editor, Author at Mediastreet

In News

Now You Can Opt Out of Seeing Political Ads on Facebook

July 13, 2020 No Comments

The change lets Facebook play both sides of the debate about political advertising on social media.

SAN FRANCISCO — For months, Facebook has weathered criticism for its willingness to show all types of political advertising to its billions of users, even if those ads contained lies.

Now the company is changing tack — sort of.

The social network said it would allow people in the United States to opt out of seeing social issue, electoral or political ads from candidates or political action committees in their Facebook or Instagram feeds. The ability to hide those ads will begin with a small group of users, before rolling out in the coming weeks to the rest of the United States and later to several other countries.

“Everyone wants to see politicians held accountable for what they say — and I know many people want us to moderate and remove more of their content,” Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, wrote in an op-ed piece in USA Today on Tuesday. “For those of you who’ve already made up your minds and just want the election to be over, we hear you — so we’re also introducing the ability to turn off seeing political ads. We’ll still remind you to vote.”

The move allows Facebook to play both sides of a complicated debate about the role of political advertising on social media ahead of the November presidential election. With the change, Facebook can continue allowing political ads to flow across its network, while also finding a way to reduce the reach of those ads and to offer a concession to critics who have said the company should do more to moderate noxious speech on its platform.

Mr. Zuckerberg has long said that Facebook would not police and moderate political ads. That’s because the company does not want to limit the speech of candidates, he has said, especially in smaller elections and those candidates who do not have the deep pockets of the major campaigns.

But critics, including the Biden presidential campaign, have argued that Facebook’s laissez-faire approach has dangerous consequences, with untruthful political ads leading to the spreading of disinformation and potential voter disenfranchisement. Some Republicans have argued that Facebook should not act as an arbiter of what can and cannot be posted in ads, and that the company’s intervention amounts to censorship.

The Biden presidential campaign lashed out at Facebook over its hands-off policy on political ads last October after the Trump campaign released ads on the social network that falsely claimed that Mr. Biden had offered to bribe Ukrainian officials to drop an investigation into his son. Since then, the Biden campaign has called for the company to fact-check ads from candidates and their campaigns.

Last week, Mr. Biden’s campaign also began an online petition and letter to Mr. Zuckerberg to demand changes to its speech policies ahead of the 2020 presidential contest. At the same time, the Biden campaign also spent $5 million in advertising on Facebook, surging past political ad spending by Mr. Trump on the platform.

By Mike Isaac

Sourced from The New York Times

In News

How to Avoid Email Blacklists

July 13, 2020 No Comments

By Jimmy Rodela

Understand what email blacklists are, and learn the strategies to avoid them. The Blueprint covers the nitty-gritty of email blacklists in this guide.

Building your email list takes time and effort, but all the hard work you put into it can go down the drain if you get blacklisted.

An email blacklist and other spam filters prevent your emails from reaching your target audience, hindering you from getting optimal results. Understand email blacklists and how they work so you can avoid them.

Overview: What is an email blacklist?

Email blacklists are real-time lists that identify domains or IP addresses known for sending spam emails.

Free mailbox providers, anti-spam vendors, internet service providers (ISP), and email service providers (ESP) use blacklists to stop spam emails from entering their systems.

Getting flagged by blacklist operators will add you to the list and block your content, preventing your emails from reaching your audience’s inboxes. If your business becomes blacklisted, your small business email marketing suffers, negatively affecting your email marketing ROI.

Factors that can get you blacklisted include:

Spam complaints. Complaints about your emails exceeding the acceptable threshold can prompt ISPs to add you to the blacklist.
Bad email content. Some ISPs filter emails by using keywords as a basis. Expressions such as “money-back guarantee,” and “free,” as well as using multiple exclamation marks and all caps can get you blacklisted.
Poor email list management. Poorly managed email lists lead to unnoticed unsubscribe requests, which can get you flagged and blacklisted. If you don’t check your email list, for instance, you might keep sending subscribers emails even if they unsubscribe, leading to them tagging you as spam.

How to find out if your company is on an email blacklist

The quickest way to check if your email is blacklisted is to use publicly available tools. Perform a blacklist check using popular databases, such as MXToolBox, to see if your IP address or domain is blacklisted.

Perform a blacklist check using MxToolBox.

Another approach is to check your email campaign stats, including your clicks and domain opens. Sharp open drop-offs, for example, could indicate you’ve been blacklisted from an ISP.

Implement good email sourcing practices, manage and monitor your email campaigns, and follow reliable email marketing tips to prevent getting blacklisted.

How to avoid email blacklists

Follow these tips to avoid getting blacklisted.

1. Use double opt-in for your email subscribers

Double opt-ins require a two-step verification where users sign up for your mailing list, then receive an email with a link to confirm their subscription.

This creates an additional security measure to prevent fake emails, ensuring your subscribers are real people and not bots. The additional signup step also ensures your subscribers want to receive your emails, whether you’re creating a newsletter, sending promotional offers, or alerting them to new offerings.

This reduces potential complaints against your business for email spamming and lowers the chances of people unsubscribing from your email list. Use double opt-ins to acquire more qualified leads, build strong relationships with new subscribers, and improve your email deliverability.

2. Include an unsubscribe link

Violating anti-spam laws can get your company’s domain blacklisted, so be sure to include an unsubscribe link to your email messages. This will keep you in adherence with legislation and regulations while improving your subscribers’ experience, too.

Add an unsubscribe link to your emails to ensure you send your messages only to people interested in receiving them.

Tips for including an unsubscribe link in your emails:

Implement newsletter best practices. Display your unsubscribe link so your contacts find them easily, reducing the chances of them tagging your email as spam. Learn from various newsletter examples, such as this one from PlayStation.

Include the unsubscribe link in your email newsletter. | Image source: Sendinblue

Learn anti-spam laws. Familiarize yourself with the anti-spam rules in your market, state, and country to ensure you follow proper practices and avoid getting blacklisted.

3. Clean your email lists regularly

Implement proper list management and assess your email lists to detect potential spam traps to avoid getting placed on a blacklist.

Tips for cleaning your email list and avoiding spam traps:

Update your email list. Send re-engagement emails to subscribers who have not engaged with you for over six months. Then, remove unresponsive contacts to filter out potential spam traps.
Avoid list contamination. Check the correct spelling of your subscribers’ emails to prevent invalid email addresses and potential spam traps from contaminating your list. Use email validation in your sign-up forms to prevent typos, and use email checker tools to verify the legitimacy of the email addresses. Maintain a healthy contact list to avoid spam traps and improve the deliverability of your campaigns.

4. Optimize your email content

Avoid sending email blasts with generic messages to reduce spam complaints and prevent being added to an email blacklist, including a URL blacklist. Work with top-notch email marketing software, such as Zoho Campaigns, to create highly customized emails to personalize your content.

Use the software’s drag-and-drop email editor to customize email layout and design, plus add text, buttons, images, HTML snippets, calendar invites, and polls.

Its advanced option also lets you add dynamic content, allowing you to display different kinds of content based on conditions, such as a specific segment or a list.

Add dynamic content to your email newsletter with the Zoho Campaigns editor.

Build personalized, valuable content your subscribers can relate with so they don’t flag your email as spam and get you added to a blacklist.

5. Secure your server

Set proper security measures and use tools to check IP addresses to protect your email server from bots or malware that can hijack your IP address and email domain.

These harmful programs can send you fake emails, getting you blacklisted even if you’re following proper email marketing practices. Use an IP lookup tool to assess if someone else is using your IP address, which can mean your network server has been hacked.

Prevent malware infections and potential blacklisting of your business by setting up and updating email server security protocols.

6. Avoid manually entering email addresses into your database

Steer clear of manually adding your contacts to your database to avoid typos in their email addresses. This helps prevent you from sending your messages to non-existent emails that bounce and get your business blacklisted.

Also, avoid adding contacts obtained physically, such as printed business cards, to your email list if they didn’t consent to receiving your marketing emails. People who haven’t given permission will most likely report your emails as spam and could get you added to a blacklist.

Connect with prospects via their personal inbox instead, and lead them to a form or landing page, allowing them to opt in to your email list.

What should you do if your company is on an email blacklist? Consider these tips if you do end up on an email blacklist.

Learn the unlisting process. Every blacklist is different, so contact the particular blacklist operator to understand the necessary steps to take you off the list. Some blacklists will unlist you after a few days once they confirm the absence of suspicious activities from your emails.
Know the factors for blacklisting. Assess the activities, email content elements, etc., that got your emails flagged as spam or added to a blacklist, and improve your strategies.
Prove the credibility of your email marketing efforts. Work with blacklist operators and prove you’re a trustworthy sender by following email marketing best practices.

Know the right strategies and keep your business off email blacklists

As long as you know the factors that can get you flagged as spam and avoid them, you’ll be able to avoid being added to a blacklist.

Maintain excellent email hygiene, follow anti-spam regulations, and implement best email marketing practices to keep your business from getting blacklisted.

By Jimmy Rodela

Sourced from the blueprint

In News

Why You Should Focus on Brand Reputation Rather Than Marketing

July 10, 2020 No Comments

By Samuel Thimothy,

When you’re building a business, your reputation is all you have. While flashy marketing campaigns or persuasive sales materials can help you close a deal, they’re not going to be strong enough to keep your customers coming back to purchase again.

As an entrepreneur, it can be difficult to separate these two ideas. If you’re putting all your energy into attracting new customers, you might forget to give a customer who has purchased from you your best work.

Unfortunately, if the customer isn’t happy with what you’ve done for them, they’ll not only move on to a competitor, but they might tell their friends, family, co-workers and acquaintances about their bad experience. If that happens too often, you develop a bad reputation — the kiss of death in the business world.

On the other hand, a great reputation can bring in new business like a marketing campaign can’t. Here’s why.

Customers remember a great experience and strong reputation.

If you have a reputation for going above and beyond your customers’ expectations, they’ll never forget. What they will forget, however, is the marketing campaign you invested in so heavily. When the ads stop running and the campaign is over, your customers will stop thinking about it.

A brand reputation is emotional. If you were there to help a customer through a difficult time or you were able to brighten their day, they’ll keep that feeling with them long after the transaction is over. They’ll also keep that feeling in mind as they continue to make purchasing decisions, extending the relationship with your business and giving you repeat purchases.

To improve your brand reputation, focus on giving each and every customer a positive, unique experience. Solve their problems. Listen to their needs, and find a solution that works well for them — even if it involves a little extra work. You won’t be disappointed in the results.

A strong brand reputation also means you can invest less in marketing overall. When you’re able to create solid connections with customers who want to keep working with you, you don’t need to attract as many new customers.

Better yet, as your positive brand reputation starts to spread, you’ll get more referrals from the customers you’ve left happy for so long.

Customers share positive and negative experiences with their friends (and online).

You’ve probably encountered it before — you’re about to order a pizza to be delivered when a friend stops you. They tell you how a few months ago, they ordered a pizza from that same restaurant and had a horrible experience. You take their word of warning and choose to order from another place.

While you didn’t experience the bad experience directly, you were influenced by the reputation of the business. Because your friend didn’t believe the business was worth purchasing from again, you decided to purchase somewhere else.

If you’re providing a bad experience to your customers, you could be creating the same negative brand reputation for your business — causing you to lose business to competitors, even if you’ve never interacted with that potential client yourself.

Now, in this same example, let’s say your friend offered an alternative pizza shop for you to order from. They claim to order from this location all the time, and they always have a positive experience.

If you choose to listen to your friend, you’re again letting a brand’s reputation sway your decisions, this time on a positive note. Since you’ve heard good things from someone you can trust, you’re more likely to choose the pizza shop that has glowing reviews.

The same goes for online reviews. If a potential customer is considering working with you, they might jump online and see that your business doesn’t have great reviews. This is a problem that no amount of marketing is going to fix. On the other hand, a number of positive reviews could be just the thing the customer needs to pick up the phone and call you or finally make an online purchase.

Build a reputation– don’t sell a product.

It’s easy to get caught up in the numbers, especially when you’re growing a business. But your number of new business deals or customers acquired isn’t always a true indication of your success.

Instead, focus on the brand reputation you’re building. Because customers tend to remember experiences (both their own and their friends’) longer, your reputation will be harder to change than any marketing campaign. If you’re not building a positive one from the start, it could mean your business is dead before it ever really gets started.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Samuel Thimothy,

VP at OneIMS.com, an inbound marketing agency, and co-founder of Clickx.io, a digital marketing intelligence platform

Sourced from Inc.

In News

SAS launches tech and talent partnerships to focus on what it does best: data analytics

July 10, 2020 No Comments

By Veronica Combs

SAS is working with KPMG to open Cloud Acceleration Centers and with Handshake to recruit young data scientists.

SAS is using partnerships to define and drive the company’s latest cloud strategy with new alliances with Microsoft, KPMG, and Handshake. SAS will use these new collaborations to expand its product line, help current customers manage cloud projects, and find new employees.

At the SAS Global Forum 2020, executives from the company explained these new partnerships and gave an update on how the company is weathering the coronavirus pandemic.

Oliver Schabenberger, COO at SAS, said the company is financially stable, and although the pandemic might end the company’s 44 straight years of profitability, SAS has announced that it won’t lay off or furlough employees during the pandemic.

The goal of the Microsoft partnership is to build smart, automated, reliable, and explainable decision systems that can work at scale, Schabenberger said.

“As data moves to the cloud, analytics follow and businesses processes become more data-driven and analytics led,” Schabenberger said.

Jay Upchurch, the CIO at SAS, said discussions about the Microsoft partnership started a year ago. The two companies realized they had many of the same key customers, including global banking companies, which sparked the initial conversation. The partnership also was driven by similar corporate cultures, complementary tech, and commercial opportunities, he added.

“There also was overwhelming customer demand for SAS services on Azure, so we listened to the market,” Upchurch said.

David Macdonald, an EVP and chief sales officer at SAS, said these customer collaborations will be more than just moving existing customer workloads to Azure.

“It’s not just lift and shift but taking advantage of the collaboration to leverage cloud services and microservices as well,” he said.

Upchurch said there will be three phases in the SAS and Microsoft partnership:

Now: Migrate customers to Azure to optimize software and hardware
Near-term: Next release of SAS Viya on Azure Marketplace using cloud-native services and optimizations
Long-term: Launch SAS solutions and industry offerings running on top of Viya on Azure

SAS will migrate its internal operations to Azure as well. The company will continue to support all cloud platforms that its customers are using.

Macdonald said the Microsoft partnership will help customers speed up their digital transformation projects.

“Decision-making support is almost a prerequisite for these changes, and cloud services like APIs and microservices are becoming table stakes for improving agility,” he said.

Macdonald said SAS has been helping cities and countries respond to new business demands caused by the coronavirus. This has included helping banks define new baselines for stress testing and helping hospitals forecast bed capacity and ventilator availability. The company posted these models on GitHub.

Two more partnerships focus on students and digital transformation

At the virtual event, SAS announced two other partnerships with KPMG and Handshake. SAS will work with KPMG cloud consultants to open Cloud Acceleration Centers. The centers will support SAS clients who have their own cloud environment as well as those who are employing other cloud-based managed services. KPMG has a network of more than 400 practitioners around the world to support SAS clients with digital transformation projects and cloud migration.

At the start of the pandemic, SAS offered access to its online training resources for free for 30 days and recently extended this access indefinitely.

SAS will be working with Handshake to find students who are interested in data science as a career. Handshake is a career website for college students in the US, which helps students filter job opportunities based on career state. The site helps large companies including the Fortune 500 find early-career talent.

Feature Image Credit: SAS and Microsoft announced a new cloud technology partnership to integrate SAS analytics tools with Microsoft’s Azure platform. Image: SAS

By Veronica Combs

Sourced from TechRepublic

In Uncategorized

Google Again: We Don’t Look At Analytics Bounce Rates For Ranking

July 10, 2020 No Comments

By Barry Schwartz

Again, Google has said that it does not look at [Google] Analytics bounce rate data for ranking web sites.

John Mueller of Google said in a webmaster hangout video at the 25 minute mark, “I think there’s a bit of misconception here that we’re looking at things like the analytics bounce rate when it comes to ranking websites, and that’s definitely not the case.”

Here is the video embed at the time he said this:

Google said this in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020. Google said bounce rates are not good signals, in 2008 Google said it is a noisy signal and also in 2008 said click data is not used for rankings. This is a myth Google said but then you have people at Google misspeaking causing more confusion.

Forum discussion at YouTube Community.

By Barry Schwartz

Sourced from Search Engine Roundtable

In News

Ad spending decline won’t be as bad this year as it was in the 2009 financial crisis, new study predicts

July 9, 2020 No Comments

By Megan Graham

KEY POINTS

Though advertising spending has struggled in recent months as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, a new forecast says the impact won’t be quite as dire as it was during the financial crisis.
In a new report released Tuesday, GroupM said it expects U.S advertising to decline 13% during 2020 (excluding political advertising, which varies greatly on election years), compared to the 16% drop seen during the 2009 financial crisis.
“That we ‘only’ expect a 13% decline is surprising,” the report says. “We might normally expect that because the 2020 economic decline is so much worse than 2009, advertising should be much weaker.”

Though advertising spending has struggled in recent months as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, a new forecast says the impact won’t be quite as dire as it was during the 2009 financial crisis.

A new U.S. mid-year report released Tuesday from GroupM, advertising holding company WPP’s media agency arm, shows how the outbreak of Covid-19 changed the group’s expectations, originally forecasted advertising to grow 4% this year. GroupM now expects U.S advertising to decline 13% during 2020 (excluding political advertising, which varies greatly on election years), compared with the 16% drop seen during the 2009 financial crisis.

Brian Wieser, GroupM’s global president for business intelligence, said the ad market’s decline is abating after an “initial freefall” that impacted ad spending beginning in March.

“That we ‘only’ expect a 13% decline is surprising,” the report says. “We might normally expect that because the 2020 economic decline is so much worse than 2009, advertising should be much weaker.”

But, it says, there are differences between the two situations. In 2009, declines played out over months and a wider range of businesses were gradually and severely impacted. In 2020, the stoppage in March of conventional in-store retail activity “ground to a halt, as did tourism, hospitality and place-based entertainment industries.”

Most other economic activity continued, however, and retail companies worked out strategies for pickup or delivery.

“Going back to mid-March, it was absolutely the case that if you could cut your spending, you did,” Wieser told CNBC. But shortly after, marketers figured out how to adapt.

“As we’ve seen, so many parts of life have just continued differently,” he said. “We’re still buying our food, we’re just doing it in higher concentrations and from fewer places, and buying more products online. Instead of taking a road trip vacation, we’re buying 72-inch flat-screen TVs. The bulk of the economy has continued to operate, not normally, just differently.”

Wieser also pointed out that where impact has been most profound has been concentrated in areas of the economy that aren’t as intense in advertising, giving restaurants and bars as an example.

“It’s not that they don’t spend money in advertising, just less than other categories,” he said.

Wieser said that declines in global ad revenue from Google and Facebook were also more modest than expected in April. Plus, the group expects businesses of all sizes will transition online more aggressively, leading the group to forecast digital advertising to decline only by 3% during 2020, or to be flat including political advertising.

GroupM expects total TV advertising to decline by 7% in 2020, with national TV declining around 11% in 2020. Local TV will see an estimated decline of 34% because of the weakness in local retail and automotive advertising, though it will grow 1% when including political advertising.

It expects the segment of players like Roku and Disney-owned Hulu that offer primarily professionally produced TV in digital form to fare “much better,” with only a 3% decline in 2020.

But the report said that much uncertainty persists and that though markets and corporate decision makers are showing improving confidence compared with mid-March, we’re still in what’s considered to be the “first wave.”

IPG Mediabrands’ Magna, which is part of Interpublic Group, also released an updated forecast Monday. The group said it estimates global ad revenues will decrease by an estimated 7% in 2020 as a 16% decline in linear ad sales is aided by a 1% growth in digital.

Magna expects the global economy will recover in 2021 after the “pandemic leads to the worst economic downturn ever” in 2020, while major sporting events like the Summer Olympics and UEFA Football Championship will help spur a recovery in marketing budgets and ad spending.

Feature Image Credit: Angela Weiss | AFP | Getty Images

By Megan Graham

Sourced from CNBC

In News

5 Ways To Close More Deals In A Downturn Using AI

July 9, 2020 No Comments

By Louis Columbus

Bottom Line: Understanding which pricing strategies cause buyers to progress through buying processes in a downturn still isn’t completely understood, but AI-based pricing can help remove blind spots in how pricing drives more sales during recessionary times.

The Struggle To Make Quota Is Real

Even in stable, healthy economic conditions, just 42% of sales professionals are making quota based on Salesforce’s State of Sales Report. Only 16% will be over 100% of quota in a given year. In an economic downturn, these numbers shrink, making the struggle very real to make quota in a recession. Here’s what it’s like to compete on pricing during a downturn:

Go-to pricing strategies that worked in better economic times fall flat and don’t generate 10% of what they before, with B2B-based selling teams seeing this most often.
Sales reps’ email in-boxes are either silent or filling up with requests for lower pricing, price protection, discounts, stock balancing or worse, returns.
Many CEOs, senior management teams, and sales reps’ initial goodwill calls to the top 20% of customers offering their complete support are now turning into returned calls asking for price breaks and permanent re-negotiated pricing.
Low-priced competitors surviving on single-digit margins continue their price wars, trying to keep production operating with orders while trimming staff.
Videoconferences are keeping deals alive in B2B pipelines, but when it comes to pricing, deals often stall as CFOs and their staffs review every new expense, introducing new members of the buying process at the last minute.

CROs say that sales cycles vary by industry, with automotive being the slowest and medical device manufacturing, medical plastics including PPE production, and consumer packaged goods manufacturers being the fastest. Getting pricing right has never been more critical or challenging, according to the CROs I’ve had conference calls with. When asked where AI is making a difference, several said automating special pricing requests, taking the drudgery out of managing co-op reimbursements, or researching sales prospects using automated services. Generating fully-priced quotes faster than competitors is where AI is most paying off according to the CROs I spoke with and is contributing to more won deals.

5 Ways AI Can Help Close More Deals In A Downturn

It’s counterintuitive to consider a downturn as a good time to find new ways to improve margins with more effective pricing. But that’s just what distributors, discrete and process manufacturing CROs are looking to accomplish today. A 1% price increase can deliver a 22% increase in EBITDA margins and a 25% uplift in stock price according to McKinsey’s recent pricing research provided in the article, Pricing: Distributors’ most powerful value-creation lever. CROs are looking at when, how, and if they will increase prices on the most price-inelastic products they have. The logic behind prioritizing price-inelastic products is that selling on quality, availability, and build-to-order flexibility for customers buying these products is the goal to stabilize and grow margins. The smartest CROs I’ve met realize that engaging in price wars on price-inelastic products cost everyone margin, and no one wins. They’re also benchmarking their recovery efforts using EBITDA. The following graphic illustrates why pricing is so powerful, especially for distribution-centric businesses. Source: Pricing: Distributors’ most powerful value-creation lever. McKinsey & Company, September 16, 2019

5 Ways To Close More Deals In A Downturn Using AI — SOURCE: PRICING: DISTRIBUTORS’ MOST POWERFUL VALUE-CREATION LEVER. MCKINSEY & COMPANY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2019

The following are five of the many ways AI can help close more deals in a downturn:

1. Knowing why specific pricing strategies succeed or fail on a deal-by-deal basis in a downturn often defies easy explanation, which is why commercial analytics are so important now. Combining traditional win/loss deal analysis and AI-based commercial analytics provides new insights into what’s working in a downturn. Commercial Analytics suites that are the most effective combine transactional analysis with product and service mix, price, and volume analysis. Vendavo’s approach to providing commercial analytics is noteworthy for its streamlined, intuitive interface design that supports drag-and-drop report customization, real-time configurable alerts, integration to the price management module, pricing localization, and more. The following is an example of how Vendavo’s PricePoint works:

2. By using AI’s supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms to improve risk scoring, only pursue opportunities that show the greatest margin growth and least downside risk. CROs see the potential for AI to improve the cognitive functioning of sales, sales operations, and pricing working together to price and win the most profitable deals that have the least risk. The challenge is to take into account entirely new buying groups comprised of personas sales teams haven’t interacted with that much in the past. The pandemic and resulting downturn have completed changed group buying dynamics and introduced new risk factors into sales cycles not seen before. When the data is available, it’s possible to quantify the impact of risk factors on margin, price, and revenue gains.

3. Help sales teams be more effective by improving Deal Price Guidance with AI, reducing the heavy cognitive load many are dealing with as pricing changes happen several times a week, along with new bundles and promotions. No one is talking about how sales teams are struggling to make sense of the many pricing, promotional, and bundling offers that are increasing today. Chances are your sales teams are overwhelmed with pricing reports, new pricing updates, promotional programs, rebates and bundles as many are. In good economic times, sales reps are sending, on average, 27%, nearly a third of their week, on internal administrative activities according to a recent Forrester/SiriusDecisions study.

4. Tailoring up-sell and cross-sell recommendations for each customer using AI to define the optimal series of options and alternatives increases the average deal size and only presents the most buildable, profitable products to them. AI-based product recommendation engines integrated with CRM, e-Commerce, ERP, and pricing systems recommend the products and services that have the highest propensity of being purchased. The most advanced AI recommendation engines take into account previous buying behavior and buying patterns in making their recommendations.

5. Knowing how price, volume, and mix decisions over time impact sales across product lines, sales teams, and business units is another area where AI is helping to improve sales in this downturn. It’s common to find groups of Sales Analysts crunching this data using Excel, which is a time-consuming, iterative process that’s a perfect candidate for AI-based automation. Imagine if the many Sales Analysts crunching data had more time to analyze it and see why pricing decisions by product, region, business unit, and geography are outperforming median sales and profit levels? Finding the reasons why pricing decisions are working in a downturn is how every CRO I’ve known defines a recovery plan. Vendavo’s recently-announced Margin Bridge Analyzer is an example of how AI can be used to understand better what’s hidden in the thousands of Excel spreadsheets organizations use for tracking pricing effectiveness.

Conclusion

Achieving commercial excellence in a down economy needs to start by improving pricing effectiveness that delivers solid gains to EBITDA margins over time. Of the many ways AI is improving selling, pricing, and margin performance, the five key areas helping distributors, discrete and process manufacturers the most are discussed in this post. McKinsey finds that the best short-term/high-impact an organization can make is concentrating on pricing and promotions shown in the graphic below. Improving sales in a downturn is possible when AI is used to decipher the data this recent downturn is producing and find new margin opportunities fast.

Source: Rapid Revenue Recovery: A road map for postCOVID-19 growth, McKinsey & Company, May 7, 2020

Feature Image Credit: ISTOCK

By Louis Columbus

I am currently serving as Principal, IQMS, part of Dassault Systèmes. Previous positions include product management at Ingram Cloud, product marketing at iBASEt, Plex

…

Sourced from Forbes

In News

How leading industries are driving multi-cloud adoption

July 9, 2020 No Comments

By Rebekah Dumouchelle

How are varied industries unlocking innovation without being tied to a single cloud?

As companies of all sizes and in all industries learn to cope with a new “business-as-usual” approach that includes all-remote workforces and intense pressure to cut costs, faster innovation and data agility may appear out of immediate reach. Industry leaders who look to data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning are demonstrating that you can have it all, with the right planning and infrastructure.

Data-intensive applications—such as image processing, data analytics, and AI—depend on rapidly growing enterprise data. With that growth comes architectural considerations. As datasets grow, applications are required to be closer and closer to that data due to network latency. As more applications are added to the environment, they start to generate data faster than it’s possible to move this data elsewhere without great cost and interruption, making migration almost impossible. This is the data gravity paradox that creates lock in and introduces future business risk: the more you gather your data together, the harder it comes to change how you handle it.

So how are businesses unlocking the power of innovation without being tied to a single cloud? Successes (and challenges) exist across a variety of industries. Here, we’ll look at a few dynamic examples of how multi-cloud accelerates innovation, enhances data agility, and reduces costs.

Multiple clouds – a balancing act for the future…

Media and entertainment

Today’s media and entertainment landscape is increasingly composed of relatively small and specialised studios that meet the swelling content-production needs of the largest players, like Netflix and Hulu. To deliver the blockbuster movies and award-winning TV shows, these geographically dispersed studios require efficient collaboration on animation, color correction, special effects, and editing. Multi-cloud solutions enable these teams to work together on the same projects, access their preferred production tools from various public clouds, and streamline approvals without the delays associated with moving large media files from one site to another. A high-throughput, low-latency data lake eliminates concerns that lag will inhibit productivity. Additionally, a central storage solution that attaches to multiple clouds reduces the large egress fees often associated with taking enormous video files out of public clouds.

Beyond the need for collaboration, other factors drive the growth of data and of multi-cloud within media and entertainment. Cameras and viewing devices have greater resolution, meaning that file sizes are larger than ever, requiring greater bandwidth in dispersed data centers than what can be achieved on-premises. Streaming services rely on data analytics to programmatically understand content popularity, divine what new content should be created, and which content should be shelved. Many of the processes related to these workflows are increasingly utilising the public cloud due to the availability of complementary data sets and use-case-specific tools for handling different types of analytics.

Transportation and autonomous driving

Connected car and autonomous driving projects generate immense amounts of data from a variety of sensors. For example, Tesla’s autopilot utilises eight cameras, twelve ultrasonic sensors, and one radar to interpret the car’s surroundings and make decisions about its path and how to avoid potential obstacles. Researchers in this field are trying to accommodate the 100s of petabytes of video and still image-generated data that are used to retrain algorithms. These are still the early days for autonomous vehicles (AVs). When 20–50x more are on road, handling more variants in driving situations (manoeuvring around any city street, any parking garage, etc.), an even greater amount of deep learning will be required. By 2030, autonomous vehicles on the road will create a predicted 1 Zettabyte of data.

Car manufacturers, public transportation agencies, and rideshare companies are among those motivated to take advantage of multi-cloud innovation, blending both accessibility of data across multiple clouds without the risks of significant egress charges and slow transfers, while maintaining the freedom to leverage the optimal public cloud services for each project.

Five business transformations enabled by multicloud

Energy sector

Within the energy sector, multi-cloud adoption can help lower the significant costs associated with finding and drilling for resources. In one example, an oil and gas services company had more than 4 petabytes of data, which it had collected by accumulating data such as sonar scans of undersea floors, geospatial photos, and land surveys, for petrotechnical analytics and seismic processing. Engineers and data scientists at this company used machine learning (ML) analytics to identify places that merited more resources to prospect for oil, to gauge environmental risks of new projects, and to improve safety.

By taking advantage of the services and processing power across multiple clouds, this company created efficiencies that can help save millions of dollars. This is possible by leveraging spot instances across multiple clouds at the same time in order to get much faster results at a lower cost than when a limited number of GPUs are available in any particular cloud. By simultaneously replicating its on-prem data lake and making the data available to multiple cloud services, this organisation supported a wide set of applications and workloads. This demonstrates how oil and gas organisations can scale PBs of data without sacrificing time, while also delivering a new level of resilience by enabling cloud-based recovery.

Healthcare and life sciences

Healthcare is one of the industries that’s lagging behind in multi-cloud adoption. This isn’t due to lack of desire, but because of the many challenges around the protection of data. The need to know where data lives, who has access to it, who has accessed it—along with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations and Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) guidelines—all bring unique challenges in this field.

Even with those caveats, multi-cloud helps healthcare and life sciences unlock the power of innovation. This is clear in the realm of genomic analysis, in particular, where analysis of huge datasets can help improve—or save—lives. FASTQ files contain the sequencing data of raw genomes; they contain millions of snippets of DNA that need to be assembled like a jigsaw puzzle. These files then allow researchers to do variant analysis, identifying differences between individuals’ genomes. The intensive process of analysing genomes consumes quite a lot of space from a storage standpoint. For example, to study the genomes of 150 cancer patients who receive a particular treatment, then analyse differences in DNA between those who were treated successfully, those who didn’t respond well to the treatment, and against the general population, variant analysis on thousands of people may be necessary. The ability to scale up across clouds and take advantage of spot instances, while sharing access to datasets with researchers around the world, is critical to making these workflows practical and accessible.

Multiply the innovation from your cloud strategy

A multi-cloud solution, in which the same copy of data is available to multiple clouds, allows users to take advantage of each cloud’s services—more than 500 available today. Multi-cloud storage can improve data agility, provide data proximity without vendor lock-in, and scale compute and storage on-demand, independent of each other. Multi-cloud offers financial savings and eliminates many operational complexities, whether you have 10s of TB or 100s of PB of data.

Adopting a multi-cloud strategy today can future-proof your organisation for when you’re ready to tackle a new workload—without being forced to copy or move it closer to the latest cloud capabilities. You don’t need to have that use case today, but an effective multi-cloud strategy allows you to leverage it when the use case is required tomorrow.

Best cloud storage of 2020

Feature Image Credit: Image credit: Image Credit: Rawpixel.com / Shutterstock

By Rebekah Dumouchelle

Rebekah Dumouchelle, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Faction

Sourced from ITProPortal

In News

Content Ideation: The Methods and Tools Necessary for Content Marketing Success

July 8, 2020 No Comments

By Kaya Ismail

As companies continue to produce more and more content, it’s becoming harder to stand out. Most alarming to marketers, Ahrefs found that over 90% of content gets zero organic traffic from Google. That means coming up with unique and relevant content ideas that rank well and garner click-throughs is a crucial task for digital marketers now more than ever.

With this in mind, we’ve asked content marketers which methods work best for generating content ideas, whether there are any tools they recommend, and who they think should be involved in the process.

Which Methods Work Best?

Maryna Burushkina, Head of SaaS at Hamburg, Germany-based Neuro Flash starts every content journey with topic discovery. “First, we need to identify what topics we want to write about, which at the same time, reflect upon our brand values and meet our marketing goals,” Burushkina explained. She evaluates 25-50 topic ideas based on search volume, keyword competition, consumer sentiment, brand consistency, and a variety of other factors. “After topic discovery,” she added, “we dive deeper into long-tail keyword research.”

“Our industries are highly competitive with limited brand loyalty,” revealed Adam Lumb, EN Site Manager at Malta-based Cashcow, “so we need to produce articles that users are specifically searching for.” That’s why his content ideation process is based heavily around keyword research and competitor analysis for each region and market they’re involved in. “This process is particularly effective,” Lumb explained, “as we can immediately gauge the potential ROI based on the search volume of a keyword, how valuable it is, how likely it will lead to a conversion.”

“Our content ideation process consists of researching and staying on top of the news trends and stories that pertain to our client base,” stated Anne Szustek Talbot, VP of Content at New York, N.Y.-based BX3. Once they have a running tally of story ideas, they agree on which topics best fit the brand’s voice. “Importantly, we try to cite external sources when developing content,” Talbot added, “so that our posts read more like news articles than paid ads.” Keeping a journalistic approach to content can lead to better stories and projects more authority for the brand. For Talbot, their content marketing success lies in employing “a journalistic approach in researching and executing story ideas so that we present the most professional voice on behalf of the brands we represent.”

The Tools That Marketers Use

“We use a variety of tools for different reasons,” Burushkina said. In particular, she uses Google Analytics and the brand’s own website data to find content opportunities related to things they’re already ranking for. “We then conduct further long-tail keyword research using Google Keyword Planner, and research competition in SEM Rush,” she said. When determining the scope of the content, Burushkina and her team checks Buzzsumo to see what other related content has been performing well.

“We use Google Analytics, Google News, and Meltwater to keep on top of trending news stories,” Talbot said. These tools work best for their journalistic-based approach to content creation because they feature the latest news and can be filtered for the brand’s target audience. “Regularly keeping up with and reading content from top-tier news services is key to ensuring we are telling the right stories for our target audiences,” she added.

“The main service we use to do keyword research and competitor analysis is Ahrefs,” revealed Lumb. Ahrefs is a comprehensive tool that offers insight into backlinks, content shares, keyword traffic, and other SEO information. Using the tool, Lumb is able to start with very generic keywords and drill down into a few target keywords that were recently discovered, have low competition, or their competitors aren’t ranking for at all. “However, we supplement keyword research with a few other tools too,” he said. For example, Google Trends is useful for determining if keywords that are more popular during certain times of the year and AnswerThePublic provides autocomplete data from search engines that reveals how users construct their search terms.

Who’s Involved in Generating Ideas?

“Everyone in the team is involved in generating content ideas, from [the] Machine Learning expert to [the] Marketing Manager and [the] CEO,” Burushkina said. That way, the brand’s content strategy includes a variety of perspectives and ensures ideas are vetted by all areas of the business.

It’s great to get everyone involved in generating ideas, but ultimately it’s up to marketing leaders to determine which content will resonate with their audience. “While contributing thoughts to the idea box is a team activity,” continued Burushkina, “the Marketing Manager will be the one taking it a step further and actually conducting a thorough analysis, and finally crafting the content.”

Feature Image Credit: SHUTTERSTOCK

By Kaya Ismail

Sourced from CMS WiRE

In News

The Best Way To Grow Your Personal Brand In 2020

July 8, 2020 No Comments

By Luke Lintz

A personal brand is how your accomplishments, personality and work are portrayed to others. The major difference between a business brand and a personal brand is that a personal brand is built around you, so it’s easy to connect on an emotional level with your audience. A business brand is built solely around showcasing your business services, offers, testimonials and track record, with very little emotion involved.

Branding shouldn’t be a battle of whether to have a personal or business brand, but how you can effectively grow both brands together. Something spectacular happens when your personal brand is bigger than your business brand and you can effectively refer people who have built trust with you to your company’s products or services.

My marketing agency specifically works on high-level personal and business branding. The most common question I receive from potential customers is: “What sort of ROI is associated with building a personal brand?” I always respond, “It’s priceless, and it takes at least 12-18 months to get there.”

I find this a funny question because I think everyone is capable of comprehending the long-term value of building proper personal and business brands, but so many people are stuck in short-term thinking. The ROI of branding is that it’s an enhancement to your current direct marketing efforts. The value comes in the long term with many different streams of revenue. For example, we had one client who grew his following on Instagram from 3,000 to 100,000 followers by posting consistent, quality content. Through an Instagram direct message, he was booked for a speaking gig that paid $25,000, with travel costs, hotel and food covered.

There are three main categories for your branding presence: your online presence, social media presence and local presence.

• A branded website, press, dedicated articles, features and a Google Knowledge Panel all play a role in your online presence and determine how you are portrayed on search engines.

• Consistent and high-quality content, your short bio, and the number of followers you have all play a part in your social media presence.

• How you are talked about with other people (when you are not around), or if you’re not talked about at all, is your local presence.

I dedicated the majority of my time to my clients’ brands until recently branching out and working on my own personal brand. I am now working heavily on growing my social media and online presence by publishing consistent, quality content about my main projects, working with major influencers around the world and publicizing it all.

If you are just starting out with your personal brand, regardless of industry or experience, you should ask yourself some of these questions:

• Who is your target audience?

• What do you want to be known for in 10 years?

• Who are some leaders in your industry, and what do their personal and business brands look like?

• How are you going to dedicate time each week to work on your personal brand?

There are more people online than ever. With such an overwhelming number of people in your industry or niche, how do you stand out? The answer is simple: There is no such thing as competition. There is no such thing as two of the exact same personal brands. If you’re able to stay consistent and are willing to invest your time and resources into your personal brand, you will be bound for success in the long term.

If you don’t currently don’t have a personal brand, here’s an action plan for getting your brand started:

1. Open social media accounts on two platforms. If you’re a business professional, you should have accounts on Instagram and LinkedIn. Don’t overwhelm yourself by starting on every platform available.

2. Next, collect all your professional photos. You don’t have to be in a suit, but the photos should be very high resolution. If you don’t have any photos, find a local photographer, and book a photo shoot as soon as possible.

3. Hire a graphic designer, and ask them to make social media banners, Instagram stories, and graphics for your Instagram and LinkedIn profiles from your professional photos.

4. Create a biography for your social media accounts. This is crucial because it’s the first thing your potential audience sees, and we all know how important first impressions are. Keep it short and concise. It shouldn’t focus too much on you, but on how you can help your customers.

5. Plan out a strategy to post consistent content about what you do.

After all of this is done and you post content day in and day out, you will eventually see returns that you can’t put a price on.

Feature Image Credit: Getty