marketing automation depends on your company’s size, available resources, and the type of tools you’re using.

The first step is to understand how you and your colleagues spend your time. Next, identify tasks that take the most time but don’t necessarily move prospects through the sales cycle. Marketing automation can take care of many of these tasks, freeing you up to focus on working with your best prospects and closing deals.

3. Start With Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most essential business processes to automate. It’s also one of the easiest to implement, so you should think about starting here. For example, sending emails regularly to your newsletter subscribers can be time-consuming. By automating instead, you could schedule emails to go out in advance and have them sent at the specified time without touching them again.

Another great way to automate your business processes is by setting up autoresponders for new leads and customers. For example, this will let you send automated messages to people who sign up for your mailing list.

4. Streamline Your Social Media Presence

Social media is a highly effective marketing channel, but you have to invest time and effort into it to get results. Luckily, automation can help you streamline many of the everyday tasks that marketers perform on these platforms, letting you work more efficiently and get better results for your efforts.

The key is to focus on the tasks that can be automated so your time can be spent on the ones that require a human touch. For instance:

  • Posting Content: You can schedule your posts in advance with almost every social platform. In addition, many offer native scheduling capabilities built right into their interface.
  • Monitoring Channels: Marketing automation can help you track key metrics like follower growth over time.
  • Link Tracking: Using unique links for each piece of content you create, you can track where your leads come from and how they interact with your site.

There are plenty of social media management tools that let you schedule posts in advance across multiple accounts at once. This means you can spend a few hours at the beginning of the week (or even just one session) creating all of your posts for the next several days or weeks.

5. Build Your List

A list is a powerful tool that can help you reach your audience and drive business growth. Marketing automation can help you grow your list organically without actually being too pushy about it.

Specifically, automation allows you to send emails with the right content and messaging at the right time. In addition, you can schedule emails for times when your audience is most likely to be receptive, allowing them to decide at their own pace.

6. Automate the Right Content for Your Market

The more relevant your content is, the higher the chance people will interact with it. And if they interact with it, it means they’re interested in what you have to say — and that translates into increased leads and conversions.

Marketing automation can track how people engage with your content, including how many times they click on a link, open an email, or fill out a form. You can then use this data to improve future communications.

The data you receive from automated tracking can also form part of your real-time web analytics. This enables you to see which parts of your website perform well and which ones need improvement.

7. Nurture Sales Leads

It’s possible to nurture sales leads with specific content, helping guide prospects through the sales funnel and move them closer to a sale. Marketing automation allows you to use the power of your content, landing pages, and social media to nurture your leads into customers.

Marketing automation is what will allow you to grow your business without adding more people or hours to your sales and marketing teams. And it’s one of the few tools that you can use for both inbound and outbound marketing, so it gives you the flexibility you need.

8. Personalize the Customer Experience

Personalization is a crucial aspect of any customer-facing business. It needs to be a focal point of your customer experience. Consumers are more likely to respond positively to brands with a strong understanding of their needs, preferences, and interests. However, while it is highly desirable in theory, it can also be challenging to execute on your own.

Marketing automation helps you cater to the customer experience by automatically collecting and managing data at scale. This creates better experiences for your customers, making it easier to retain and keep them happy.

9. Follow Up With Customers After Purchases

Retaining customers is one of the most critical factors in growing a sustainable business, and the best way to keep them coming back is to provide excellent service. But, are you following up after they make purchases? If not, you could be missing out on a significant opportunity to grow your business.

It turns out that one of the best ways to do this is through marketing automation. With it, you can set up campaigns that check-in with those who have bought from your business. These post-purchase emails allow you to send personalized messages at precisely the right time to increase revenue and build stronger relationships.

10. Generate Reports on Marketing Campaigns and Website Traffic

Analytics are critical to any company that wants to improve the performance of its marketing and sales teams. One of the best ways to collect data about your customers is with a comprehensive marketing automation platform that can track their activity across all channels.

These platforms can potentially let you automatically generate reports on website traffic, sales leads, and conversions from downloads as well as social media posts. You can also use analytics to track the effectiveness of your sales emails.

11. Don’t Make It Obvious That You’re Using Automation

Automation is an incredibly powerful tool for marketers, but it can also be dangerous and can reduce engagement if you aren’t careful. It’s important to remember that your subscribers are real people with real emotions. You have to speak to them as people would.

If you make it obvious you’re using automation; you run the risk of alienating your subscribers. They might not feel like you’re treating them as individuals, and they’re less likely to engage with your campaigns or buy from you again at that point. On the other hand, personalized subject lines can go a long way toward improving open rates or click-through rates (CTR).

12. Align Automation With Your Overall Business Goals

To achieve maximum return on investment (ROI), you need to align automation with your overall business goals. This means you need to outline what your business does and what it wants to achieve as a whole, then break that down for each department. Once you have, you can start designing your automation strategy to deliver your desired results.

This is not a silver bullet that will solve all of your marketing and sales problems. But when implemented correctly, it will help you streamline processes, generate more leads, and drive more revenue.

Hopefully, we’ve given you some ideas on how you might use marketing automation to your advantage. Avoid the mistake of thinking that it’s a one-size-fits-all solution, because it isn’t. Instead, by looking at what marketing automation can do for you and your needs, you can figure out how to fit it in and make the most of your ROI.

Image Credit: MART PRODUCTION; Pexels; Thank you!

By Joe Martin

VP of Marketing

Joe Martin is currently the VP of marketing at Scorpion, a leading provider of technology and marketing to help small businesses grow. Formerly he was CloudApp’s GM and CMO and a Head of Marketing at Adobe. With over 15 years of experience in the industry and tech that makes it run, he provides strategic guidance on how to build and use the right stack and marketing for businesses to grow. Joe believes marketers need smart training and leadership to scale company growth. Connect with Joe on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter @joeDmarti.

Sourced from readwrite

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How To Build Your Business Brand in the Metaverse

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By Zaheer Dodhia

Is your brand ready for the metaverse? It can be a complex question — for one thing; the answer depends on what “the metaverse” refers to for you as a business owner. For another, it can depend on the type of business that you run. But, ultimately, brand owners want their companies to be ready for anything — and active growth is often top on the list.

What Is The Metaverse?

The answer to this question depends on who you ask, but a simple definition is “a collection of technologies that allows us to interact in a virtual universe.” Most commonly, those technologies involve augmented or virtual reality and video.

Technically, our ability to interact with AI or with avatar representations of others on social media is an offshoot of what the metaverse is intended to be. The function of the metaverse is to meld the physical and the virtual into one.

As technology advances, experts and innovators predict that we’ll spend more time in this digital universe than we do now — and maybe more time in our virtual world than we do in the real one. With the heightened focus on digital communications and ecommerce during the past two years, this doesn’t come as a surprise. Statistics already show the rise in interest — in 2020, almost 84 million people were using AR/VR regularly in the United States alone, with that number projected to rise to 110 million next year.

There’s endless scope for the imagination with the metaverse concept — not to mention endless scope for business growth. Big companies like Microsoft and Epic have already invested in the metaverse, aiming to stake a claim on their virtual brand. As a result, the market for augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality are projected to reach 300 billion dollars yearly by 2024.

There’s no doubt about it — the metaverse is the next significant shift in the digital world, and it’s best to be ready to take advantage of it!

Here are the top three ways to build your business brand in the new digital movement known as the metaverse.

Unified Branding

Branding is always one of the top keys to building a business. Branding not only identifies who your company is but connects it with core values, products and services on offer, and even your audience.

“Just make sure you have a brand” isn’t really the best advice, though, because inconsistent branding can actually be detrimental to your overall brand. Inconsistency can cost — 90% of consumers expect to have a consistent experience with a brand regardless of the platform, and consistent brands are more likely to have strong visibility, whereas if consumers are less aware of a brand and have less of an impression of it as a whole, they’re less likely to notice the company — and therefore less likely to engage or invest. Neglecting your colour scheme or making a logo design mistake can have serious consequences.

Along with consistency, specific elements can help with solid branding. For example, using a signature colour can boost a brand’s recognizability by up to 80%. That means that customers would be 80% more likely to recognize and interact with your brand in the metaverse if they see your signature colour.

Leitmotifs, or sonic branding, are also valuable to a complete branding package. Some statistics suggest that using audio — think jingles or recurring notes, like with MacDonald’s ba-da-ba-ba-ba — as part of your branding can increase recognition by up to 46%.

In the end, the numbers show the importance of keeping your branding steady as you move into the metaverse with your brand. Unified branding across all platforms, including print, storefront, social media, and website, has been shown to increase revenue by up to 23%. That’s significant growth, especially for a small business.

Virtual Experiences

The metaverse is all about virtual reality, and adding virtual experiences into what you offer your customers is an excellent way to get them ready for the metaverse even now. In addition, you may be able to leverage the rising sales of VR headsets, which is one of the most popular ways to explore the metaverse concept. From just under five million sets sold in the US in 2020, sales are projected to reach more than 14 million yearly in the US by 2024.

But VR headsets aren’t the only way to craft a virtual experience to share with your customers and attract them to your business. Build a digital storefront that mimics your brick-and-mortar store. Create digital tours of your products. Ikea is an excellent big-name pioneer of this, already demonstrating how to use the metaverse concept to grow a particular aspect of a brand. With virtual room design, Ikea customers can see what furniture and features will fit, how the colour scheme will turn out, and how frustrated they may get while figuring out how to put it all together.

Okay, that last part isn’t actually a feature of Ikea’s virtual experience. But it’s only a matter of time.

Video Production

A final and significant way to build your business brand in the metaverse is to incorporate videos in your marketing, website, and social media posts.

The importance of video isn’t anything new. Approximately 85% of marketers already leverage video use as an essential part of their strategy, with 92% of that number labelling it as essential to their work going forward. Video nets the most engagement on social media, especially Instagram. More than 90% of businesses point to social media videos as a key that has garnered new customers and directly caused conversion.

But with the metaverse being focused on virtual/augmented reality and video, video production is even more of a recommendation for brands that are looking to grow. Not just for marketing purposes, either — other popular kinds of videos include how-to or explainer videos and social media videos, both of which puts the focus on entertainment and education.

The more value you can provide, the more likely you will attract new interest. And with new interest, your brand is sure to grow.

To the Metaverse and Beyond

It’s challenging to get a consensus on just what the metaverse means and how far it will take us. But one thing is for sure — we’ve been spending more time in the virtual world than ever in the past few years, and it’s almost guaranteed that the trend will continue.

With essential brand-building methods, your brand will be ready to grow in the metaverse and whatever comes next.

Feature Image Credit: Julien Tromeur; Unsplash

By Zaheer Dodhia

Sourced from readwrite

 

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If Publishers Want To Stay Competitive, They Need To Prepare For The Cookieless Future Today

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By Todd Tran

In preparation for the cookieless future, publishers have made strong improvements to their business models. Some are focusing on higher-quality content, while others are collecting first-party data from users who log into their sites. At the same time, advertising and buy-side platforms are attempting to develop solutions for the cookieless world.

While these developments are no doubt encouraging, they’re not a panacea.

If publishers want to ensure they’re set up to succeed by the end of next year, they need to take their fate into their own hands right now – and that means offering users true value.

Two steps to cookieless success  

To prepare for the future, some organizations are congregating around unified IDs, which are anonymous IDs that track users across the web.

Personally, I do hope more publishers sign on to the unified ID initiative. In my opinion, it’s a really good solution. But it’s an incredibly hard solution, too.

To be able to achieve workable scale with unified IDs, publishers will need to create a strong value exchange to persuade their users to log in, which can take years. What’s more, unified ID initiatives will need to get to a point where a large volume of publishers have opted in. Not to mention there are several competing solutions that are currently not interoperable.

While I believe unified IDs will have a place in our ecosystem in some form, if you’re relying solely on them to rescue you in the cookieless world, you’re out of luck.

Still, the arrival of the cookieless world is an opportunity for publishers to win business from competitors that aren’t ready. And it just takes two steps to effectively prepare for the inevitable.

1. Provide true value

While having logged-in users isn’t the only way to leverage first-party data, it provides a greater depth of information. But, like unified IDs, it’s an uphill battle to get users to register. To get the sign-ups they desperately need, publishers must develop a content and monetization strategy based on a strong value exchange. Users need a strong reason to register and log in. There are plenty of successful examples of this value exchange already on the market, such as The Independent, which offers subscribers “limited access to premium articles, exclusive newsletters, commenting, and virtual events with our leading journalists.”

2. Account for anonymous users

Since most publishers won’t have enough logged-in users to scale to the same level they had using third-party cookies, they need to use technology that enables them to gain insight into anonymous user behavior, too. Primarily, this includes solutions that anonymously track movements on a publisher’s site, but not anywhere outside of it. Contextual signals and AI or predictive audiences can help, too.

By prioritizing these two steps, publishers are giving advertisers the best possible opportunity to buy sustainable media that delivers real business outcomes.

Prepare for the cookieless future today

As cookie deprecation nears, publishers need to prioritize user identification and targeting. And they need to do so today. Failure to adjust business models ahead of time will almost certainly have an adverse impact on the bottom line.

On the flip side, the faster publishers tackle the problem head-on, the sooner they’ll be in control of their own destinies and gain a competitive advantage. Where there is danger, there is most certainly opportunity.

By Todd Tran

Chief strategy officer, Teads. 

Sourced from ad exchanger

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Grow Your Brand Beyond Amazon With a Strong DTC Strategy

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How can brands leverage Amazon to grow DTC sales? Let’s dive right into it.

In the past two years, brands like Supply, Beardbrand, and Ranch Road Boots joined the likes of Nike and Ikea to exit Amazon. While this shift in strategy does pique the interest of DTC brands, it is one that removes its presence from the biggest shopping site in the world. This begs the question: How can brands leverage Amazon to grow DTC sales? Let’s dive right into it.

As the largest product search engine in the world, Amazon offers key benefits that work to the seller’s advantage and also appeal to consumers. Specifically, consumers trust the platform. Further, added incentives, such as Amazon’s single-day delivery, an accessible catalogue of diverse products and the brand’s buying power, add to the platform’s assets.

The downside? High fees, huge competition over price and keywords, non-unique product pages, prioritization of sponsored listings and, of course, the uncertainty of having your listings pulled at any time.

While this does make the benefits of switching to a single DTC sales channel shimmer a little brighter, it comes with its own fair share of drawbacks. The complete control over the content, absence of market fees and building long-term customers are offset by the heavy lifting to attract customers, investment in site maintenance and building trust with customers.

Sellers who also sell on DTC channels are afraid that having both sales channels will make Amazon cannibalize their DTC sales and undermine their high-cost DTC marketing efforts. All this, while also paying Amazon with high selling fees.

Here’s how brands can leverage Amazon to grow direct customer relationships:

Strategically perceive Amazon as a doorway for relationships

When a customer discovers and buys your product on Amazon, they are still an Amazon customer. They made the choice to search for a solution to their problem on Amazon. Despite choosing your product, they trusted Amazon first to display the products and brands.

Think of an exhibition or a multi-artist gallery. Brands who wish to grow direct relationships with customers through Amazon perceive it as the “gallery” that provides them with the opportunity to make a great first impression on the consumer. Although, this might not make the desired profits right off the first interaction.

This is just like how an artist would use a gallery to showcase their talent and provide visitors with an experience that would leave them wanting more. This could be deployed in several practical ways we will discuss further. But this mindset is crucial to succeeding in using Amazon to grow direct customer relationships.

Use (and A/B test) product inserts to start direct relationships with Amazon customers

Think of Amazon as a sales driver, not a customer acquisition channel. With no data or opportunity to re-engage with the customer, you mostly make sales on Amazon but do not acquire customers.

Despite strict restrictions on the content of your product inserts, there are several ways you can engage with your customers outside of Amazon without breaking the rules.

The most effective ways to interact with customers are through email and text messaging. Think of an added value you can provide the customer that would prove incentive enough to give you consent to interact with them after their Amazon purchase. For example, register their lifetime warranty, sign up to an exclusive content club or even free products. Direct them to sign up via a special link (QR code or a very short URL works best) to your list.

A/B test the offer to see which one resonates best with your audience and gets you the most engaged customers. From this point on, it’s up to you to deliver great value for their consent and engagement with your brand through this channel.

Pro Tip: This is not just a lead list — these are customers who have received your product, paid money and attention to your brand and now expect to get more value from your brand. The more value you provide, the higher your chances are to convert them into paying customers directly with your brand. It’s all about the “trust meter” that will make them buy directly from you the next time around.

Use Amazon as a review showcase

Being the largest product search engine in the world, consumers may search for your product or brand on Amazon even if they’ve seen your ads outside of Amazon. Consumers trust the Amazon review system. While many sellers are angry about them removing reviews, some are taking advantage of that consumer-trusted system to increase credibility and sales outside of Amazon.

One of the strategies we use for brands we work with is to push their product on Amazon to make as many sales as possible. We push to get as many positive reviews and showcase these reviews outside of Amazon — in ads, email marketing and social media.

We then provide a coupon for consumers to incentivize them to purchase the product directly from the brand’s website. This way, the brand enjoys the credibility of the Amazon platform and acquires customers directly on their site.

Be ready to break even or even lose money on Amazon sales to win long-term on DTC

To drive sales and beat the high competition on the Amazon marketplace, brands must think of Amazon as a marketing channel rather than a profit centre.

When done right, brands can acquire high-quality customers from Amazon who will buy and engage directly with the brand. This spares the high marketplace fees and constant need to adapt to new Amazon regulations and rising competition.

Further, this allows the brand the freedom to showcase its products and brand the way they desire. It also provides brands the chance to learn more about their customers’ preferences and innovate new ways in which they can serve them better.

Given the tremendous value brands get from acquiring direct customers and the high cost of acquiring them outside of Amazon, it’s sometimes worth looking into spending more advertising on Amazon. Alternatively, brands can lower prices on specific products inside Amazon and gain traction on initial sales for the chance to convert more of these sales into long-term customers.

This is similar to the strategy employed by accessory manufacturers when selling in Apple stores. Though sometimes they break even or lose money on the front-end products sold within Apple stores, they gain long-term customers. When done right, this also helps increase brand recognition and word-of-mouth marketing.

If the strategies I presented to you today were beneficial to you, or if you plan to employ them in your sales activities, I’d be excited to hear from you! Or, if you would like to talk more about how brands can use the changing landscape as an opportunity to grow, please feel free to drop me a note!

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