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Digital Ad Growth Will Power Facebook’s Returns For Years To Come

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Summary
  • Facebook’s growth rate is ultimately tied to growth in digital ad expenditures.
  • Digital ads have grown at more than 15 percent annually in recent years, and there’s reason to believe growth will continue.
  • Given Facebook’s huge share of digital ads, there exists a strong case for sustainable returns over the long term.

Of all the FAANG stocks, I’ve always thought that Facebook (FB) offered the best prospects for sustainable returns over the long term. At this stage, the company bears no resemblance to the riskier bet of eight years ago. Today’s Facebook is a cash machine with a huge moat around its business.

To estimate Facebook’s future growth, it’s necessary to look at the digital advertising space as a whole. Here, I review the projected growth of the global advertising industry and run a few thought experiments based on Facebook’s expected share of ad expenditures. The results show that Facebook stock is actually a lot cheaper than its earnings multiple would suggest.

Digital Advertising Growth

With social media usage surging during the pandemic, it doesn’t appear that Facebook’s engagement is going away anytime soon. The core Facebook site grew its monthly active user base to 2.7 billion people last quarter, representing 19 percent in less than two years. While FactSet expected daily active users on the site to fall to 1.7 billion, DAUs actually increased to 1.79 billion. The company estimates that 2.5 billion people use at least one of its services every day.

At the end of the day, Facebook’s revenue growth is tied to the growth of the advertising industry, specifically digital advertising. Although global advertising will decrease 7.2 percent worldwide in 2020 due to the pandemic recession, digital advertising is expected to grow modestly in the low single digits to approximately $333 billion, according to eMarketer. Internet advertising is continuing to gobble up market share as traditional non-digital advertising declines. This year, digital will surpass 60 percent of the total advertising market.

With ad revenue of $75 billion, Facebook holds around 22 percent of the global digital ad market, a duopoly it shares with Google (GOOG). Analysts often point out that Facebook cannot keep growing sales at a 23 percent CAGR, as the company has managed to do over the last three years. If that happened, Facebook would soon eclipse the size of the entire advertising market, which is obviously impossible.

Yet, the latest reports estimate the digital advertising will grow to $640 billion by 2027, a CAGR of 10.3 percent. And as Ark Invest analyst James Wang observed two years ago, projections have consistently underestimated digital ad growth. In 2014, eMarketer forecasted a $188 billion market for digital ads in 2017, but actual digital ad spent exceeded $232 billion.

As Wang argues, there’s no hard ceiling for the ad industry as a whole. U.S. advertising expenditures amounted to about 1.1 percent of GDP in 2020, which is at the lower end of the 1-1.5 percent historical range. Conceivably, the U.S. ad industry could grow another 36 percent.

Valuation

As a thought experiment, let’s say Facebook grew earnings at 10 percent annually through 2027. Even at that very low rate, Facebook would grow net income to approximately $45 billion by 2027, up from $23.5 billion today. If earnings grew by 20 percent, they would reach over $81 billion by that time. At a 10 percent growth rate, it would take about 15 years to break even in terms of Facebook’s earnings, and just 11 years at a 20 percent growth rate.

A growth rate of 20 percent over the next decade seems feasible. Digital advertising spend as a whole grew at about a 15.6 percent CAGR since 2012, from $104 billion in 2012 to $333 billion in 2020. Much of that growth came at the expense of traditional print media. As social media services like Instagram (owned by Facebook), YouTube (owned by Google), and Snap (SNAP) perfect their video offerings, traditional television advertising could be the next industry to go the way of the dinosaur.

That said, it would probably be wiser to assume a growth rate somewhere between 10 and 20 percent to account for weaker years. In that case, the valuation looks a little bit less enticing, but it certainly isn’t insane (unlike some other companies that I could name).

Right now, Facebook’s P/E of 35 is only slightly above the market average of 34. Relatively speaking, it’s an above-average business selling for an average price. I made a similar point in December 2018 when the stock was under pressure from negative publicity. Since then, it has doubled in value. If you have to own a FAANG stock or even a tech stock, in general, Facebook is certainly a better bet than most.

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Sourced from Seeking Alpha

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This is the list of apps that Android users should avoid downloading

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Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe.

  • According to Avast, various user reviews on the Google Play Store They mentioned that the platforms caught their attention through ads on YouTube and promised a different game than the app finally offered.

Do you want to install a game because you saw its advertising and it caught your attention? Better think twice. According to a group of experts from the antivirus company Avast , some applications from the Android store that disguise themselves as harmless games show you intrusive advertising that compromises the security of your data.

The researchers found 21 applications that can compromise your data, through intrusive advertising, known as ‘adware’, some of them are still active in the Play Store although they have already been reported.

According to Avast , various user reviews on the Google Play Store mentioned that the platforms caught their attention through ads on YouTube and promised a different game than the app finally offered. According to SensorTower, these platforms have been downloaded eight million times.

Among the applications that have these characteristics are:

  1. Assassin Legend – 2020 NEW
  2. Cream Trip – NEW
  3. Crush Car
  4. Desert Against
  5. Find 5 Differences – 2020 NEW
  6. Find Hidden
  7. Find the Differences – Puzzle Game
  8. Flying Skateboard
  9. Helicopter Attack – NEW
  10. Helicopter Shoot
  11. Iron it
  12. Jump jump
  13. Money destroyer
  14. Plant monster
  15. Props Rescue
  16. Rolling Scroll
  17. Rotate Shape
  18. Rugby Pass
  19. Shoot Them
  20. Shooting Run
  21. Sway Man.

Feature Image Credit: The Average Tech Guy vía Unsplash 

This article was translated from the Spanish edition using AI technologies. Errors may exist due to this process.

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

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4 Real-Life Tips For Risk-Averse Entrepreneurs In Search Of Proven Business Ideas

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By Pia Silva

At first glance, the words “risk-averse” and “entrepreneur” don’t seem like they’d go together. After all, entrepreneurship is an inherently risky business — insert your mental image of an 80s- era Tom Cruise here.

But in reality, entrepreneurship does still have room for more risk-averse individuals.

There’s a lot more to reducing risk than finding a proven business idea in a seemingly stable industry. Sure, a “proven” business idea is a good start, but the way you choose to run your business will go a long way in reducing immediate and long-term risk so you can have a successful entrepreneurial career.

Embrace Adaptability (And Be Willing To Adapt, Too)

Survival as a freelancer or solopreneur often comes down to being flexible — or being able to quickly pivot, learn and thrive in new ways.

This isn’t just true during times of crisis. Market conditions change all the time. New tech or world events can completely disrupt your way of doing business, or give you an opportunity to streamline your workflow and become more efficient. To embrace adaptability, you have to be willing to make needed changes based on the ever- changing world we live in. You have to be proactive in understanding the trends that could affect both your industry and your target audience.

Don’t let yourself get so bogged down in your routine that it will be hard to transition to a new way of doing things. Be open to new ideas, and constantly work to improve your knowledge and skills so that you will be better positioned to make needed transitions quickly.

Diversify, Diversify, Diversify

If you only remember one point in your efforts to reduce risk, it’s this: you have to diversify.

For solopreneurs, this primarily involves diversifying your income stream and the markets you serve. This doesn’t mean you have to try to become all things to all people. But you should explore how you can avoid tying all of your revenue to a single source. If that income source were to disappear overnight, what would you do?

This became abundantly clear during a recent phone call with Mariah Carrion, franchise coordinator at Frannexus. During our conversation, she explained, “Diversification can be a key defence against risk. When you have more varied offerings or target a broader range of consumers, you will be able to hold your own against competitors. Proper diversification means that no two parts of your business will react the same to the same event. If something happens that negatively affects one part of your business, you can shift your focus to the other revenue streams to keep yourself financially stable.”

For solopreneurs, diversification can be as simple as expanding your client base so your revenue isn’t all tied to two or three clients. Or you might consider introducing new, complementary services that build off your skills. Depending on your niche, you could even use options like a subscription service to create a source of recurring sales.

Make Cash Flow Management A Top Entrepreneurial Priority

This year, a lot of brick and mortar businesses discovered the importance of cash flow management when they had to shut their doors and go without making any sales for weeks, or even months due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since then, many businesses have permanently closed locations, furloughed employees, or gone out of business entirely — in large part because they didn’t have enough cash on hand to deal with such a massive disruption to their business.

While freelancers and solopreneurs generally have less overhead to worry about, you should still make cash flow management a top priority. Innovative entrepreneurs are always looking for ways to increase their profits, whether by making more sales or bringing in higher-paying clients.

Perhaps even more importantly, they look for ways to cut unnecessary spending. Sure, renting a private office may be a nice perk, but if you can manage all your work from home, you’ll save a lot of money just by working in a home office — noisy kids notwithstanding.

Continually Invest In Your Business

During tough times, it can be tempting to completely pull back on your efforts to grow your business.

After all, when profits are down, you’ll want to cut costs so that you can keep yourself in the black. For many entrepreneurs, this means cutting out advertising. While this may be necessary for some, try to avoid this “all or nothing” mindset. Within reason, you should actually keep marketing and advertising during tough times. For starters, this will ensure that your target audience doesn’t forget that you exist.

If your competitors are also going through tough times and pulling back on their marketing, your continued advertising efforts could actually expand your reach like never before!

By maintaining a presence, you’ll be able to bounce back faster (and stronger) once customers are in a better position to do business with you again.

Reducing Your Risk For The Future

If there’s one lesson 2020 has taught entrepreneurs, it’s that there’s no way to completely “risk- proof” your business. At the same time, though, it’s also proven how the right business practices can leave some better prepared for challenging times than others.

Don’t be afraid to take the plunge into entrepreneurship. Few things can be more rewarding — and it doesn’t have to be as risky as you might think.

Feature Image Credit: STEVE WASTERVAL

By Pia Silva

Sourced from Forbes

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5 Ways to Organically Grow Your Social Media Presence

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By Syed Balkhi,

It’s not always easy to grow your social media channels. There are a ton of factors that come into play and determine how consumers perceive your business.

There are plenty of ways to connect with consumers in today’s digital landscape and get more conversions on your website. One of the most effective ways people just like you are growing their business is through social media marketing.

An impressive 3.81 billion people use social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to talk to their friends, engage with content, and buy products. Business owners and marketing teams know that whatever target audience they want to reach, it’s possible to find them on social media.

Despite the advantages, it’s not always easy to grow your social media following organically. There are a ton of factors that come into play and determine how consumers perceive your business. If people don’t know that you exist, there’s no chance that they will ever follow your account, visit your website, or become a paying customer.

Today, we are going to take a look at five of the best ways to organically grow your presence across various social channels.

Get to know your followers

Before you can get more followers, it’s recommended that you learn everything you can about your existing subscribers. The people who found and actively followed your channel are interested in your products and what you have to say.

Understanding the mentality of your followers can help you find new ways to generate more traction. For example, adding a poll can help you learn about common pain points and goals that users face in your industry. Using this information, you can start planning new content and marketing campaigns designed to help consumers overcome these issues and reach their goals.

If people who haven’t followed your page face similar problems, seeing someone share a relevant post could be the deciding factor when the user can either keep scrolling or click your profile.

You should also take the time to engage with followers in the comments section of your posts. People on social media are vocal about what companies are doing right and where they can improve. Responding to these folks is a great way to build trust with your existing audience while finding new ways to organically reach more prospects.

Host interactive events

Have you ever attended a live online event, such as a webinar? Most people have, and for a good reason. These events are excellent opportunities for learning and connecting with likeminded people.

Businesses host interactive live events to educate potential customers while connecting with them on a deeper level than occasionally responding to comments. We know that events like webinars work to organically grow email lists. In fact, 20% to 40% of webinar participants eventually become leads. By this logic, you can expect to see plenty of people follow your brand after signing up for a webinar.

If you’re running an e-commerce storefront and don’t plan on hosting webinars, there are other interactive events you can create for your social media channels.

Giveaways, for example, are an excellent way to build your social media following organically while getting people excited for your business. On average, giveaways have a conversion rate of 34%. In other words, a staggering 34% of people who see your giveaway on Facebook or Twitter will enter.

You can choose to give away anything from your most popular product to a gift card for your store. Let’s face the facts; people like getting stuff for free. The chance to win something for taking a simple, free action is enough to convince many people to follow your profile and engage with your brand.

The key to using giveaways to grow your social media presence is the rules. You should establish rules that encourage people to follow your profile and join your email list for two ticket entries. Using this strategy, you can dramatically grow your social media channel and email list.

We also suggest that you encourage participants to share your contest for a third chance to enter. Sharing is the best way to ensure that everyone can participate in your event, even if they are already following your channel and subscribed to your email list.

Share visual content

Visual content is the foundation for many social media platforms. Without images and videos, platforms like Pinterest, Instagram, and YouTube would be obsolete. However, sites like Facebook and Twitter also rely heavily on visuals to keep users engaged.

Content that features professionally made images and videos is more likely to be shared by consumers who are already following your brand. If someone is scrolling through their timeline and sees one of your graphics, they may pause to look at the image or watch the video.

When this occurs, the user may get curious and navigate to your profile. If you can impress these people with interesting content and an irresistible value proposition, they could become followers on the spot. At the very least, they will see your brand name and recognize you in the future. This type of exposure eventually leads social media users to follow brands shared by their connections.

Focus on creating high-quality videos that are jam-packed with valuable content. You can create guides, reviews, infographics, and much, much more. More people are using their smartphones to access social media, so we expect this format to grow in popularity over the next several years.

Connect with other companies

Did you know that 55% of buyers research businesses using social media? This statistic is telling because it shows us that while many people use these platforms to have fun, many use it to look for product and service recommendations.

Put in all of the work, and you’ll see more organic traffic. But there’s another way to boost your followers by reaching consumers outside of your network.

Connecting with other companies in your industry is a great way to spread brand awareness and grow your following. There are plenty of products and services that work together. For example, an email marketing firm might partner with a hosting company. Both businesses can benefit from reaching a similar target audience.

Why?

Because in most cases, customers looking for one service are also looking for the other. Merging your marketing efforts and posting content that promotes both companies is a great way to expand your network. There’s a good chance that the consumers following the partner brand you choose don’t know about your company, and vice versa. The result is a win-win situation for consumers and both businesses.

Analyse your performance and make changes

Finally, don’t forget to review your social media performance and make changes to your marketing strategy. Learn about your posts that see the most engagement, and find out why this is the case. Usually, enhanced traffic occurs on specific posts because they address common problems people face in your industry.

So, if you see a surge in traffic on posts about a specific sub-topic, you can assume that consumers are interested in that subject. Creating and sharing more related content can result in more social engagement and shares, which leads to new organic followers.

You can also test elements of your campaign to see if you can achieve stronger results. Let’s say you see low engagement on your scheduled 7 p.m. post. Try changing the time to 9 p.m. to see if this results in more engagement.

It’s possible to test virtually every aspect of your marketing to see if you can get more shares and comments. Experimenting with headlines, images, and content topics are three more of the most common ways to use your analytics to improve your performance in the future.

These experiments are based on your performance and worth pursuing if you want to get maximum value from your social media marketing strategy.

By Syed Balkhi,

Hello, I’m Syed Balkhi, a 27 year old award-winning entrepreneur with a strong 8 figure online business. I was recognized as the top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by the United Nations. I was born in Karachi, Pakistan. At age 12, my family immigrated to the United States. Ever since I can remember, I have been extremely competitive which makes me hustle at everything that I do.

Sourced from business.com

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Making Buildings “Healthy” As Consumers Return Indoors

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By Gary Drenik

The world had to change how we work, socialize, learn and even shop as a result of the burgeoning pandemic. Driving the change is a sudden lack of safety felt by consumers in indoor spaces — the types of spaces we used to frequent without a second thought — and buildings and facilities managers have been left to figure out how to make their spaces “healthy” in order to bring back workers, students, shoppers and restaurant goers.

To better understand what makes a building “healthy,” I recently connected with Manish Sharma, vice president and chief technology officer of Honeywell Building Technologies.

Honeywell Building Technologies creates products, software and technologies that can be found in more than 10 million buildings worldwide. Manish shared insights with me on how the pandemic is affecting people’s peace of mind, what sort of technologies we can expect to see in indoor spaces moving forward, and how building managers can ultimately restore confidence.

Gary Drenik: Covid-19 has obviously changed the world in ways we could have never imagined. What are some of the biggest changes you’ve seen? What do you think will never go back to the way it was?

Manish Sharma: One of the biggest changes that we’ve seen at Honeywell is how people’s awareness levels have increased about infection spread, the role of air quality and general space health. People are more attuned to what’s happening to change the spaces that they occupy, use and interact with to make them safer, especially aspects like air quality and adherence to safety guidelines which wasn’t top of mind for many people before. Whether you are shopping at the mall, working from the office, or in a classroom, buildings were meant to be spaces to bring people together – and now, we’re creating solutions to help people from each of these dimensions.  Think of how an emphasis on safety changed the way that we fly after 9/11. We’re experiencing a similar moment of inflection now. People are going to expect – and want to see – that the buildings they use are safer and healthier. This may mean a more touchless experience in the office, new filtration and cleaning solutions in their children’s schools or automatic management of occupancy density in common gathering areas. I don’t think we’ll go back to just assuming that a building has all of the right systems in place – I think expectations will be to see and know it’s safer and healthier.

Drenik: That takes me to my next question: As we consider the return-to-work or school post-Covid-19, recent data from Prosper Insights & Analytics varying degrees of ‘comfort’ among consumers regarding returning to normalcy.  With this in mind, what are some ways to ease consumer minds when it comes to being indoors in the new normal?

Sharma: As we eventually make our way back into indoor spaces, air quality, cleanliness, and safety are key factors in reassuring people a space is safer. Building owners and managers must reassess not only their infrastructure but how they communicate changes and precautions in effect to their occupants and visitors. They need to look at technology, beyond HVAC systems, that not only keeps consumers safer but makes them feel safer. It’s great if a mall installs a new air filtration system, but it doesn’t do anything to quell shoppers’ fears if they don’t know that it’s been installed or how well it’s working to keep them safer. Restoring confidence in being indoors is two-fold: deploying the right technology to make it safer and then educating the public on how it is keeping them safer with visible, real-time status and notifications on a building’s health.

Drenik: When you say technology beyond HVAC, what is that you’re talking about? And why is it important for building owners and managers to think beyond new HVAC systems?

Sharma: A building must be looked at holistically. Upgrading your building controls strategies and HVAC systems are just one part. Building owners and managers need to consider technology like indoor air quality sensing, HEPA-based air purifiers, automatic temperature scanning, touchless access, autonomous UV light-based surface cleaning, mask detection and bringing the data to life in a Healthy Buildings dashboard if they’re going to truly create a healthy building.

If you think of the human body, you don’t just prioritize the health of one organ, you prioritize the health of your body as a whole. An upgraded building control strategy for the HVAC system is pointless if occupants aren’t maintaining social distance or complying with wearing a mask (which video analytics and AI can tell you). Similarly, it’s important to think of ways to limit contact with frequently touched surfaces with frictionless access control and showing occupants real-time health of a building through a Healthy Buildings dashboard.

This goes for any building. From offices and schools to stadiums, airports and malls, every facility manager should be thinking how to make their space a healthier building.

Drenik: As we head into the holiday season, what do brick-and-mortar retailers need to consider?

Sharma: The remainder of the year will be a critical for many retailers. While online shopping has unsurprisingly risen since March Prosper also found that people are more likely to shop in-store in October compared to September — suggesting shoppers are preparing for in-store holiday shopping. The study also found that people are more likely to avoid certain types of stores and shop at less likely times in October, compared to September.

Retailers need to consider how to reassure shoppers that they are shopping in clean and safer spaces. Stores that are not deploying the right technology or proactively sharing their safety precautions, may not attract as many shoppers. Retailers that invest in technologies to create a safer and healthier shopping experience – and transparently share with their customers what they are doing – may be more successful.

Drenik: Thank you Manish for sharing these critical insights regarding how Covid-19 has created an awareness and need for new safety measures for indoor spaces including retail stores and how Honeywell is working to keep people safe in these environments.

To stay ahead of the post-pandemic consumer, Prosper’s US Signals series of datasets include leading indicators and advanced predictive analytics covering forward looking consumer spending plans, behaviours and economic outlook:

To read my previous Forbes articles on changing consumer behaviour, predictive analytics, machine learning, data privacy and more, please click here.

Feature Image Credit: zimmytws – stock.adobe.com

By Gary Drenik

Sourced from Forbes

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Demand Generation Playbook: Three B2B Digital Strategies To Increase Brand Awareness

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By Adam Feiner

Business to business (B2B) digital marketing provocatively communicates your unique value proposition in different formats, to different segments, and across several channels to gain awareness and earn consideration. Consider a company engaging in B2B marketing without first-party data, like a start-up or a business entering a new market. Where would they present their brand and value proposition to gain awareness? What content would they reveal and to whom? How would they respond to interactions with their brand? How would they capture and organize data?

The answers to these questions will define your digital strategy and illuminate your target audience. First-party data, like intent data, reveals information about your prospects that can help you earn consideration and win deals by delivering increasingly relevant content to your audiences. Accumulating first-party data requires that you elicit a response and add it to the profiles of your prospects to enrich personas. This enriched data is used to determine what content to present next. Email, mobile, social and website interactions (i.e., clicks, downloads and demo requests) and self-identified preferences are your opportunities to acquire first-party data. Data is perishable. It takes patience and persistence to build and maintain first-party data.

Website Experience

Your website reflects your digital strategy. Effective website design naturally guides visitors toward information they seek in as few clicks as possible. This requires a customer-centric perspective acknowledging user experience and customer journey focused on need, value proposition and solution rather than products and capabilities. Your prospects should see themselves as they navigate and consume content.

In 2008, the Nielsen Norman Group estimated that visitors will read only 20% of the text on an average page, so sharpen your writing and create engaging videos. Less is more when it comes to web design, and too much information risks confusing visitors and losing their attention. Clearly articulate your value proposition on your homepage to support your keyword strategy, create a site map that simplifies navigation, and make sure your CTAs are present but not intrusive. Your website should capture visitor data with cookies to identify first-time and repeat visitors and employ gated content to enable direct marketing. Once prospects reveal interest and share their email or mobile number, your odds increase. Because Google said in 2016 that over 50% of searches come from mobile devices, optimize for mobile.

Whether you’re creating or refreshing a website, tools like Google Analytics can help identify best- and worst-performing pages. Google Search Console can reveal technical problems skewing results, and you can use visualization techniques (i.e., heat maps) to illuminate how visitors see your site.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO strategy is designed to help website pages rank higher on search engines like Google and Bing. Focus on keywords that decision-makers search. Target low volume keywords with high cost-per-clicks (CPCs), publish highly tactical content for key decision-makers, and leverage social media to amplify content distribution and cover a wider audience.

There are several steps to create and leverage a B2B SEO strategy. First, know your buyer and build personas of individuals inside the companies of your target verticals. Second, understand how they search for what you sell and know the keywords they use. To uncover keywords, utilize available free crowdsourcing applications, search engine auto-complete suggestions and SEO tools (such as SEMRush and Ubersuggest) that search competitors’ keywords to uncover their strategies. When bidding on keywords, do not shy away from high CPCs. Those are likely the words that prospects use when they’re ready to buy. Third, identify the topics and content to share with your audience. This is your chance to differentiate and illuminate your solution. Successful outcomes might include capturing an email address or being mentioned on social media, which takes patience and time. Fourth, use on-page SEO to optimize each webpage for terms that indicate buying signals. Keywords in short URLs, latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords and long content publications help search engines understand what you do and increase SEO rankings. Fifth, publish high-quality blogs to increase your landing page rankings. For best results, select related topics that are impacted by your solution. “Shoulder” topics can draw more links to content. Finally, while it is not easy and takes time to get quality backlinks for your B2B business, they are important. With all the content and research required, this could easily be a full-time job.

Social Media

A successful social media strategy communicates your unique value proposition to your followers by sharing compelling content that resonates. Your brand’s story should be told to spark interest and engage the right audience. Maintain an active presence to stay current and shape industry dialogue. Social media in your marketing mix can amplify awareness, generate demand and improve content marketing campaigns. No other channel can provide the same immediate impact.

Listen to and monitor your social channels. By listening to your potential customers’ daily conversations, you can begin to see topic patterns, momentum and current market concerns. You can help guide the conversations as the subject matter expert who understands customer challenges and delivers positive outcomes. As you monitor specific prospect activities, respond to unique questions they post to establish credibility and trust.

Centralize your social profiles onto a single platform that enables monitoring and listening simultaneously. Create alerts to keep apprised of instances where your brand is mentioned directly or indirectly. Listening effectively will help you anticipate future campaigns and improve messaging. Listening can keep you ahead of your competition, help you construct an effective influencer program and even build more impactful brand partnerships.

Conclusion

Effective digital marketing authoritatively communicates your value proposition to an identified audience, guides them toward your unique content and website and educates and differentiates. Purposefully present your brand and value proposition where your audience will gain awareness of it. Become a trusted partner with relevant content and help search engines understand what you do. Listen to your audience and guide the conversations by responding to questions as a subject matter expert. Enrich your first-party data by eliciting responses and capturing information that can help you deliver more relevant content. Gain awareness, earn consideration and find in-market buyers for healthy digital pipelines.

Feature Image Credit: getty

By Adam Feiner

Follow me on LinkedIn. Check out my website.

VP Sales at Loyalty Builders, accurate and affordable pioneering predictive customer intelligence for retail and wholesale marketing. Read Adam Feiner’s full executive profile here.

Sourced from Forbes

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IDC: Worldwide IT predictions for 2021 that CIOs need to know

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By N.F. Mendoza .

Informed and cautioned by the COVID-19 crisis, predictions say CIOs need to consider remediation of shortcomings, identifying which IT areas should be accelerated, and which new tech to leverage.

The coronavirus‘ worldwide impact on lives and the immediate pressure on the IT workforce was completely unprecedented: This is a given. But now, the enterprise has the opportunity to take a reasoned, analytical, and predictive look at what is involved in an unexpected, dramatic emergency. In the next 12 to 24 months, predictions for the global business ecosystem, and specifically, the tech world, are completely shaped by COVID-19’s disruptive force, according to a new report from business analysts International Data Corporation (IDC).

“IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Industry 2021 Predictions” reported that despite the disruptions in 2020, the global economy rallies towards its “digital destiny.”

“The COVID crisis was, for the IT industry, represented a first in the sense it was the first crisis in the cloud era, and it was really the first crisis even in the era of mobile and smartphones,” said the IDC report’s author, Rick Villars. “One key takeaway we came for this crisis versus, say prior ones, was that technology was what led people to respond and do better. This was very much a technology that helped people navigate the crisis, as compared to many past crises. That was our big takeaway, is this is a crisis where technology mattered and being smart about your technology use is really what helped you navigate the issues better as a person, and as a company. And frankly, even as a country.”

Remote workers, e-commerce, education, telemed, and more are based in a digital-delivery model-making digital-augmentation, which must be the standard to continue to be competitive in the industry. Most products and services are based on a digital delivery model or require digital augmentation to remain competitive. By 2022, this means a shift of 65% of global GDP will be a result of digitalization. There will be a dramatic change in the tech economy, too, with IT spending from 2020 to 2023 estimated at $6.8 trillion. Predictions in the IDC report are focused on the outcome of how the current changes will profoundly affect the enterprise by 2023.

“We don’t say that they’re definitively by order of importance” in the report, Villars said. “There was a flow to it. We wanted to say there were really three major trends that a CIO needs to think about.” Three of the top 10 predictions for CIOs and digitally driven C-suites are remediation of shortcomings, identifying which IT areas should be accelerated, and to leverage new tech, according to an IDC report.

IT predictions for 2021

1. Becoming cloud-centric. The enterprise was already making the shift to cloud-centric infrastructure, but when the pandemic hit, and the industry had to make significant changes to office operations, the transition quickened, so much so that the IDC report cited by 2021’s end, 80% of enterprises–informed by the experience of the shift to a primarily remote workforce–will develop a mechanism to double the acceleration of the shift to cloud-centric infrastructure and applications.

“In a crisis, there’s always challenges, but there’s usually companies or groups that use this to take advantage of a competitive situation and grow market share or acquire new technology to change their business,” said Villars.

2. Prioritize edge. Cause and effect will dominate most industries, which will continue to evolve. What most of the enterprise learned from the necessary transitions and subsequent practices put into play during the pandemic will be responsible for the motivation through 2023, for 80% of edge-driven investments and business-model changes. This necessitates a revised infrastructure, with application and data resources toward edge locations, and industries will need to incorporate cloud-centric edge and network solutions. This will address quicker responses for existing business needs, and serve as foundational for the support of long-term resilience digitally, enable scaling for business, and flexibility in business operations.

3. Hybrid by design. Today’s dispersed workforce was definitely a result of the circumstances hoisted upon the enterprise by the coronavirus. But, the IDC report predicts that 75% of G2000 companies pledge that the workforce have technical parity by 2023 and that the workforce will be created and developed to accommodate a hybrid structure. It will foster a better understanding, group efforts, and a motivated workforce.

“There was always this perception about, ‘OK, the remote work, it’s a temporary thing. When the crisis is over, people will go back to the office,” Villars said, “and what we saw was that really the companies who were accelerating and doing well were ones who are inclined to completely change their model and recognize that giving their employees to work anywhere and in any environment, and work together anywhere as equals, as opposed to second-class citizens and first-class citizens, was going to be a key part of succeeding in the next phase.”

4. Autonomous IT. Throughout the world, all IT automation initiatives will be supported by a burgeoning cloud ecosystem for greater resource control and real-time analytics by 2023. But to overcome challenges and meet the objectives, the industry must be forthright and integrate proactive AI/ML-powered analytics, introduce automation informed by policy, and use low code, serverless workflows more for a consistently operating infrastructure.

“Companies are going to go out and much more aggressively acquire much more advanced tools and AI,” Villars said. “Not technology companies, but companies across all industries.”

5. Talent at the heart of operations. For everything to come together and work efficiently as planned, the most critical element will be the building appropriately skilled teams of IT/Sec/DevOps professionals. Because it is and will be a challenge to bring a quality group together, there are concerns that through 2023, that about 50% of the hybrid workforce, as well as efforts to automate business may be slowed or stopped completely because the industry leaders may not have properly created a budget that will bring the best talent to their business. The need for developer and data analytics talent isn’t likely to be abated, so enterprises will need to look towards alternative solutions, to move innovation, such as flexible talent sources, crowdsourcing, and employees who are already within the company; this will become a necessity to meet development/automation and advanced analytical needs.

“If you think about automation or cloud or any of these other things,” Villars said, “and you don’t step back and think about what’s the impact on people, and how you can use this to help them do their job, as opposed to just add yet another pressure and challenge in their job, that can make the difference between whether you’re going to be really successful in this new world or try interesting things but not really succeed.”

IDC’s other predictions revolve around how the industries deal with AI, the future of IT agility, resiliency, and sustainability.

“One of our big predictions uses this [predictive] model to leverage the idea of digital co-workers, digital assistants, to help employees work better,” Villars said.  “I’m looking to see if that actually gets implemented. Because that’ll tell us whether people are really serious about this idea.”

IDC’s predictions were presented in a webinar Tuesday and will be available as an “on-demand replay,” as part of the 40 FutureScape events, that addresses topics such as the CIO Agenda, Digital Transformation (DX), IT/OT convergence, cloud, smart cities, and industry-specific presentations.

Feature Image Credit: iStock/smshoot 

By N.F. Mendoza .

Sourced from TechRepublic

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‘Most administrative HR roles will be automated in the next few years’: As workplace tech evolves, HR and tech officer roles merge

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By Lucinda Southern Lucinda Southern,

This article is part of the Future of Work briefing, a weekly email with stories, interviews, trends and links about how work, workplaces and workforces are changing. Sign up here.

Commercial-real estate company Squarefoot has been making tentative steps, like others, to return to its New York office space over the last few months.

But office space has become a commodity, and Squarefoot — with 60-staff — is one of a number that has built an algorithm to help allocate which of its 27 staff gets priority.

In the early months of lockdown, Squarefoot’s staff developed a system to allocate that resource. First, it identified four categories of office-based amenities — software only available in the office or connected whiteboards — then, on a one-to-five scale, staff rated how important these amenities were to carry out their ‘mission.’ On certain days, Squarefoot’s brokers, who show prospective customers around new office spaces, have a greater need to be in the office than product designers, for instance. Each employer has a possible 30 hours a week that can be allocated.

“The beauty of it is that it’s impersonal, everyone accepts the judgment of the computer, there’s no tendency to argue,” said Squarefoot president Michael Colacino. Squarefoot plans to sell the product to other organizations once it’s been road-tested, so far there hasn’t been enough demand to return. As employers are starting to find, while most staff over the last six months have been more closely connected to their immediate team members, relationships between the rest of the organization have frayed.

Bots beat people for mental health support

Other companies have drastically accelerated their digital tech capabilities since the pandemic forced millions of workers to communicate online. In a global study of 1,2000 staffers by Oracle and Workplace Intelligence, 66% strongly agree that coronavirus has accelerated their companies’ willingness to invest in artificial intelligence tools. Elsewhere, the use of employee communication software has grown as more organizations migrate to remote and virtual workflows: Platform Workvivo has grown 200% since March, catering to the growing number of employers managing remote teams.

But tech tools’ lack of judgment noted by Squarefoot’s Colacino has wider ramifications and benefits. The same study by Oracle and Workplace Intelligence found that 82% of people believe robots can support their mental health better than humans, and 68% of people would prefer to talk to a robot over their manager about stress and anxiety at work.

During the last six months of layered crises, social anxiety and mounting emotional burdens, peoples’ expectations of how companies protect staff is growing. Employees’ mental health has risen to the top of the list of priorities over the last couple of months — 51% noted their company has added mental health support —yet 76% feel like their company should be doing more, according to the same study. Technology is stepping up to fill those roles.

The corporate wellness market is estimated to be worth $97.4 billion by 2027, according to a February 2020 report by Grand View Research (before coronavirus). The number of available third-party corporate wellness tech vendors is rapidly expanding, according to managing partner of Workplace Intelligence Dan Schawbel, and his experience of attending HR trade shows.

“Mental health is the biggest topic of our time, and it has worsened and heightened because of Covid,” said Schawbel. “There will always be new tech and they will always be humans in the workplace, [we need to understand] what their roles are and how will they get along and support each other. From a mental health standpoint, robots are better than humans at providing a judgment-free zone, unbiased to share problems with and answer health questions 24/7. While humans are better are relating to coworkers and feelings of empathy.”

Companies like Adobe, Unilver and Starbucks are investing in well-being seminars, classes and automated bot systems to meet staff mental health requirements. While human therapists will always be needed, tech can supplement therapy because it is so scalable and accessible.

HR, meet tech

With more tech in our professional lives, in a well-being capacity or otherwise, it means that champions are changing.

“We are seeing more and more CIOs and CTOs take the helm in shaping employee culture and engagement through the corporate technology stack, their roles have changed from being a tech enabler to how people experience these platforms,” said Workvivo co-founder, Joe Lennon, adding that this was a trend that started before coronavirus, and, as is often the case, is being led by the large U.S. tech organizations.

“Creating culture digitally is difficult,” Lennon notes. “The problem is the tech is focused on operation needs rather than human needs or the needs of the company.” Companies are increasingly realizing they need to keep engaging staff who are working remote — without overburdening them — otherwise it leads to a lack of motivation and staff churn.

For millions, how we work has been hugely disrupted, forcing employee communication tech to evolve, bringing with it new demands, new skills and new roles.

“Most administrative HR roles will be automated in the next few years,” said Schawbel. “Covid is the gas to light a fire to all the workplace trends that were on the agenda, but not high up.”

Instead, the role of HR will expand beyond staff as numbers and workers, but encompassing their whole life, personality types, at-home situation and personal considerations. That combination of tech and people will be a compelling blend.

“It’s time to move beyond the ‘human resources’ title to something closer to some of the newer titles currently emerging such as people operations, employee experience, employee success or chief experience officer,” said Lennon. “This alone will send a strong message to the workforce.”

By Lucinda Southern Lucinda Southern

Sourced from DIGIDAY

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Why Content Marketing Matters For Brands (And Yes, This Includes Yours)

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By Pia Silva.

When you hear the term “content marketing,” it’s easy to think of big brands with six-figure advertising budgets and a team of bloggers and infographic designers on their sides. The thing is, it doesn’t matter how “big” your brand is. Even if you’re a freelancer or solopreneur, content marketing can make a significant difference for your ability to attract high-quality clients.

Yes, creating quality content marketing requires a fair amount of time — but what doesn’t? This is an important investment into your brand that will keep on giving.

It’s Essential For (Long-Term) Lead Generation

People no longer make a knee-jerk purchase because of an ad they happened to see on TV or online. Instead, they consider various options and do their research before making a decision.

When done right, your content will help you distance your brand from the competition. It will engage potential clients and provide the information they need to make their decision. It will present you in the best light possible.

Creating content is always worth it! The biggest reason? Because unlike ad campaigns, content is forever. It continues to exist on your website and other channels long after you publish it.

High-value content could eventually rank in Google search results itself, serving as a lasting form of lead generation. Valuable, insightful content has the potential to keep delivering value for your brand long after you’ve written it and forgotten about it.

If Google Cares About Content, You Should, Too

There’s no two ways around it: Google always attempts to put the best, most relevant content in front of people. These results are based on what they type into a Google search bar, as well as the quality of the content itself. The more “white hat” SEO-driven content you can produce, the easier it will be for potential clients to discover your brand.

Remember, there are no tricks or shortcuts anymore. Anyone trying to sell you the SEO equivalent of a “get rich quick” scheme shouldn’t be trusted. The way to get good SEO is by creating good content — not by tossing in a bazillion keywords or stuffing your content with backlinks.

This was especially clear during a recent email conversation with Maria Khramtsova, CEO of FortuneZ, a markets and iGaming media publication. She explained, “While keywords are important, your first priority should always be to provide real value to your target audience.”

Continued Khramtsova, “Always ask yourself if your content is truly informing them and helping them gain new insights about the topic. You can worry about working in keywords afterwards. When you write for the audience first, you’ll be able to work in keywords naturally, without detracting from the value of the content as a whole.”

Content Is Key For Better Understanding Your Customers

Wouldn’t it be nice to pry back the lid and get an inside look inside your prospects’ brains to know what they’re thinking — and what they want? Content marketing lets you do just that, through a trial-and-error approach — though one that doesn’t have the high costs of a traditional ad campaign attached.

Because they are housed on your website, the value of each content marketing piece can be easily quantified based on things like number of views, leads and so on.

With this in mind, you can then use your content to test audience-specific ideas like tone, target needs, branding messages and product or service ideas. The more content you create, the more you can learn about what your target audience likes or doesn’t like.

Over time, this allows you to fine-tune your voice and subject matter until you’ve got your content marketing running like a well-oiled machine. And with more quality, relevant content to help prospects discover you, it’ll be that much easier to connect.

Content Marketing Demonstrates Credibility (Instead Of Just Talking About It)

Far too many “experts” simply share a list of their services and an about page that acts like a virtual mini-resume. They assume that this is all they need to do to demonstrate their expertise and gain the trust of potential clients.

Yes, these website features can be helpful starting points, but your content marketing is how you can really prove your credibility — and not just say that you are.

Sure, you can talk about your industry experience and say that you did some big-time stuff at your old job before diving into your new career as a solopreneur, but the average prospect is going to need a lot more than that before they can trust you. Even testimonials from current and former clients can sometimes fall short, because a prospect may feel like they have different needs or concerns than your satisfied customers.

Your content marketing offers a chance for you to share your real opinions and insights about your industry. This isn’t where you have to try to be diplomatic. Strong opinions on relevant industry topics is how your potential clients can truly come to know you and your approach. Most importantly, it’s how they learn what makes you different or special.

Start Your Content Marketing Journey Now

Whether you’re planning to produce your own content or partner with a trusted freelancer, the most important thing is to start content marketing now. When you provide worthwhile, valuable content, you give potential clients a compelling reason to do business with you.

Feature Image Credit: STEVE WASTERVAL

By Pia Silva

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website or some of my other work here.

I am a partner and brand strategist at Worstofall Design where we build brands that turn expertise into profit. Unlike most branding firms, we build entire brands in days instead of months, and only work for 1-3 person service businesses. Our unique process and niche positioning has helped us to overcome the hurdles we struggled with when we were starting our business, reliably attracting a steady flow of high paying clients and allowing us to enjoy the freedom that inspired us to become entrepreneurs in the first place. At Forbes, my goal is to clarify and simplify the elusive idea of “branding,” and share practical tips and tangible steps to help businesses find their unique brand voice that leads to profit

Sourced from Forbes

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How Predictive Analytics Takes the Guesswork Out of Ad Performance

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By Heather Fletcher

Marketers should first determine why they’re optimizing ads at all

Everyone loves a sure thing, especially someone who’s paying for an ad.

In a world where many business leaders waste money on ads by going with their gut feelings or worse—collecting as much data as possible on ad audiences and inevitably targeting them with irrelevant advertisements—what are the best ways for performance marketers to use predictive analytics to optimize ads?

Performance marketers need to start by figuring out why they’re optimizing their ads at all.

Do they want to increase sales? Acquire customers? Accomplish some other goal? This seemingly simple step is where a lot of performance marketers go wrong. They collect all of the data they can instead of the data they should.

Imagine if Karen Heath from Teradata hadn’t wanted to help a retailer increase diaper sales in 1992. She may never have sought out the data showing that when men bought the high-margin item, they also bought beer. By placing beer and diapers together, the retailer’s sales rose.

This one finding for one retailer that resulted in product placement changes in 1992 eventually evolved into the more advanced predictive analytics that optimized multichannel marketing in 2011.

Now, in 2020, the practice is so advanced the basic definition of predictive analytics says it incorporates machine learning techniques.

Predictive analytics practitioner Helen Xiaoqin Yi, a data scientist at a major electronics retailer, suggested performance marketers use “predictive tools to create audience segments or explore new potential audiences” with algorithms like SVM, logistic regression or neural networks.

“Then we can analyse their preferences from the comments, reviews, social media, interactions with ads, events or any relevant campaigns, and design several plans for different segments,” Yi said.

Stephen H. Yu, president and chief consultant at Willow Data Strategy, advised that performance marketers figure out who should be targeted with which ad and through which channel before personalizing ads.

“A series of personas based on propensity modelling can be useful in determining the most optimal offer and creative for each target,” Yu said.

Devyani Sadh, CEO and chief data officer of Data Square, provided three possible segments:

  • Prospects: Identify top-performing prospect ad audience segments based on demographic and psychographic similarities, content preferences, and interests of known high-value customer “clones.”
  • Active customers: Model customers’ prior history along with a “similarity index” of others with similar purchase patterns to optimize ad content. Examples include cross-sell or the next logical product (concurrent or sequential)
  • At-risk or lapsed customers: Stage 1 is identifying those who are staged to attrition or already lapsed, but are likely to respond to an offer. Stage 2 is optimizing ad messaging for retargeting or other initiatives by predicting special offers and promotions most likely to resonate with this group, based on history.

Yi suggested launching a small test of several ad designs using different times of day, durations of exposure and placements in order to prove that the optimization worked.

Then, give credit where credit is due. Yu added that performance marketers need to make note of how well each element and channel worked. In other words, don’t default to blanket attribution.

For example, performance marketers will want to keep track of more than just ad placement. Within this one area alone, Sadh said performance marketers can “optimize ad placement by ranking top-performing platforms, affiliates, social media sites, websites, search engines and regions by extrapolating from navigation patterns, search, browsing behaviour and digital identities of known converters.”

But even a sure thing won’t be a sure thing forever. Just like how search engines regularly update algorithms, performance marketers will need to revisit the predictive analytics process to continue optimizing their ads. Sometimes, marketers will have to start from scratch.

Yi said program or campaign dashboards will tell performance marketers if they need to update the models they build based on the process.

“No matter what the results are, we should always summarize and learn from them to prepare for the next campaigns,” she said.

Feature Image Credit: Predictive tools can help brands form audience segments and gain new consumers. iStock

By Heather Fletcher

Sourced from ADWEEK

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