editor, Author at Mediastreet

In News

From Insta captions to blog posts, AI is now crunching copy for brands

September 14, 2021 No Comments

Chris Lu, cofounder and chief technology officer of Copy.ai, told us these tools give copywriters a “first draft” to work with.

“Marketing Brew is the home of provocative ideas, fresh thinking, provocative insights, and interesting perspectives on what they think about marketing, media and advertising. This publication gives you a way to digest their news, quick takes and new offerings in the field.”

This description of our newsletter was written by artificial intelligence. Pretty close, right?

Given only our name and a brief description—“a newsletter about marketing, media and advertising”—a tool called Copy.ai was able to spit out that paragraph.

The tool is part of a wave of smart content-churning machines that use the power of artificial intelligence to ~~steal writing jobs~~ make life easier for whomever’s crunching copy.

HAL meets Stan Freberg

Copy.ai and other AI-enabled copywriting companies like Jarvis and Copysmith are built upon OpenAI’s GPT-3.

According to the smart folks over at Emerging Tech Brew, GPT-3 is kind of a big deal. Trained on roughly a trillion words to predict—but not understand—text, it’s widely considered to be among the most advanced language models in existence.

“Large language models are powerful machine learning algorithms with one key job description: identifying large-scale patterns in text. The models use those patterns to ‘parrot’ human-like language. And they quietly underpin services like Google Search—used by billions of people worldwide—and predictive text software, such as Grammarly,” writes Emerging Tech Brew’s Hayden Field.

Of course, if you’re a marketer, who cares? You just need content. And lots of it. That’s where these tools come in handy. They can help write everything from Instagram captions to product descriptions to blog posts.

“We want to humanize AI. We want to help you start from something, and not a blank slate,” Copysmith CEO Shegun Otulana told Marketing Brew.

There’s an assumption that machines could take jobs away from writers, but Otulana doesn’t see it quite that way. “There’s an aspect of writing that isn’t easily replaced. A computer can’t tap into the human interactions you express in a story, the emotional aspects of a story you tease out. A computer can’t live the life of a human.”

But if you’re a writer who specializes in, say, product descriptions for e-commerce sites—or other types of copy that aren’t exactly trying to forge a human connection—these tools might pose more of a threat, he said.

For copywriters who need to bang out posts on multiple platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, there’s a volume benefit to these tools, since the AI provides various options for each post. Sure, you might not actually need dozens of call-to-action phrases, but any professional could whittle those down to five good ones and tweak them if needed.

“We try to give you the first draft,” Chris Lu, cofounder and chief technology officer of Copy.ai, told us. “Content creation is a treadmill. You’ve got to make a lot of it, it has to be relevant, and it has to be on brand.”

Andrew Race, a strategist at the digital agency Juice, called Copy.ai a time saver. “In five minutes, I’ve got 25 different variations [of a headline]. Before, I would have had to write every single headline or idea out myself,” he said. He estimates it cuts his actual copywriting time in half.

So far Copy.ai, which debuted in October 2020, has 4,100 paying subscribers made up mostly of marketers.

Ryan’s artificial copy

We asked Copy.ai to make a couple of Facebook headlines and posts for a made-up brand called Ryan’s Lemonade, giving only the keywords “lemonade, sweet, tart, fresh.”

Here are three versions it came up with:

It’s So Good You’ll Want Seconds: With a history of providing quality fruit drinks, Ryan’s continues on with their new line of lemonades. From sweet and tart to a hint of fresh, Ryan’s is bound to quench any thirst.
Cool, Refreshing: Pure and natural lemonade sweetened only with real sugar, not high fructose corn syrup.
Nothing is as refreshing as Ryan’s: Have you ever felt like you were in paradise? Everyday life is a bit harder than we wish it to be. Lemon Ryan’s is the perfect amount of all things good, made by real people in the sun-drenched hills of California. $5 for a gallon? No… lets make that two!

As you can see, it isn’t perfect. But it’s pretty good, and each took less than 10 seconds. Copy.ai assumes a lot—we’re not sure where “$5” or “California” came from. “These are natural language models. All it’s trying to do is write text. It’s just trying to predict the next word,” Lu told us.

If only a few keywords are plugged in, the content produced by these tools can have a generic feel to it. Lu said he doesn’t expect plagiarism to be an issue, but did say the company is planning on adding a plagiarism detector. “The AI helps with how to say, not what to say,” he added.

Copywriter –> AI editor

Similar to Copy.ai, Jarvis also lists templates for platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, but its bread and butter is longer-form content, like a blog post.

According to Dave Rogenmoser, founder of Jarvis, it has nearly 30,000 paying subscribers. At least 60–70% of its clients, which include Airbnb, Zillow, and CVS, are using it for projects “around 500 words,” Rogenmoser told Marketing Brew.

By inputting a few key words, Jarvis can spit out entire paragraphs, turning your average copywriter into an editor, who can guide the machine in a specific direction. If it veers off and becomes illegible, a user has to delete what isn’t working and try again. It doesn’t eliminate work entirely, as someone still has to pick and choose what works.

This post by Danny Veiga, a digital marketer in San Antonio, was written by Jarvis. Veiga told Marketing Brew Jarvis did about 80% of the work. The other 20% was mostly fact checking.
Veiga uses Jarvis for his email marketing, social posts, and homepage copy.

“Jarvis thrives when you need to write a lot of words, but they don’t need to be the most important words you’ve ever written,” said Rogenmoser. In other words, AI probably won’t win a Pulitzer anytime soon, but if you’re cranking out copy, it’ll give you a template for a flood of usable jumping points.

“It takes the mental load off. Writers are safe,” said Rogenmoser. For now.

By Ryan Barwick

Sourced from Morning Brew

In News

What a Customer Relationship Platform Is and What It Can Do For Your Business

September 13, 2021 No Comments

By Scott Clark

CRM platforms have been around since the 90s, and have evolved over the last decade to include artificial intelligence, machine learning and improved functionality. That said, just what is a CRM platform, what is its primary purpose, and how is it used to increase sales and turn leads into customers? In this article we will answer those questions and tell you why the martech stack should include a full-featured, unified CRM platform.

What Are CRMs Used For?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms are most often used by sales, marketing professionals, and customer service staff to manage and refine a brand’s relationships and interactions with prospective leads and current customers. CRMs are able to manage the relationships that a brand has with its customers through the entire customer lifetime. While many brands are using Customer Data Platforms (CDP) to unify customer data across all channels, CRMs are still in use by the majority of enterprise businesses. A recent report from Stellaxius revealed that 91% of businesses with over 11 employees use a CRM.

As brands grow and become more sophisticated, their use of a CRM grows with them to take on more duties, said Tony Kavanagh, CMO at Insightly. “CRM has an increasingly broader remit which goes beyond sales to include marketing, service & support, field service, ecommerce and analytics,” he said. “Customer experience by definition relates to every interaction a customer has with your company from unknown website visitor to full happy customer for life. CRM should be looked upon as the technical backbone to help manage this entire journey,” he said.

Older CRMs had the problem of siloed customer data, which resulted in a highly fragmented view of customers, which negatively affects a brand’s ability to consistently engage customers in a timely manner. “The way to address this is to consider moving to a unified CRM platform so that all customers’ data sits in one secure place, and on which all the required CRM applications of sales, marketing and customer service & support. This will ensure that all customer-facing teams are looking at the exact same set of the most recent customer data, resulting in higher rates of responsiveness from both sales and customer service reps and higher customer satisfaction and retention rates,” suggested Kavanagh.

CRMs are also used to provide customer service professionals with instant access to each and every interaction that a customer has had with a brand, including chat history, purchase history, and customer service tickets. Access to this information allows customer service personnel to provide well informed, immediate responses that leave customers feeling satisfied.

The 3 Types of CRMs

There are three different types of CRMs: operational, analytical, and collaborative. Although all CRMs share some core functionality, the primary roles of each are different:

Operational CRMs: These streamline and automate sales, marketing, and service processes, and are used to generate leads and convert them into contacts, while at the same time capturing all details. They also help to provide service throughout the entire customer lifecycle.
Analytical CRMs: These are used for the analysis of customer data which has been collected from various touchpoints in the customer journey. They enable brands to make more informed decisions, enable marketers to evaluate the effectiveness of their campaigns, sales professionals to increase sales, and customer service agents to improve the quality and efficiency of support.
Collaborative CRMs: These enable a brand to share its customer information between departments (sales, HR, marketing, IT, customer service, and others). They also enable all of a brand’s departments to share the same goal, which is to improve customer service, increase customer loyalty, and acquire new customers.

Sridhar Jayaraman, VP of Engineering at Qentelli, views a CRM as a “one stop platform” that is used to capture all of the conversation with or about a brand’s customers, including those that occur during and after the sales cycle. “Every professional involved in these conversations — including Lead Generation Specialists, Inside Sales and Field Sales reps, Sales Engineers, Account Managers, Customer Support reps — all capture the information in the CRM, so it becomes the single source of truth!” said Jayaraman.

CRM Core Functionality

Although the three types of CRMs have different uses, there are three functions that are common to all CRM platforms: contact management, interaction tracking, and lead management. Contact management is used to store customers’ contact information in a searchable database, including names, phone numbers, addresses, email addresses, and social media accounts. Interaction tracking is used to input notes and track customer interaction history, which is used to document conversations with specific customers. Lead management allows businesses to manage the process of converting prospects into leads (potential customers) by identifying, scoring, and moving them through the sales funnel.

Additional functionality that many CRMs provide may include:

Email marketing integration and templates
AI-based decisioning
Workflow automation
3rd party integration support
Reporting/dashboard and analytics
Sales forecasting
Live chat
Conversational AI chatbot
Call centre integration
Document management
Sales pipeline management
Mobile CRM functionality
Quote and proposal management
REST API support
Social media management

Additionally, some CRMs have the ability to send automated emails to customers, for example, after a specified number of days since the customer’s last purchase from a brand. This allows a business to remain in contact with a customer through personalized emails which deliver relevant content, coupons, offers, incentives, and seasonal promotions.

Customizable email templates can be triggered to be sent based on events, including purchases (“thank you for your order”), product inquiries (“you asked about this product”), shopping cart abandonment (“we noticed you left several items in your cart”), and customer service calls (“we hope we were able to solve your problem”) among others.

Other CRMs use AI and process automation to identify customer sentiment through analytics, and rapidly respond to customer service inquiries and social media posts.In fact there are some CRM platforms that are able to intercept problems and complaints on social media that could potentially threaten a brand’s reputation by using social listening. Businesses are able to respond instantly to customer complaints before they can cause damage to the businesses’ reputation.

Many brands use a CRM as a way to gain a deeper understanding of the effectiveness of specific marketing campaigns. “Marketing professionals use the CRM platform to create and track campaigns, gain insights into which campaigns are working and channel energies to drive many such campaigns. This will generate quality MQLs that can be sent to the Sales teams,” said Jayaraman. The CRM is also useful for contract management and forecasting. “As the sales process involves efforts from multiple resources, while identifying the probability of a particular opportunity, a CRM platform can offer visibility to the sales leadership with a monthly or quarterly review of best- and worst-case scenarios.”

Non-Traditional Uses of a CRM Platform

While a CRM is valuable for its traditional functionality, there are many non-traditional uses for a CRM. The cross-department transparency that a CRM provides ensures that every salesperson can see the interactions that each customer has had with the brand. This means that customers will not be overwhelmed with multiple sales calls, and department leads can easily see the effectiveness of their sales and marketing department. The CRM also makes it easier to determine which marketing channels are most effective.

Other uses include historical market and sales analysis, which enables brands to be able to anticipate the needs and spending habits of their customers, increase the efficiency of marketing campaigns, and identify and capitalize on trends.

Many brands use a CRM to keep their customers up to date as they go through the stages of the sales funnel, much like Amazon.com does. Once the customer places an order, they will receive an email letting them know that the order has been received. Once the order has been packaged and shipped, the customer receives another email that tells them their order is on the way, and typically includes a tracking number. When the order is delivered, the customer receives an email letting them know that their order has arrived. Finally, a follow-up email is sent asking the customer if they would be willing to write a review or provide feedback about their order. Also included in the follow-up email are offers for related products or services that the customer may be interested in, based on their personal shopping history with the brand. This is a great way to keep the customer engaged, emotionally satisfied, and loyal to the brand.

Final Thoughts

The Customer Relationship Management platform is an extremely useful tool for marketers, sales professionals, and customer service representatives. CRMs enable brands to manage and build stronger relationships with prospective leads and customers, enhance customer service, increase transparency between departments, and eliminate departmental data silos.

Feature Image Credit: Daniel Cheung

By Scott Clark

Sourced from CMS WiRE

In News

Google updates Search to generate and show ‘more readable’ page titles

September 13, 2021 No Comments

By Abner Li

Google’s latest Search improvement is a “new system of generating titles for web pages” that better describes what a result is about.

One of the primary ways people determine which search results might be relevant to their query is by reviewing the titles of listed web pages. That’s why Google Search works hard to provide the best titles for documents in our results…

Google wants the main part of a search result — in between the domain/URL and summary — to be “more readable and accessible.” Introduced last week, the company says testing has shown that this new system is “preferred by searchers.”

The previous approach saw page titles possibly change based on the search query entered by users. This new system produces “titles that work better for documents overall.” As such, different page names will “generally” no longer occur.

Google updates Search to generate and show 'more readable' page titles

Another aspect of this updated page title system sees Google place emphasis on text that “humans can visually see when they arrive at a web page.” Other page text and “text within links that point at pages” might also be factored.

We consider the main visual title or headline shown on a page, content that site owners often place within <H1> tags, within other header tags, or which is made large and prominent through the use of style treatments.

When Search encounters an “extremely long title,” Google will just use the “most relevant portion” and truncate the “more useful parts.” The company might also show site names alongside page titles when helpful.

For website owners, Google will soon release updated guidance:

However, our main advice on that page to site owners remains the same. Focus on creating great HTML title tags. Of all the ways we generate titles, content from HTML title tags is still by far the most likely used, more than 80% of the time.

By Abner Li

Sourced from 9 TO 5 Google

In News

How to Create an Impactful Triggered Email Workflow

September 13, 2021 No Comments

By Kevin George

Triggered emails can help to build long-lasting relationships with prospects and customers alike. According to GetResponse, these emails show a 38.03% open rate and a 6.76% click-through rate.

One of the biggest advantages of triggered emails is their longevity. It is quite possible that visitors who receive these emails engage with them some months later. According to statistics, around 18 to 23% of engagement is noticed after 24 hours of deployment.

So, how will you make your triggered email campaigns more impactful for readers?

Here is a detailed article to help.

#1. Segment your audience according to the customer journey

The spray-and-pray technique of email marketing is no longer effective. Instead, marketing professionals must take a customer-centric approach and try to send triggered emails that are relevant for the readers.

According to a 2017 report by Mailchimp, segmented campaigns exhibit better performance when compared to non-segmented ones.

They show:

31% higher open rates
64% higher unique open rates
37% lower unsubscribes

While segmenting, you can start with basic customer journey parameters like:

New subscribers
New customers
Active subscribers or customers
Inactive subscribers or customers
Re-engaged subscribers or customers

If you want to go for complex segmentation criteria, you can consider demographics, geographical location, purchase history, products browsed for, and resources downloaded.

#2. Send relevant emails based on user behaviour

Your triggered emails must be aligned with the trigger event. In other words, if a customer has placed an order, he or she will expect a confirmation email with all the necessary order details. No wonder, these emails have a 60% open rate.

Let me share an example with you.

A few days back, I searched for plus-size products on an eCommerce store. They sent me a triggered email promoting their “Plus Size Store”.

#3. Use data to create a personalized experience

The key to sending impactful triggered emails is data. If you collect more data about the customer’s interests, purchase preferences, and behaviours, you will be able to target them better. After all, 71% of customers believe that personalized experiences will affect their decision to interact with emails.

Having enough data will help you set engaging triggers that are more appealing for your customers. For example, if you are in the banking and finance sector, you can send out triggered emails whenever an EMI payment is due or there has been an update to the credit report.

Executing triggered emails at different stages of the buyer’s journey

First Stage: Brand New Subscribers

Visitors who have filled out your sign-up form in the expectation of getting a freebie or discount can be categorized as new subscribers.

Optimove suggests that 80% of prospects complete the first purchase on the day they register. 7% of them do so within the first week of registration. You must aim to crack the purchase within the first seven days.

Welcome emails help to build a strong relationship with the new subscriber. Through these emails, you can let your subscribers know about your offerings and encourage them to make their first purchase from you.

Take a look at this welcome email by Moo in which they have offered a discount coupon code and featured their unique selling points (USPs).

Image Source

Second Stage: New Customers

Leads who make their first purchase on your website will be considered new customers.

According to research, only 15% of first-time online customers will become repeat buyers. Repeat buyers contribute to one-third of online shopping revenue and spend three times more than one-time shoppers.

Use triggered emails to nurture these customers and make them purchase yet again. You can even incentivize them with an exciting offer.

eCommerce email marketers can trigger a post-purchase feedback email to increase subscriber engagement.

Similarly, SaaS business owners can ask customers for their input about how they liked the services.

See how HubSpot has sent out a short, yet engaging feedback email to interact with their customers.

Image Source

Third Stage: Active Customers

When a customer downloads several resources from your website and makes repeat purchases, you can categorize them as active customers. They are likely to be brand evangelists who will help you acquire new customers.

You can make loyal customers feel special by sending out VIP offers and bonuses. In addition, you can also invite them for exclusive interviews and then include their responses on your website testimonials or blog posts.

The BuzzSumo team, in partnership with Mantis Research, sent a survey invitation email to their loyal audience asking them to participate in it and invite their friends and family too.

Fourth Stage: Dormant Subscribers and Inactive Customers

Subscribers who have not engaged with your emails in the last few months are considered to be dormant. Lost customers, on the other hand, are the ones who have not purchased from you in quite some time.

As obvious as it may seem, the longer the inactive time, the tougher it becomes to revive them.

You can reactivate such users with the help of re-engagement emails. Remind them that you are grateful for their association with your brand. You can also share all the USPs that make you stand out from the competitors.

Take a look at this re-engagement email by Noom that works like a charm to bring back inactive customers.

Image Source

Wrapping up

Hitting the marketing triad of delivering the right content to the right person at the right time has become a breeze by setting up triggered email workflows. They not only help to engage prospective and existing customers but also assist customer retention.

If you have not started investing in triggered email workflows just yet, now is the right time.

Tools like Salesforce and Marketo can prove to be extremely useful for this.

By Kevin George

Kevin George is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers, one of the fastest growing custom email design and coding companies, and specializes in crafting professional email templates, PSD to HTML email conversion and free responsive HTML email templates in addition to providing email automation, campaign management, and data integration & migration services. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.

Sourced from Jeffbullas.com

In News

5 Questions You Should Ask to Determine Whether TikTok or Instagram Is Better for Your Influencer Marketing Campaign

September 10, 2021 No Comments

By Ismael El-Qudsi

Here’s a breakdown of how both platforms compare and what makes each one stand out in the influencer marketing space.

If you’re responsible for keeping your brand focused on the right social platforms and leveraging the right influencer partnerships, you’ve probably spent some time wondering whether you should focus on TikTok or Instagram.

TikTok and Instagram both offer distinct attractions for their users. While both are visual, TikTok is more audio and music-driven and has a more creative and spontaneous feel to much of its content. Instagram, on the other hand, is a more established platform with a more polished aesthetic. Because of its longevity, a sophisticated advertising and influencer network has developed on its ecosystem, which can make it easier to venture into known-commodity partnerships with influencers.

Where are your time and resources best spent, and what differentiates the two? The right answer often differs for each brand and that the difference depends on their audience and goals.

What’s your target audience demographic?

The platform you prefer may vary depending on which types of users you’re seeking to connect with. TikTok’s overall audience skews younger, with half of all Gen Z American adults accessing the platform, as compared to only 22 percent of millennials and 14 percent of the 50-64 cohort.

Instagram has a wider user base among all demographics, with 48 percent of 30-49 year olds on the platform and a third of the 50-64 age range. Its growth has stabilized and it’s not experiencing the same rapid user base expansion as TikTok.

How are you hoping to get seen?

Instagram has an advantage on influencer choice, because the network is more established and there are more influencers working there. Because Instagram has been an influencer option for a while, influencers may have a formula in place and be more certain about tried-and-true ways to gain attention from their specific audiences.

Sponsored content and advertising make frequent and expected appearances in Instagram users’ news feeds, while on TikTok, only 5.7% of content creators post about brands, products, or services on a daily basis. That number grows to just 17.3% on a weekly basis, with 60.8% of content creators reporting that they have never shared sponsored content on the app, as per our most recent research where we polled 1,743 influencers from more than 20 countries. This is, by far, one of TikTok’s greatest advantages and presents a great opportunity for marketers looking to capture people’s attention in a less saturated space.

Which metrics are you using to gauge success?

TikTok’s structure and users’ top content interests (#comedy and #dance) mean marketing efforts need to be more subtle, humorous and creative to attract interest. It’s not the platform for a hard sell nor for brands who want to have tight and rigid control of influencer content.

However, it is the ideal place to level up on organic engagement and to create relationships that may boost loyalty and migrate followers over to your other social platforms. In fact, 87.1 percent of TikTok influencers and content creators say their engagement rate is higher than on other platforms.

TikTok’s potential reach also far outstrips any other social platform because its algorithm doesn’t limit views, so if you’re planning campaigns that grow reach and awareness, TikTok might be the best place for your influencer marketing efforts.

If your focus is on a quicker sales cycle or moving your target audience from the middle to the bottom of the sales funnel, you may be better off with a consistent storytelling strategy on Instagram Stories where you link directly to your landing page or ecommerce site.

How well-versed are you in influencer marketing?

Do you already have an established influencer program, or are you just getting started? Your own knowledge level may influence the direction you lean with your platform choice.

If you’re accustomed to working with influencers and have a good grasp on your goals and metrics, you may feel ready to venture directly on to TikTok. You’ll know where you need to go and what you need to do, and you can guide the partnership based on your previous experience, especially if you use an influencer database to source the right people for your niche.

If you’re new to the influencer marketing world, you may want to leverage the knowledge of Instagram influencer partners.

Instagram influencers we surveyed said they typically spend at least three hours daily using the platform, which means they likely have their audiences’ likes, dislikes, and propensities down to a science. If you can source the right influencers for your campaigns, you can rely on them to serve as co-strategists as you plan your new influencer marketing campaigns.

In our recent study on TikTok influencer marketing, marketers surveyed said that analytics and tracking is one of their biggest TikTok challenge areas. If you’re confident in your influencer marketing knowledge, and you’re willing to experiment a little, you can easily and creatively overcome these challenges and get attention in a less saturated market.

Is there a clear winner for brands building an influencer marketing strategy?

In the battle for brand positioning, there’s no clear winner between these two powerhouse platforms. Instead, you can find the right place to showcase your business when you think strategically and evaluate which media sources your ideal buyer consumes.

Not many things in business come down to feeling alone, but you can evaluate which brand feels like a natural fit based on the criteria we mentioned, then continue to adjust while monitoring performance data.

You may find that one platform is clearly right for your brand or you may see opportunities to connect with your target audience across both. As each platform refines its offerings, algorithm, and business-focused features, you can continue to experiment accordingly with your strategy.

And, if you find you’re ready to dive into something new, TikTok can provide a welcome platform for experimentation. By getting your brand in the space, you can see where content is resonating for your audiences, define your goals, then align with the right creators and make a splash.

By Ismael El-Qudsi

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

In News

A Look at the Top 4 Digital Marketing Categories

September 10, 2021 No Comments

By Kaya Ismail

Digital marketing has become a necessity for any business attempting to survive in this day and age. It’s been said that the most important thing is not the amount of money you spend on digital marketing but the way you spend it. What does this mean? Well, certain categories within digital marketing will give you more benefits than others, depending on your company’s size and goals.

Digital Marketing is constantly changing, but there are some foundational categories of digital marketing you need to have a strong grasp of to thrive in the digital ecosystem. To learn more about the top digital marketing disciplines and the software tools for digital marketing. we asked the experts and here’s what they shared.

Top Categories for Digital Marketing

If there is a universal truth in digital marketing, every marketing executive has their own ideas of how marketing should be done and even how many marketing categories there are. Working in such a rapidly evolving industry means that new marketing categories can crop up all the time.

Even in the past ten years, there has been a huge jump in how digital marketing is understood. However, like Kate Adams, SVP of Marketing at Boston, MA-based Validity, said, “while marketing categories aid in creating brand awareness, recognition and trust, what a lot of marketers don’t realize is that the success of their digital campaigns is highly contingent on the health of their data.”

To understand more about each category, let’s take a closer look at some of the most popular digital marketing categories.

SEO

For some marketers, SEO is the pillar of their campaigns. This is because SEO is applicable to the other digital marketing categories. For instance, you’d have to use relevant SEO keywords in your drip campaigns and content marketing to make them effective and engaging, which is why SEO and research are fundamental for digital marketing.

SEO Tools

“When it comes to doing SEO, our go-to tools would be SEMrush and Ahrefs. We find using SEMrush helpful as it allows us to quantify our website’s estimated reach and also determine our site’s domain and/or resource authority,” shares Maya Levi, Marketing Manager at Tel Aviv, Israel-based ReturnGO.

SEM

Search engine marketing (SEM) refers to the practice of leveraging paid advertising that appears on the search engine results pages (or SERPs). In search engine marketing, companies place bids on keywords that Google visitors might use when looking for certain products or services, which gives the company the opportunity for their ads to appear alongside results for those search queries.

SEM Tools

According to Christopher Moore Chief Marketing Officer at Mooresville, NC.-based Quiet Light, “The best tool for pay-per-click advertising is Google Ads Editor as it allows you to create and edit different ad campaigns across different Google accounts making it far easier to manage your various campaigns and edit ads as the campaign goes along to make them more SEO friendly.”

Content Marketing

Content can take many forms, from blog posts to voice instructions delivered through IoT devices. Since it can takes many forms, it is often seen as the lifeblood of marketing campaigns. Due to its flexibility, content marketing has a central and all-encompassing role in every marketing strategy and can be tailored to fit customer needs before, during and after the buying process.

Content Marketing Tools

There are many content tools out there to help improve your content marketing. They can help build, grammar, content suggestions and SEO best practices. Examples include Grammarly, Ink and Jarvis.ai. Most of these are artificial intelligence-based apps that helps marketers overcome writer’s block and create content more consistently across niches, and ensure SEO is baked-in to the process.

Email Marketing

Getting into inboxes and engaging recipients through email marketing has become more challenging than ever before, with inbox volume nearly doubling year-over-year. Email marketing tools can help simplify email marketing campaigns and provide crucial insights to help increase engagement and improve execution.

Email Marketing Tools

A good piece of advice is that you should always start with an ESP (email service provider) that fits your budget and your brand. “Flodesk is a great option for paid with no tiered plans, but if you want to start with free, MailerLite is another popular one with a generous amount of free subscribers before you need to upgrade your plan,” shares Abby Sherman, Director of Strategy at Minneapolis, MN.-based Snap Agency.

Data Analytics

Without data, marketing is nothing but guesswork. On the other hand, the inappropriate use of data can definitely cripple even the best-laid plans. “Marketing and sales teams waste up to 50% of their time dealing with data quality issues,” confesses Adams. “From duplicate records to outdated contact information. If companies aren’t reaching the right audience, their marketing efforts (and money) are going to waste,” she continued.

Data Analytics Tools

“To gather data and insights, we supplement our usage of SEMrush with Google Analytics (GA),” said Levi. “Google Analytics is easy to set up, and it allows us to stay on top of our social networking profiles and website’s performances. Through the data that we get from GA, we can resolve marketing roadblocks that we encounter along the way strategically,” she shared.

All in all, to make it easier for you to meet the demands of digital marketing, it’s best if you choose and invest in the right software that will make the research, execution, and optimization of these efforts much easier for you. Some of these helpful apps include CRM tools, automation software, and collaboration tools that, with the help of personalization and a human touch, will help you create relevant and effective marketing campaigns.

Feature Image Credit: Adobe

By Kaya Ismail

Sourced from CMS WiRE

In News

7 Tips to Use AI to Acquire and Retain Customers

September 10, 2021 No Comments

By Kevin Payne

Artificial Intelligence (AI) mimics the cognitive functions of the human mind, particularly in learning and problem-solving. Many of the apps that we use today are powered by AI. From voice-activated virtual assistants to e-commerce, AI applications are everywhere.

With the advancements in AI technology and access to big data, companies across different industries are integrating AI into their processes to find solutions to complex business problems.

The application of AI is most noticeable within the retail and e-commerce space. Websites and apps can interact intelligently with customers, creating a personalized approach that enhances the customer experience.

No matter what industry your business operates in, these seven tips can help you acquire and retain customers more efficiently at a fraction of the time it takes to do things manually.

How to Use AI to Get and Keep Customers

1. Identify Gaps in Your Content Marketing Strategy

If you’re just starting with content marketing, you’ll need to know what type of content to create.

By using AI, you can identify the gaps, find fixes, and evaluate the performance of your content marketing campaign.

Take Packlane, a company that specializes in custom package designs, for example. They came up with high-quality content like helpful blog posts that provide valuable information. At the same time, the content they publish makes it easier for their target market to understand their brand and services.

If you’re in the retail or e-commerce space, you can use AI to identify the gaps in your content marketing. Your content may be focused on your products and their features, but through AI, you can determine the relevant content that addresses your audience’s needs and pain points.

2. Pre-Qualify Prospects and Leads

Not every visitor to your site will become a paying customer. If you’re not getting sales despite the massive traffic, it means you’re generating low-quality leads.

Some reasons why this happens includes:

Targeting the wrong audience
Poor content marketing strategy
Using the wrong type of signup form
Promoting in the wrong social media platforms
Ineffective calls to action

These explain why 80% of new leads never convert into sales. The mistakes can be rectified with the help of artificial intelligence.

AI tools can extract relevant data to help you learn more about your target audience. These tools also provide predictive analytics on your customers’ behaviour. They, in turn, help improve your lead generation strategy because you’ll know which leads to pursue, where to find them, and how to effectively engage them.

3. Provide Personal Recommendations

According to a report by the Harvard Business Review, even though there are privacy concerns when consumers’ personal information changes hands, people still value personalized marketing experiences.

Brands that tailor their recommendations based on consumer data boost their sales by 10% over brands that don’t.

Recommendation systems’ algorithms typically rely on data on browsing history, pages visited, and previous purchases. But AI is so advanced that it can analyse customers’ interactions with the site content and find relevant products that will interest the individual customer. This way, AI makes it easier to target potential customers and effectively puts the best products in front of the site visitors.

Because of AI, recommendation engines are able to filter and customize the product recommendations based on each customer’s preferences. It’s a cycle of collecting, storing, analysing, and filtering the available data until it matches the customers’ preferences.

This is an effective way of acquiring and retaining customers because there’s an element of personalization.

4. Reduce Cart Abandonment

A high cart abandonment rate is the bane of e-commerce business owners. According to a study by the Baymard Institute, online shopping cart abandonment rate is close to 70%.

Users abandon their online carts for various reasons:

high extra costs
complicated checkout process
privacy concerns
not enough payment methods, or
they’re not ready to buy yet.

Using AI-powered chatbots is one way to reduce cart abandonment. AI chatbots can guide the customers through their shopping journey.

AI chatbots can have a conversational approach and give the customer a nudge to prompt them to complete the purchase. These chatbots can also act as a virtual shopping assistant or concierge that can let a customer know about an on-the-spot discount, a time-sensitive deal, a free shipping coupon, or any other incentives that will encourage them to complete the checkout.

With AI, lost orders due to cart abandonment are recoverable and can lead to an increase in conversion rate for e-commerce businesses.

5. Increase Repurchases With Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics is the process of making predictions based on historical data using data mining, statistical modelling, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other techniques. It can generate insights, forecast trends, and predict behaviours based on past and current data.

In marketing, predictive analytics can be used to predict customers’ propensity to repurchase products as well as its frequency. When used to optimize marketing campaigns, AI-powered predictive analytics can generate customer response, increase repurchase, and promote cross-selling of relevant products.

It’s all part of the hyper personalized marketing approach, where brands interact and engage with customers and improve their experience by anticipating their needs and exceeding their expectations.

With predictive analytics, you can focus your marketing resources on customer retention and targeting a highly motivated segment of your market that are more than happy to return and repurchase your products. This approach is less expensive than advertising or implementing pay-per-click campaigns.

6. Improve Your Website User Experience

Every business—big or small—knows the importance of having a website, where visitors can interact with the brand, respond to a call to action, or purchase products. But it’s not enough to just have an online presence; it’s important that visitors to the site have a great experience while navigating through your site.

What makes for a great user experience? Users have different expectations. Some of them want faster loading time, while others want a simple and intuitive interface. But most important of all, they want to find what they’re looking for. It could be a product, content, or a solution to a problem. Whatever they may be, it’s up to you to meet their expectations.

With artificial intelligence, you can improve your website user experience tenfold. Here are some of the ways AI can be used to improve user experience.

Search relevance

This pertains to how accurate the search results are in relation to the search query. The more relevant the results are, the better search experience the users will have. This means they are likely to find relevant content answering their queries or finding products that solve their problems.

Personalized recommendations

Content that is tailor-made for the user tends to have greater engagement which increases the likelihood of conversation. Amazon has perfected the product recommendation system using advanced AI and machine learning. AI gets data from customers and uses it to gain insights and apply predictive analysis to recommend relevant products for cross-selling opportunities.

AI chatbots

The presence of chatbots contributes to a great user experience because they provide 24/7 assistance and support in the absence of human customer service. Users can get accurate answers to their inquiries quickly and efficiently, compared to scrolling through a text-based FAQs.

7. Social Listening for Potential Customers

Social listening is the process of analysing the conversations, trends, and buzz surrounding your brand across different social media platforms. It’s the next step to monitoring and tracking the social media mentions of your brand and products, hashtags, industry trends, as well as your competitors.

Social listening analyses what’s behind the metrics and the numbers. It determines the social media sentiment about your brand and everything that relates to it. It helps you understand how people feel about your brand. All the data and information you get through social listening can be used to guide you in your strategy to gain new customers.

Social media monitoring and listening can be done much more efficiently with the help of artificial intelligence. It’s an enormous task for a team of human beings to monitor and analyse data, but with AI-powered social media tools, all the tedious tasks can be automated. They can be trained to leverage data to provide valuable insights about your brand with high accuracy.

With AI and machine learning, your social listening can easily determine your audience, brand sentiments, shopping behaviour, and other important insights. By having this information within reach, you’ll know how you can connect with them more effectively and turn them from prospects to paying customers.

Key Takeaways/Conclusion

More companies across different industries are using the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to significantly increase brand awareness, enhance customer engagement, improve user experience, and meet customer expectations.

AI can identify gaps in your content marketing strategy so that you can create content that’s relevant to your target audience.

AI can help you generate high-quality leads that are likely to buy your products.

With AI, you can personalize and tailor-fit your product recommendations based on your customers’ preferences, increasing repeat purchases.
AI can be integrated into your e-commerce site to reduce shopping cart abandonment.
AI significantly improves website user experience by making it intuitive, accessible, and easy to navigate.

AI-powered social media tools can help you monitor and gain valuable insights about your brand. You can then use this to develop a social media marketing strategy to gain new customers.

Achieve these milestones, and you’ll be sure to acquire new customers and retain existing ones.

Feature Image Credit: iStock/monsitj

By Kevin Payne

Sourced from https://www.blackenterprise.com

In News

Understanding the Weight and Impact of Search Ranking Factors

September 9, 2021 No Comments

By Peter Roesler

You know that abiding by Google’s rules is a must, but did you know not all search ranking factors are applied equally?

As a business owner or marketing professional, you know the importance of competing for the top positions in SERPs (search engine results pages). For years, I have explained how important it is to mix relevant, targeted content with well-constructed pages and sites that load quickly (among other things) to achieve favour from the search engine deities (i.e., algorithms).

Search ranking factors are complex. They also change all the time. This is one of the most frustrating parts of this industry.

However, I’m here to help and demystify the ever-changing ranking factors for you. Remember, the search ranking factors are essentially a minimum bar you need to cross. This doesn’t mean your site is guaranteed to rank.

Achieving Search Engine Success

Now it’s time to figure out what will help you achieve the success in search engines you are hoping for.

There’s no question that Google is the top authority when it comes to search results. It also offers guidance and guidelines on the “Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines” page. Here you can find a selection of tips that, when combined, impact each piece of ranking content.

What are these principles? Glad you asked.

The Top Principles Used for Search Ranking Results

Google makes it clear what the search engine’s intent is. These principles help to clarify this even more:

People are searching online for several purposes. They may want to accomplish something quickly or dive deep into a specific topic.
It’s the role of search engines to provide a diverse array of high-quality, helpful search results in an order that makes sense based on quality and helpfulness.
Different search types require different search results.
Search engines are used worldwide, which means diversity in search results is a must to satisfy the diverse people using search fully.
Search results need to be helpful to people who are searching for something. The results need to provide trustworthy and authoritative information rather than leading people off-topic by presenting misleading information.

When you understand the guiding principles related to search quality, it is pretty clear what Google is saying.

Any given webpage may be ranked uniquely for a specific search. The search engine will determine ranking for keywords differently based on (along with other external variables) the intent and location of the person who is searching.

What does this mean for you?

Well, it means that the ranking factors you are trying to optimize for aren’t always applied equally.

Understanding the Search Ranking Process

At the very heart of SEO, the goal is to maximize the main opportunities. This begins by knowing where these opportunities are and then creating content that helps you capitalize on these opportunities.

While it can be challenging to grasp, understanding this important concept (and the principles used by Google) will help you create content that better serves search intent.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Peter Roesler

President, Small Business SEO@KickAss_SEO

Sourced from Inc.

In News

‘Advertisers are starting to lose trust’: Why media buyers say Facebook is losing its grip on social ad spend

September 9, 2021 No Comments

By Kimeko McCoy

For the last few years, Facebook and Instagram have dominated advertisers’ media mix. But recently, media buyers say ad spend on social media’s biggest platforms has started to deteriorate.

It’s more of a slow leak than a mass exodus, with client ad spend dedicated to Facebook and Instagram recently declining by 5-10% over the last year, according to Hallie Wyckoff, group director of social media at Wunderman Thompson Commerce.

“It’s happening now because of the pandemic, in all honesty,” Wyckoff said. “There were so many changes in marketing budgets last year where a lot of brands pulled back for a bit or had to be more lean with what they were willing to spend.”

For Wunderman Thompson, with clients including major marketers like Unilever and Coca-Cola, ad dollars that may have gone to Facebook and Instagram have recently shifted to alternative platforms like TikTok — or to efforts to improve or build out social commerce opportunities, as well as working with influencers, Wyckoff said.

Given Facebook and Instagram’s scale, targeting capabilities and range in ad unit offerings, advertisers and media buyers predict it won’t lose its crown any time soon. In fact, the platform’s ad business is holding up for now, per previous Digiday reporting. However, the platform’s flaws like waning interest from younger audiences, rising cost per impression and mounting data privacy issues are giving way to challengers like TikTok, Snap and even Pinterest. The flaws have gotten worse because the pandemic has made for an uncertain future and constant shifts in people’s shopping habits, which has advertisers looking for alternatives.

When asked for comment, a Facebook spokesperson pointed to the platform’s Q2 2021 earnings call, in which Facebook reported strong business growth and noting that total revenue for Q2 was $29.1 billion, which is a 56% year-over-year increase. According to chief financial officer David Wehner, speaking during Facebook’s most recent earnings call on July 28, the growth was predominately driven by verticals that performed well over the course of the pandemic, like online commerce and consumer packaged goods.

At least one marketing agency, Tinuiti, which Facebook pointed to as an example of increasing investment on its platforms, hiked it’s year-over-year spending on Facebook and Instagram alongside increased ad spend for platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, and Pinterest.

“We’ve seen this increase 37% YoY on Facebook and 75% YoY on IG (24% growth in Q1 and 53% growth in Q1, respectively). And we’re on pace to spend 61% more on Facebook and Instagram than we did in all of 2019,” said Avi Ben-Zvi, vp of paid social at Tinuiti.

But according to Pew Research, Facebook and other major social media platforms’ growth stalled over the past five years. Facebook’s brand reputation suffered last year after advertisers boycotted the platform with the “Stop Hate for Profit” campaign. And new research from analytics and insight company Skai, shows that social media CPMs have been steadily increasing, up about 12% from 2019. According to Skai, CPMs hovered around $5.71 this time in 2019 and are now at $6.37.

Also buffeting the social giant is the fact that it is facing a serious challenge in Apple’s data privacy changes, noted Katya Constantine, CEO of performance marketing shop DigiShop Media via email.

“The biggest cause has certainly been because iOS14 removed some of the most powerful targeting options,” she said. “Also, I imagine that some of the usage has also slipped as the world came out of the pandemic and that removed some inventory and drove up CPMs.”

Elijah Schneider, CEO of social marketing agency Modifly, backs up Constantine’s claims.

“Advertisers are starting to lose trust that consumers lost a long time ago,” Schneider said.

And challenger brands have seen the writing on the wall. Modifly, with a client list that includes startups and direct to consumer brands like Super Coffee drink brand and Beam wellness brand, has seen clients press for serious ad dollar diversification since late last year, said Schneider who added that in 2019 and 2020 at least 80% of Modifly client spend was in Facebook products. At present, that ad spend now sits at 55% on Facebook and 45% on alternative social platforms, like TikTok and Snapchat. (Schneider didn’t share what these breakdowns looked like in actual dollar figures.)

“For brands that are really focused on Gen Z, Facebook is part of the mix. But they’re not necessarily the dominant part of the mix,” said Noah Mallin, chief strategy officer at IMGN Media, where client ad spend on Facebook and Instagram has decreased from 95% of budget in prior years to 75% at present. “They’re much more evenly matched for established big brands where Gen Z is a segment among many,” he added.

In a rush to diversify ad spend, advertisers have divided their digital dollars up amongst everything from alternative social media platforms to digital tools to support a brick-and-mortar presence. There’s no clear kingpin coming to dethrone Facebook and Instagram, although many marketers see promise in TikTok given the platform’s scale and massive audience.

If nothing else, the decline continues to push along the industry-wide conversation around the need to diversify media spend, making for healthy competition among the platforms and more viable options for media buyers, Mallin said.

“I don’t necessarily see [Facebook and Instagram] diminishing to nothing,” Mallin said. “But if you want to have a smart mix and you’ve got the budget for it, you’d want to have Twitch in there and you want to have TikTok in there too.”

That’s not to say Facebook couldn’t make a few changes to delay its decline — and this could just be the latest interaction of changes in the social media landscape, marketers say. When it comes to digital and social media, that landscape is always changing, meaning advertisers will always need to adapt. This pandemic made flexibility a priority, said Wunderman Thompson’s Wyckoff.

“If we start to see CPMs or CPCs go down, you might see an influx back to Facebook and Instagram,” she said. “It’s an ever-evolving world and marketers are going to continue to pay attention and see what’s best.”

Feature Image Credit: Ivy Liu

By Kimeko McCoy

Sourced from DIGIDAY

In News

Google is doubling down on a powerful new AI tool for Search

September 9, 2021 No Comments

By Hayden Field

But the technology has drawn criticism from the AI community

Google wants your search queries to look less like a Jeopardy! answer and more like a chat with your friend—filled with the kind of slang and shorthand only a human would understand.

To get there, the tech giant is enlisting a powerful AI tool you all might remember: a large language model, specifically one called MUM (multitask unified model).

Large language models, which are trained on datasets as large as one trillion words, help computers process and produce human-like language.

But, but, but: The tech has drawn criticism from parts of the AI community. In the past year, Google fired both co-leads of its AI ethics team after a dispute over their research on the dangers of large language models.

One of experts’ top concerns? Models trained via internet data will naturally learn biases—then can easily replicate those patterns and multiply the resulting harms.

Case study

Google hasn’t yet announced a timeline for when it’ll incorporate MUM into live search, but it’s already experimenting with one-off projects.

Then vs. now: In 2020, Google team members spent hundreds of hours compiling the different ways people could refer to Covid in order to accurately route pandemic queries. This year, they wanted to do the same thing for queries about the Covid vaccine—so they used MUM to “generate over 800 names for 17 different vaccines in 50 different languages” within seconds, Pandu Nayak, Google’s VP of search, told Popular Science.

Big picture: Google announced MUM at its developer conference in May alongside other language model initiatives, and now it seems to be doubling down on how important the tech is to its future business model. More sophisticated searches and answers will likely lead to more valuable targeted ads, which could mean big changes for the ad pricing model, reports the FT.—HF

Feature Image Credit: Francis Scialabba

By Hayden Field

Sourced from Morning Brew