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Exploring the Top Digital Marketing Trends for 2021

January 7, 2021 No Comments

If there’s one niche of the business world that never stops evolving, it’s marketing. Digital marketing is highly dependent on the maturation of online technologies and is continuously pivoting and responding to new developments. Having said that, are you prepared for 2021?

The Digital Marketing Trends Set to Define 2021

Now is the time to begin planning ahead to account for the digital marketing trends of 2021. By staying current, you can develop a digital marketing strategy that takes the latest tips, trends, and frameworks into account.

“A good digital marketing strategy gives your company a cohesive plan that is consistent through your many online and offline channels,” Marcel Digital explains. “After all, you want your branding and message to be the same on your point-of-purchase advertising in your stores as it is on your social media pages and website. A cohesive message saves time and effort by not having employees recreate a marketing message for every channel.”

But our focus is not to discuss how to create a cohesive message. While important, we want to dig into the how. In other words, how do you execute once you’ve zeroed in on your message?

Though classic marketing principles and approaches will always prove effective, sometimes it’s helpful to study the latest trends to get a feel for innovative opportunities that can take marketing to the next level. And in this article, we want to focus on a few of the top trends for 2021. Take a look:

1. Live Video

Live video streaming has exploded over the past three years (and will continue to do so over the next decade). Powered by social media platforms, live streaming is available to the masses and provides an avenue for the continued democratization of content. Just consider the following data points as curated by HubSpot:

Internet users watched approximately 1.1 billion hours of live video in 2019.
By 2027, the live video streaming market is expected to hit $184.3 billion.
By 2020, live streaming is expected to account for 82% of all internet traffic.

Those are significant numbers – too significant to ignore. And there are plenty of reasons why businesses are making the jump to live video, including:

There’s almost no learning curve to record live video. There’s no need for a script, props, or post production. You hit the record button and push out live content. It’s casual, relaxed, and relatable.
There’s no requirement for advanced technology. While you can certainly enhance quality with some tech upgrades, a smartphone is all that’s needed to get started.
Live video feels exclusive and commands longer average view times when compared to pre-recorded videos. (There’s a sense of urgency from the viewer that they might not be able to see the content later.)

Live streaming video is used in a variety of capacities and is highly dependent on your brand, goals, and content strategy. However, it’s ideal for things like Q&As with an audience, customer support, special announcements, interviews with influencers, live events, and backstage events.

If you’re new to live video but want to get started, the best piece of advice is to jump in and do it. Try a couple of videos and see what happens. Were you comfortable? Did you enjoy it? Did the audience engage? What can you learn?

Your first shot at live streaming won’t be perfect, but you can always optimize over time.

2. Programmatic Advertising

Another sweeping trend is the growth of programmatic advertising. If paid traffic is part of your strategy for 2021, you need to gain some understanding and proficiency in this area.

As MarTech Advisor explains, “Programmatic advertising is the process of automating the buying and selling of ad inventory in real-time through an automated bidding system. Programmatic advertising enables brands or agencies to purchase ad impressions on publisher sites or apps within milliseconds through a sophisticated ecosystem.”

Over the past couple of years, programmatic advertising has become the preferred method of running ad campaigns. It offers real-time insights, enhanced targeting capabilities, increased transparency, better budget utilization, and provides a way to combat ad fraud effectively.

Programmatic advertising can be deployed in a variety of channels and formats, including display ads, video ads, social ads, audio ads, native ads, and digital out-of-home (DOOH) ads.

Contrary to how traditional media buying works, programmatic advertising doesn’t usually involve publishers and advertising working together in a one-to-one fashion. The type of programmatic deal – such as real-time bidding, private marketplaces, preferred deals, or programmatic guaranteed – determines how they’re delivered.

3. Voice Search

Would it surprise you to learn that approximately 27 percent of the online global population uses voice search on mobile? Or that more than 1 in 3 US internet users use a voice assistant monthly (up from just 9.5 percent in 2018).

Consider that by the end of 2020, roughly 30 percent of all internet browsing sessions will include voice search. And that more than half of adults use voice search on a semi-regular basis.

The writing is on the wall. Voice search will soon become the preferred method of browsing the internet. It’s faster, hands-free, and ultimately more convenient.

So what does that mean for digital marketing? Well, it changes everything, particularly on the content strategy side of things. People speak differently than they write. Consider, for example, someone searching for a pizza restaurant. Their queries might look like this:

Typed: pizza restaurant Bronx

Spoken: What’s the best pizza restaurant in the Bronx?

Voice search is ushering in a new age of SEO and content creation where long-tail keywords are the focus. Natural, conversational language wins the day. Brands that adapt to this style will see their SEO rankings improve and search traffic scale.

In terms of blogging strategy, brands should focus on developing content that answers questions. People go to Google when they have a question and the search engine knows this. So in an effort to satisfy their users, they’re elevating content that answers very specific questions.

4. Interactive Content

Online users are growing bored with basic blog posts and static content. They want to be stimulated. They also want control over their experiences. And these desires are currently culminating in the rise of interactive content.

Research shows that interactive content gains 2X more engagement than static content. This has led 34 percent of marketers to include interactive content in at least 10 percent of their strategies.

The most popular types of interactive content include quizzes, polls, interactive infographics, AR, VR, and online calculators.

Interactive content is typically just a subsegment of the larger content strategy. But in 2021 and beyond, it’s going to become an even bigger portion. While many brands are currently developing one piece of interactive content for every nine pieces of static content, that number will likely increase to 20 percent.

5. Shifts in Influencer Marketing

In 2016, the influencer marketing industry was worth an estimated $1.7 billion. By the end of this year, it’s projected to be worth somewhere north of $9.7 billion.

People like to hate on influencers, but they’re effective. The earned media value for money spent on influencer marketing was roughly $18 for every dollar spent in 2019. And over the last three years, there’s been a 1500% increase in brands searching for “influencer marketing” on Google. In other words, it’s effective and here to stay. But as we enter into 2021, this industry will undergo significant shifts that will ultimately change the way businesses approach marketing and advertising.

One of the biggest shifts will be the rise in micro influencers. These are influencers who have small yet loyal followings (anything less than 10,000 followers). And what they lack in reach (compared to large influencers), they make up for with high engagement and affordability.

It’s also possible that we’ll see an increase in performance-based influencer marketing. In the past, it’s always been sort of a flat fee deal. Businesses pay per post and the influencer gets the same amount of money no matter what happens on the engagement front. But as the influencer arena gets more competitive, brands will gain more leverage. Soon, we could see payment based on the number of clicks, comments, or even sales.

Ultimately, the changes in this space will be dictated by consumers. Followers make it clear what they do and don’t respond to by the type of engagement they offer. As brands and influencers gather more data and analytics from these types of posts, they’ll iterate and zero in on what works best.

Hit the Refresh Button on Your Digital Marketing

No digital marketing strategy is set in stone. As you approach 2021, take the time to understand the new trends so that you can shift your strategy into a direction that aligns with the trajectory of the larger consumer marketplace. Whether it’s live video, programmatic advertising, voice search, interactive content, or shifts in influencer marketing, there’s ample opportunity for growth and expansion.

By Frank Landman

Frank is a freelance journalist who has worked in various editorial capacities for over 10 years. He covers trends in technology as they relate to business.

Sourced from readwrite

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Amazon will earn over $14 billion in net US digital ad revenues this year

January 7, 2021 No Comments

Sourced from eMarketerD

It’s critical that marketers stay ahead of the latest B2B buying committee trends. Join eMarketer’s Tech-Talk Webinar, with sponsored content presented by Salesforce. Learn how demand generation leaders are adopting new practices and AI-powered technology to grow ROI and outperform competitors.

Sourced from eMarketer

eMarketer and Business Insider Intelligence have joined forces to become the leading research company focused on digital transformation. For more insights and key statistics on the biggest trends in today’s most disruptive industries, subscribe to Chart of the Day.

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How To Re-Engage Inactive Customers and Create a Connected Experience

January 6, 2021 No Comments

By Harsha Solanki

Despite the efforts that you may put into acquiring and engaging new customers, some of them tend to stop interacting with your brand

The synergies that were powering the machinery of the modern world are shifting across all spheres. Even as social media and the Internet continue to bring people closer in a closely-knit capitalist superstructure—the development amplified by technological intervention—brands have to deal with an ineludible truth. Despite the efforts that you may put into acquiring and engaging new customers, some of them tend to stop interacting with your brand.

Inactive customers are an inevitable part of business reality. While the reasons for the suspension of the engagement between a brand and its customers—temporary or permanent—can be miscellaneous, the ultimate result is invariably the same: the customer ceases to be a customer. This can be devastating for businesses because establishing deeply personalized, contextual relationships with new customers requires brands to invest an exorbitant amount of time and effort…all of which brings us to the all-important question: how do you bring these non-responsive customers back into your brand’s fold?

Reigniting the spark: What is connected re-engagement and why it is good for your business

Connected re-engagement steps into this picture to enable your brand to reignite interactions with lapsed customers. The core idea behind it is simple. Existing customers are already primed to be engaged with the brand—all a brand needs are the right ‘connected’ strategies.

Connected strategies are critical because modern-day customers are disposed to switch between different channels when interacting with a brand. A report by Social Media Today revealed that nearly three in four customers (72 per cent) prefer an omnichannel communication approach. Opting for connected re-engagement strategies—which comprise myriad methodologies and approaches—has proven advantages across multiple sectors. Recent market studies indicate that customers that interact across multiple channels spend 3-4 times more, on average, than their peers who interact across a single channel. Brands that opt for a strong omnichannel approach to customer engagement also register an average 9.5 per cent increase in their annual revenues.

In short, while your brand may grow in the absence of a connected communication strategy, your odds of long-term success are more favourable if you opt for one.

This invites the question: how do you build a strong and effective re-engagement campaign that is powered by connected communication? Here are the key aspects of any connected communication strategy, along with some examples of how brands across verticals have used different approaches to re-engage customers:

Identifying and segmenting inactive customers

Before you endeavour to target your inactive customers with re-engagement campaigns, you first need to identify your least engaged customers. In-depth data mining and analysis of consumers and their past behavioural patterns can help you to accomplish this goal by enabling you to categorize dormant customers into appropriate segments. You can create diverse segments depending on your business objectives and requirements.

For instance, one segment could include customers who have not made any purchase from your shop in the last half-year. Customers who have not visited the shop in the past three months can be grouped into yet another segment. More segments can be created to segregate customers into organized sub-clusters, such as users who have not interacted with your brand on any social media platform over the last three months or shared negative feedback on a product/service.

Identifying and understanding these segments is essential as they can then be targeted with highly personalized content and call-to-actions that are precision-tailored to speak to their stated and unstated needs. For instance, if a customer bucket includes people who now only prefer to passively engage with your brand (like over your social media pages through reactions on posts, videos, etc.), you can send them personalized emails along with appealing offers.

Targeting each segment with personalized content

Offers such as digital coupons and sales promotions (including providing free product samples or limited-time subscriptions) can remind your inactive customers what they have been missing out on. A popular OTT platform did something similar with a recentre-engagement campaign. It was different because people could sign up for free content streaming without filling in their credit/debit card details. By eliminating this barrier, the brand prevented the problem of customer drop-off before sign-up while significantly expanding its customer database and generating massive social media traction.

You can also up the ante of your offers (such as rewards and loyalty programmes) by making the interaction of customers with your (re-) engagement campaign intriguing. A popular digital payments app recently gamified the users’ engagement through a travel game. Users gained reward points upon each transaction, enabling them to advance to the next level. The excitement of moving ahead in the game, in turn, incentivised users to transact more frequently. The short-term and long-term rewards reaped under such gamified initiatives can also be a powerful motivation for customers to re-engage with a brand they’re already familiar with. This can, therefore, maximize the impact of your re-engagement strategy.

Focus on data to build a truly connected strategy

Once you have successfully re-engaged a segment of lapsed customers, the next step involves doing it at speed and scale across multiple channels. This is where data and analytics enter the picture. As mentioned above, the data that you have accrued from your past interactions comprise a valuable asset. You can leverage this wealth of information to optimise the effectiveness of your re-engagement strategy through data-mined insights.

Every successive campaign facilitates the capture of better quality of data that you can then leverage to create even better strategies. A robust technological infrastructure, such as those enabled by leading players in the connected communication space, can help you tap into the power of this virtuous cycle and optimise re-engagement. Having a data-driven omnichannel communication strategy also increases the number of points of interaction, thus ensuring that the customer engages with your campaigns across multiple channels.

Unless brands find a way of rigging the balance of probability, an uninformed chase of customers is not likely to yield the desired result, and chance is the one thing that brands cannot afford to take in this highly unpredictable post-pandemic business landscape. The only viable solution, then, is to create a well-thought-through and tech-augmented connected communication strategy. By keeping the aforementioned steps in mind, brands of all sizes can optimise their customer engagement and ensure that they achieve all the relevant objectives, with precision and at scale.

Feature Image Credit: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

By Harsha Solanki

Managing Director-India, Infobi

Sourced from Entrepreneur India

In News

6 Tips For Creating Engaging Content

January 6, 2021 No Comments

By Jared Atchison

Having a powerful content creating strategy is key to getting customers to engage with your brand.

Most businesses know that content is the key to winning customers. However, building a content creation strategy that actually engages users is still a challenging issue.

There are a few mistakes that businesses continue to make. For example, focusing on quantity over quality. And creating content that sounds “professional” but impersonal to users.

In this post, we’ll cover several practical ways you can create engaging content. And with the tips given here, you’ll be able to make content that’s appealing and gets attention – which in turn will lead to more sales for your business.

Create content customers want to read

This tip seems obvious, but many businesses approach content creation by keeping their business goals in mind.

For example, I once came across a website selling high-end bathtubs for personal use. The creator of the site and the content focused on technical specifications such as the model names and numbers of the tubs. If they had thought about what their customers want, they would have focused on how their bathtubs could be a way to relax or add a classy touch to their homes. And they could have optimized their SEO for bathtubs and the location they catered to.

To create content your customers want to read, keep the following in mind:

Learn about your primary demographic. You should have a clear idea of whom you are selling your product to. Even if your product is for everyone, you’re better of picking your most important demographic and learning about how they use your product
Focus on the benefits your product provides rather than the features you think are important. Specs matter but what your customers really want to know is that your product will meet their needs

The remaining sections of this post will give you more guidelines on how to make content people want to read. Start with researching who your audience is and what they want. And use the rest of the ideas here to build content that shows them that your business is the right fit for them.

Imagine your audience in clear detail

Have you noticed that when you know someone well, your conversations with them are meaningful and generate a positive response? This is something you can do even when you’re writing email posts, blog content, or ads for your audience.

When you write for a faceless mass, your communication will lack liveliness. But if you can build a customer persona, your content automatically becomes more interesting. For example, a clothing company for plus-sized women will have a different view of their customers when compared to how a fabric manufacturer for furnishings will think about their target market.

When imagining your audience, give them an age, a name, a profession, and make them “real.” Then, when you think about them and write your blog post or create your video, you’ll approach your material with greater energy and personalization.

Have a tone of voice

In a sea of impersonal content, having a ‘voice’ and a specific tone for your brand can set it apart. As an example, consider how Old Spice differentiates itself from other grooming brands for men. All their marketing, from their website copy to their ads, use a fun, humorous, and cheeky tone. This makes the brand memorable and people immediately associate their content with grooming and self-care products for men.

After you’ve made a clear picture of your audience, imagine that you’re talking to them directly as you would a friend. With practice, you’ll find that creating and maintaining a tone becomes easier and will also engage people more.

Choose a tone of voice that’s right for your business. Humour in content is always engaging but is not necessarily appropriate in all situations. You can opt to be professional, academic, uplifting, or choose any other tone that makes sense for your audience and your business. The important thing is to remain consistent across your communication.

Engage your audience’s emotions

A critical element that makes content jump out online is the use of emotion in your blog posts or social media content. Always look for ways to connect with people at an emotional level. Here are my suggestions for doing this:

Make use of power words that are proven to get people’s attention. Words like “Free”, “Best”, “Guarantee”, and many others create an impact when you add them to email subject lines, blog titles, and ads
Craft blog titles with “How-tos” and “X Best” or “X Easiest” and similar formats as these tell users that your content will help them
Pique your audience’s curiosity by building a suspenseful opening sentence in your emails
Ask a question that makes your audience think
Make a bold statement or an assertion that compels people to keep reading your content
Add stories, case studies, and news to add examples to your posts and provide context to users

The next time you’re on social media, observe posts that go viral. You’ll note that virtually all of them evoke people’s emotions in some way or the other. Keep working on making emotional content and track the impact of your content through analytics. You’ll identify what works and how to leverage your content for the best effect.

Format your content

Nothing will put your readers off as much as a badly formatted blog post. Even though an article may contain extensive information, your audience will not consider it helpful if they can’t scan it and understand whether it’s relevant to them in a brief glance.

Here’s how to format your content for the best effect:

You can make your content scannable by breaking your text into smaller paragraphs – keep each paragraph to three or four lines each
Run your content through an app like the Hemingway Editor. It will detect sentences that are too wordy and highlight them for your attention
Use a casual way of speaking or writing in your posts. A friendly and conversational writeup will make your content easy to understand. What’s more 83% of people prefer an informal and chatty tone.
Break up long posts with images and video content. Images retain people longer on your website and illustrate your point well. Posts with images get 94% more views as opposed to ones without any visual elements.
Use headings and subheadings to tells users what each section of your posts is about. This makes it readily apparent to your users whether your post will help them or not
Make use of bullet points and numbered lists to break up long paragraphs into actionable points

A well-formatted blog post or article will make your content look appealing to people seeking relevant and informational material. These tips will keep people on your page longer, impacting your engagement rates and SEO too.

Leave a call to action

When you end a piece of content, whether it’s a video, social media post or a blog article, be sure to give your users something to do.

A call to action serves the purpose of driving customers to take action that leads to further engagement. These actions can include following you on social media or liking a video. You can direct users to subscribe to a newsletter or join an exclusive membership site.

When you don’t add a call to action, even one as simple as telling people to check out more of your content, your audience will lose interest fast and find content elsewhere.

With calls to action, you’ll be able to reengage your audience. When they receive your emails, get notifications for new videos and posts, you’ll have the opportunity to continue nurturing your relationship with them.

The tips given here are practical and proven to work. By implementing just some of them, you’ll see an improvement in how well people respond to your content.

Of course, you’ll have to go through some trial and error before finding what works for your business in particular. But if you keep working on these tips and use analytics to support your efforts, you’ll see a boost in customer engagement.

By Jared Atchison

Co-Founder of WPForms, one of the largest WordPress contact form plugins in the market. I have been programming for over a decade and enjoy creating plugins that help people create powerful web designs without touching code. See Jared Atchison’s Profile

Sourced from business.c

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Everything You Know About Genius May Be Wrong

January 6, 2021 No Comments

Sourced from Next Big Idea Club

As we likely all learned in elementary school, Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb… right? Sort of, says best-selling science historian Steven Johnson. It turns out that the story of genius is more complicated than we think. Steven sat down with psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman, scientific director of the Imagination Institute, to discuss how creativity, innovation and genius truly happen.

This conversation has been excerpted from the “Open Minds” video series on American Express OPEN Forum®. View the complete video and series for more on creativity.

For more on creativity, view the complete video and series on American Express OPEN Forum.

Steven Johnson: Over the last decade, there has been so much interesting research into our understanding of innovation and creativity. There’s been a lot of debate about the lone genius archetype, where people have a certain essential genius to them, and they isolate themselves and come up with a brilliant idea that changes the world. Is that a myth, or is there some truth to that?

Scott Barry Kaufman: With optimal creativity, you find people switching back and forth between moments of solitude and moments of collaboration. Often you need to give people a chance to have the solitude to reflect on something, to really flesh it out in their own way. Then when they bring it to the table and share it with co-workers, that’s when the synergy happens, and great insights tend to happen. You need both.

Johnson: My feeling is there are important insights that come out of people who are uniquely talented, but we have a warped sense of how important that is simply because the lone genius makes for better storytelling. I wrestled with this a lot.

The history of the lightbulb, for instance—every kid learns that Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb. It’s ingrained in your head as a school kid. But there were 15 different people inventing the lightbulb in the same period of time. Edison ended up making the first commercially successful lightbulb, but the ideas that made a lightbulb imaginable in the first place were very much in a network of people whose work Edison was fully aware of. He even bought some of the patents for some of the work that they’d done. He also assembled a very multidisciplinary team to help him turn the lightbulb into a viable commercial product.

And yet it’s really hard to tell a story where there are 15 protagonists—15 geniuses. It’s so much easier to say, “And there he was, plucky Tom Edison, coming up with this great idea!” We compress the story of genius down into an individual one because it makes for a stronger narrative, when in fact, the most important ideas involve some level of network collaboration.

Kaufman: It’s important to make the distinction between being sociable and drawing on other people’s work. These 15 people that contributed, it’s not like they all sat down at the table together and did it. My argument is more that it’s really important to have that solitude—even if you’re drawing on other people’s work during that solitude—to have that time to synthesize all these different ideas without the pressures of having to on the spot be sociable about it. That’s particularly useful for introverts, right?

Left: Steven Johnson, Right: Scott Barry Kaufman

Johnson: It’s a really important point, and relates, in a way, to one of the things I’ve written about that I see as a misconception about creativity, which is the overemphasis on the eureka moment.

It is absolutely true that there are moments of insight, where an idea seems to crystallize in your head, and often those moments come when you have time to just let your mind network with itself, rather than being out in the world. I think, again, the problem is one of storytelling: “Well, the apple falls from the tree, and oh, he’s got a theory of gravity.” That’s a good story. We like to hear moments of sudden insight or understanding.

If you look at the most transformative ideas, whether they’re commercial, business, technological or scientific ideas, we neglect that they have a long incubation period as hunches, as an intimation that something is interesting or intriguing but you can’t really put your finger on why. One of the defining characteristics of the people that I studied is that they’re very good at keeping those hunches alive for long periods of time and allowing themselves to follow those leads, even though they’re not sure where they’re being taken.

The eventual insight or eureka moment is often a collision between two or three different hunches that belong to different categories that somehow come together. So there are eureka moments. But if you haven’t set up an environment where you give yourself time to cultivate these hunches, you won’t get to that eureka moment. You have to start with that hunch cultivation first.

Kaufman: I have maybe 40 insights a day and 99 percent of them are junk. So just having an insight doesn’t mean it’s going to be a good one. It’s just a process, the way that our brain works. For brainstorming sessions, you allow your workers to go on their own and generate as many ideas as possible with no judgment. You really need to keep the judgment aspect off of that. Then you can bring everyone together and have them share. First give them that process where they can go a little crazy. Nothing’s off the table. Then, of course, you want to hone, but you don’t want to hone at that beginning stage.

Johnson: One thing I think is really fascinating—and it’s been central to your work—is how much recent neuroscience has illuminated how creativity works in the brain, and the imagination network of the brain. This is one of the most important new insights in our understanding of how the mind works in the last 20 or 30 years. It’s all about creativity.

Kaufman: For a very long time in the field of cognitive neuroscience there was this focus on what’s called the Executive Attention Network. It was really important for focusing on a task, for getting stuff done and implementing. And don’t get me wrong, it is extraordinarily important. Ask anyone who has great difficulty concentrating what that experience is like, and it’s not a great experience. In fact, there is this research at Harvard showing that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Being able to control your mind is important.

But recently, a bunch of rogue cognitive neuroscientists began asking, “Well, is there any value to your own internal stream of consciousness to be able to daydream, to go inwards, to ignore the external environment?” I think it is a big paradigm shift in the field to have discovered what’s called the Imagination Brain Network, which we activate whenever we go inward; we’re really tied to our deepest passions, our deepest memories, our personal memories. It turns out creativity requires daydreaming on ourselves, in a way. Daydreaming is essential for creativity.

Johnson: A common theme of everything that we’ve been saying is that, in a sense, the creative process is not about one state. It’s the ability to move between different mental states: to have that daydreaming state, and then have that executive function—“I’ve got to get this done, I’ve got to ship a product”—and the ability to comfortably move among them, and also to move between solitude and being social.

The one thing I would add to it is that on some level, there’s a geographic quality as well. There’s a great story about this guy, Frederic Tudor, who basically invents the ice trade. He comes up with this idea before refrigeration, before the invention of freezers, basically carving frozen chunks of water from New England lakes and then shipping the stuff down to the Caribbean or the South in the early 1800s.

Ice becomes the second-largest export in the United States behind cotton. This guy has this genius idea, transforms our economy, becomes a multi-millionaire because of this, and he gets the idea by traveling to the South and to the Caribbean as a 19-year-old who’d grown up in Boston, and he’s looking around in this new environment and thinking, “Wow. There’s no ice here.”

If you lived in the Caribbean in 1800, you would’ve never seen ice. It was just not possible to make ice, and it never got below freezing there. He has this insight: “If I could get ice down to this environment, I could make money. It’s something that’s very scarce and valuable in this environment, and basically free up north.” What’s crucial to this story is that he physically moved, he went from an environment where he had all these expectations about how the world worked, to some other place where the world was different and challenged his expectations. In a sense, from the physical migration from one place to another, the spark of an idea emerged. Sometimes it’s moving from one mental state to another, and sometimes it’s moving from a physical state to another that helps you unlock that creativity.

Sourced from Next Big Idea Club

In News

Ad Age 2020 Marketers of the Year

January 5, 2021 No Comments

Sourced from AdAge

TikTok tops our annual list of the top performing brands of the year

The 10 brands that comprise Ad Age’s 2020 Marketers of the Year list didn’t just survive the pandemic, they thrived.

The list is topped by TikTok, which emerged as a major pop culture force and must-stop for an increasing number of brands, including several on our list. That includes cosmetics upstart e.l.f., which had the foresight to jump on the platform back in late 2019 with its 15-second “Eyes Lips Face” song, and has since amassed 10 billion views for its TikTok content. Other new economy brands making the list include meditation app Calm, whose Election Day marketing set a new standard for timely product placement. Online marketplace Etsy smartly tapped into trends like DIY and customizable goods, including, yes, masks.

But breakthrough marketing in 2020 was not confined to plucky start-ups. Stalwarts like State Farm, which is nearly 100-years-old,also cracked the list, thanks to a reinvention strategy that included putting a new spin on its iconic “Like a good neighbour” tagline. McDonald’s, No. 2 on our list, found ways to reach new audiences, including with its wildly successful Travis Scott collaboration.

The list—chosen by a team of Ad Age reporters and editors based on factors that include business results driven by breakthrough advertising and smart strategic thinking–is full of brand marketing lessons, including from an unlikely source: Conservative anti-Trump PAC The Lincoln Project, whose go-for-broke attitude shows that fearlessness is a key ingredient for great creative. “We’re not unemotional about this stuff,” TLP cofounder Rick Wilson told us. “We’re passionate about this stuff.”

No. 1: TikTok

No. 2: McDonald’s

No. 3: Lowe’s

No. 4: The Lincoln Project

No. 5: Etsy

No. 6: Calm

No. 7: e.l.f.

No. 8: Lego

No. 9: Adobe

No. 10: State Farm

Sourced from AdAge

In News

Where is Your CX Leaking Loyalty?

January 5, 2021 No Comments

By Greg Tucker.

Surprisingly few companies track the brand loyalty leakage throughout their customer’s experience to learn where loyalty is “won and lost”.

With over $600 Billion spent on advertising to create brand awareness, drive prospect conversion and build customer loyalty, surprisingly few companies track the brand loyalty leakage throughout their customer’s experience with them to learn where loyalty is “won and lost”.

Our customer journey research efforts with global brands covers four key aspects of the “Path to Purchase”:

Marketing / Prospect Leakage – Turning unaware prospects into buyers and minimizing the “leakage” of prospects from the “Awareness-to-purchase” stage
Sales / Revenue Leakage – Ensuring that customers can spend the full amount of their purchase intention during the sales & renewal journey, and that “Revenue leakage” throughout the customer lifecycle is minimized
Customer Retention / Customer Leakage – Ensuring that customers receive the positive experience that will keep them coming back year after year and renewing their purchases with the company and brand. Especially important in B2B contractual customer relationships.
Customer Satisfaction / Loyalty Leakage – Ensuring that customers receive the “on-brand” experience that results in high satisfaction/NPS scores that drives and sustains positive word-of-mouth” marketing.

Customer Satisfaction / Loyalty Leakage

Our customer journey research for existing customers is designed to answer these questions:
• For a customer starting their relationship with us, what is the “typical experience” they receive from start to finish? What is an “on-brand customer experience”?
• What differentiates the “on-brand experience” and the “typical experience” (or the “off-brand experience”)? What differentiates our experience with the leading competitor’s experience?
• What is the impact of our experience on our customer loyalty metric? What could our full potential of brand loyalty look like if we delivered the “most impactful, on-brand experience”?
• What can be done to improve the customer’s experience, the impact on loyalty and on business results? What improvements have the highest impact?

A popular restaurant company asked us these questions and asked us to identify the “Existing Customer Experience” and where it didn’t meet their expectations. Over 25 factors needed to be assessed as part of the experience – food, service, wait times, price, cleanliness, power & Wi-Fi, rewards programs, specials, etc. Several customer segments needed to be engaged across different restaurant formats and across multiple day-parts (breakfast, lunch, afternoon snack, dinner and late-night snack).

Through qualitative, quantitative, ethnographic, biometric and eye-tracking research, it became clear that the current customer experience was solid, but not stellar. And customer loyalty scores trailed the leading competitor by a wide margin.

The insights that emerged included:
• There were 8 stages of the customer experience journey – and 20 friction points were encountered along the journey – well-known to the restaurant employees – but not prioritized or proactively managed on a systematic basis
• Many of the 25+ factors that were studied had little impact on the customer experience. They weren’t relevant to being “on-brand”.
• There were 4 “moments of truth” along the journey that defined the overall experience. Getting these 4 things right resulted in an outstanding “on-brand experience” – getting them wrong resulted in an “off-brand experience”. 90 points of customer loyalty (NPS) were “leaking” out of the customer journey through a failure to proactively manage these 4 moments of truth.

Linking these insights to business results allowed us to model and quantify the following:
• Focusing on delivering an “on-brand experience” in the 4 key areas (out of 25+ potential areas) of the customer experience results in an industry-leading customer loyalty result, with a measurable and immediate NPS improvement.
• This impact had a 30% improvement in customer lifecycle revenue, based on visit frequency, increased spending per visit.
• Improving the experience would allow the company to expand its customer base within the family members and their friends, making new customer growth faster and less expensive.

By Greg Tucker

Greg Tucker is a Who’s who of Customer Experience and award-winning CX practitioner, advisor and leader for more than 15 years. As CEO of Tucker & Company he consults to Fortune 1000 enterprises and emerging companies on Customer Experience strategies and programs, delivering transformational business results. As a CX Officer and CMO at Copart Auto Auctions, he implemented an end-to-end CX program across all channels that delivered a 20% improvement in Enterprise profitability and received the 2012 CX Innovation Award for delivering a powerful ROI from the CX Program.

Sourced from The Customer

In News

The Data Behind Your Perfect Fit

January 5, 2021 No Comments

By Madeleine Streets

Data is the buzzword of 2020, but it’s only as good as the analytics it drives. When deployed correctly, data can support the retail experience by providing insights into customer behaviour. Brands that can use these learnings to create personalized shopper journeys are likely to see big rewards, from increased customer loyalty to greater brand engagement and, ultimately, to more sales.

FN spoke with Sebastian Schulze, co-founder and managing director at Fit Analytics, about the value of personalization and why the right fit for retail is Fit Analytics.

FN: Why is personalization worth the investment in 2020?

Sebastian Schulze: Customers crave a hyper-personalized experience. As shopping shifts online, retailers must keep up with their customers’ wants and needs to maintain a competitive edge. Customers may only spend a short amount of time browsing online; if they don’t immediately find something tailored to them, they will shop elsewhere

In an A/B test of our Product Suggestions feature with partner Simons, we found that showing more personalized products led to an increase of 10% in net revenue; 5% in average order value; and a 2% higher conversion rate for shoppers who interfaced with the feature. In order to keep shoppers engaged within massive product catalogues, retailers must personalize the online experience with items that are relevant to them.

Sebastian Schulze, co-founder and managing director at Fit Analytics. CREDIT: Fit Analytics

FN: What gives Fit Analytics an edge in the marketplace right now?

SS: Fit Analytics recommendations are based on real people – not just numbers. We take into account body modelling data and size charts, in addition to purchase and returns data, for truly accurate recommendations. When Fit Analytics launched a decade ago, we offered a webcam-based body modelling service that captured over 100,000 3D scans of real people. While the original technology proved a bit too laborious, we were able to gain irreplaceable insights, which served as the foundation for our AI-powered sizing platform. Our algorithms are constantly improving with every recommendation given; we provide over 1 billion size recommendations a month.

We are also continuously adding to our suite of solutions: We want to ensure that we are meeting retailers and their customers every step of the way. With the ongoing innovation within our platform, we perform regular user testing, learning from shoppers first-hand.

FN: How would you define a superior user experience in e-commerce?

SS: A superior user experience is one that keeps customers coming back. We’ve found that customers are not afraid of a longer journey, if it leads to a trustworthy recommendation. When presented with personalized products that are relevant to their likes and interests, customers are more likely to come back and shop again.

Recent A/B tests showed that Fit Finder users were more confident to check out when experiencing a medium-length user journey. Those shoppers had a 14.4% higher conversion rate on mobile (+6.5% on desktop) than those who received a size recommendation after just a few questions. Shoppers who completed the longer questionnaire were more confident with the provided recommendation and therefore more likely to convert. This type of user experience creates brand trust and leads to customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Fit Finder is an intuitive size advisor that delivers certainty for shoppers and captures crucial customer intelligence.

CREDIT: Fit Analytics

FN: How can machine learning and AI help strengthen existing retail strategies?

SS: These technologies take data points that don’t have much meaning when isolated and translate them into actionable insights. Through AI and machine learning, retailers can truly get to know their customers and create a completely custom experience for every shopper. Retailers can also leverage this data to improve initiatives around merchandising, inventory planning, product development, and marketing. This is essential when considering the expectations shoppers currently have to get what they want right now.

For more information, visit fitanalytics.com

Feature Image Credit: CREDIT: loops7

By Madeleine Streets

Sourced from www.footwearnews.com

In News

Bestselling Author Daniel H. Pink’s 4 Strategies to Help You Persuade Better and Sell More

January 4, 2021 No Comments

By Ryan Lui

Learn these research-based tips on becoming a better seller and persuader.

For entrepreneurs, sales mean life — our sales directly impact our livelihood and ability to provide for others. Our ability to sell or persuade people on an idea (e.g., kids eating their broccoli) determines our effectiveness in the role we play. Therefore, becoming a more extraordinary salesperson and a better persuader should be for everyone.

The best businesses do something for the world

For the last few decades, the term “servant leadership” has led and reminded us that outstanding leadership empowers and equips others to embrace and accomplish their full potential.

Daniel H. Pink, author of bestsellers like Drive, A Whole New Mind and To Sell is Human, has suggested that in the way many of us understand leadership synonymously with servant leadership, we must also understand selling as synonymous to servant selling.

He told me, “The presumption is either you run a business or do something good. I don’t believe that! The best businesses do something for the world. We have this belief that for me to win, you have to lose. But that’s rarely the case. I think it’s wrong morally and analytically.”

I drew four insights and strategies from our conversation, which can help lead to more powerful persuasion and more outstanding sales.

1. Remember your business is good

One of the fundamental strategies to better persuasion and sales is first to remember why you are doing what you’re doing and what you’re selling.

You most likely started your business to provide something, whether a product or service, to fill a gap in people’s lives. You wanted in some way to make their life better. Good. Remember that.

Your product or service makes lives better, so persuade and sell with confidence and a good conscience.

2. Think like a scientist

When I learn new things, I can get overwhelmed by the multitude of insights, tactics and strategies. So I asked Pink how to know which option to choose. He told me, “Think like a scientist … you have to say, ‘I have a hypothesis, I think this frame will work, but let me test it out.'”

Just as scientists test and prove their hypotheses, so should entrepreneurs test their marketing. Say you have two approaches for your next big sales presentation or marketing plan, but you don’t know which one to choose. Why not spend some more time to test out your different approaches? It could be as simple as asking your family or friends. Just find some neutral people you can experiment with.

When I launch a new product, one of the first things I do is create a survey and send it to friends and people I know that I’d ideally like to work with. It helps me get an idea of what’s connecting with people and also what I may be missing or blind to.

3. Use social proof

When you hear the term “social proof,” what do you think of? I think of brand names and logos plastered over a company’s website. But social proof is more than that. Social proof is anything that proves to your audience that you share something in common and part of a common tribe that affirms what you are selling.

When persuading someone, whether a client or a prospective mentor, try to bring in social proof to your conversation. Mention how someone they know just recently invested in your product or service. Appeal to their relational and social instinct: When they know someone in their tribe trusts you, they’ll be more more likely to trust you, too.

If you’re trying to get someone to become your mentor, mention how you’ve spoken with or are friends with someone they consider a peer. Just make sure it’s actually true.

4. Focus on one word

“When I say ‘Google,'” Pink asked me, “what word comes to mind? And when I say ‘search,’ what word comes to mind?”

When starting a company, developing or redeveloping a brand, a helpful exercise is to find your “one-word.” What is that one word that describes your product or service? Is it “search,” “marketing,” “paper?”

If you have difficulty honing your one-word down, simply ask some friends, your clients, or other people. Ask them what word comes to mind when they think about the business.

Sometimes we want ourselves or our business to be something that we are not. The sooner we can get over that and embrace who we are, the more clearly our clients will be able to see us, and the more confidence they will have to buy from us.

Whatever word you find, become that word and embody that word.

A better servant seller

Sales and marketing are for everyone. It’s for budding entrepreneurs, organizational leaders and parents who want their kids to eat broccoli.

If our intentions are pure and our product is good, then we don’t only have the right but the obligation to become a better seller. Remember: Your business, your sales and your persuasion are not merely a means to a personal end; it is an act of service to another, others and the world.

Feature Image Credit: Paul Bradbury | Getty Images

By Ryan Lui

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

In News

Web Typography Rules: What You Need to Know

January 4, 2021 No Comments

By Roshan Perera

90% of all the information on the web is in writing. That means that typography is a skill that dictates that 90%. That’s a staggering figure that highlights just how important typography is.

It’s absolutely everywhere: blog posts, social media, magazines, reports, books, and so much more.

What this means for you as a designer is that text is your primary means of communication. If you haven’t got your typography skills down, then you’re not going to be able to deliver your ideas to your audience.

Luckily for you, we’ve got a list of useful tips and rules that you can follow to avoid that happening. Even if you’re not the best at typography, follow the information that we’ve laid out here, and you’re going to be fine.

Pick an Industry Standard Font

There are a ludicrous number of fonts to choose from when designing your web typography. Some of these fonts are much better than others, though, so make sure you do your research and pick one that’s proven to get results.

There’s nothing worse than looking at an unreadable squiggly mess on a page, so put some thought into what font you’re using.

Use a Large Front Size

(Example: Elementor)

Back in the day, tiny font sizes used to be all the rage. That might be passible on massive blocky monitors, but people are using phones and tablets to browse the web these days.

You need to make sure that those users can read your content, so pick a big font that’s easily visible as soon as you glance at it.

We’ve found that 15 – 25 px yields the best retention rates, but so long as it’s legible and nice to look at, you shouldn’t have a problem.

Make Your Headings Proportionate

Headings are the signposts of your web typography. It helps the user navigate the page and highlights what information might be important to them.

It’s vital that your headings stand out, so make sure that you’re using at least a 180% increase in size when compared to your body text.

Line Spacing

(Example: Overpass)

There’s nothing more frustrating than trying to read a block of text that has awful line spacing. Not only does it turn the reading into a chore, but it can be incredibly hard to follow.

That’s why you’re going to set your line spacing appropriately. 120 – 145% percent of the overall point size should do it.

Tracking and Kerning

Adding tracking and kerning to your text is going to help it look neater and roomier. What this does is adjust the spacing between letters proportional to the size of the text. The space between the words of a heading versus lines of text isn’t going to be the same.

This can help to keep everything separate for your user, making it easier to navigate through the information.

Don’t Forget Whitespace

(Example: Uber Brand )

Whitespace is a vital part of web design as a whole, and that includes typography. You need to have some decent whitespace in between your headings and your paragraphs. If you don’t, then the whole thing is going to become a cluster of information, which is exactly what you’re trying to avoid.

Your user’s eyes need places to rest. This doesn’t just go for on the page, but when they read, too. If you don’t have whitespace, they get fatigued. When they get fatigued, they stop reading.

This is the exact opposite of what you’re trying to achieve, so make sure you’re obeying this web typography rule at all times.

Limit Your Line Length

Limiting your line length is an industry-standard practice for a reason. If you’re not doing it, then your page is going to suffer when it comes to professionalism.

45 – 90 characters is a good-sized line length to take that also leaves a lot of room for your personal preference.

One factor you might want to consider when choosing your line length is what device you expect your clients to be using. There’s a clear difference in device usage across services here, and you can get away with longer line lengths with users visiting from bigger machines.

Choose and Stick to One Typeface

(Example: Two Robbers)

Serifs and sans-serifs. Both of these typefaces have advantages and disadvantages, but you should only be using one.

Determine what your target audience or client is looking for and use that information to influence your decision.

This is completely separate from your font selection, bear in mind. The typeface is a stylistic family of fonts that fall within it.

That being said, you should determine your typeface before your font, and not the other way around.

Structure and Hierarchy

If you don’t have a hierarchy, you descend into chaos and pandemonium. This is as true for typography as it is for life.

We’re not just talking about your H1, H2, H3, and P HTML tags here, but the way in which you present your information, as well.

If you have quotes, links, lists, or anything in between, make sure that it all follows a uniform structure.

If you’re doing a listing page, then you don’t want the links to a resource being halfway through one entry, at the bottom of another, and the top of another.

Further Your Web Typography Education

Web typography is a discipline that cannot be learned in a day. It takes constant practice and exercise to develop your skills, and that’s only one part of the equation.

The industry standard is constantly evolving and changing, meaning that you need to keep up to date with all of those changes.

Keep yourself plugged in and make use of all the practice and educational resources you can find.

Conclusion

Web typography is an overwhelming discipline that can take its toll on even the most seasoned designer. It’s like a muscle, though, and the more you use it, the stronger you’re going to be.

It’s, unfortunately, a massive part of web design, meaning it’s completely unavoidable. You’re going to have to tackle it at some point; we just hope that our tips help you when you get there

By Roshan Perera

Sourced from design shack