editor, Author at Mediastreet

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Nine Things To Know About Google Analytics

January 13, 2020 No Comments

Of all the business analytics tools used today, the most popular one is Google Analytics, which is a data-tracking tool offered by Google. If you’re a business owner looking to optimize and better understand how visitors use your website, here are some things you should know about Google Analytics and how to make it work for your business.

1. Google Analytics is free.

There are no subscription or monthly fees for the standard version. More features are included with the paid version, but they really aren’t necessary for running a small business. When your business has grown, you can simply upgrade when you have more resources available.

2. It’s easy to set up.

There’s minimal technical know-how involved to get started. You just sign in with an existing Google account and follow the instructions. You will be asked to provide basic information, such as your website and domain name. Lastly, you will need to add a tracking code to your website’s code for Google Analytics to start capturing data.

3. There are five reporting options.

The ABCs of Google Analytics include Audience, Behavior and Conversions. These reports provide an overview of who your visitors are, what they do on your site, and what activities they complete. The other two reports are Real-Time and Acquisition, which show real-time activity on the website, as well as how traffic reaches it.

The Audience report allows you to confirm and/or discover how well your marketing is working from different standpoints. The report can confirm if visitors are coming to your website from a specific location you are marketing to, or help you make further discoveries about new locations to put forth efforts toward. Also, if the goal of your website is to have repeat visitors, data within these reports can confirm the percentage of returning visitors to your website as a key performance indicator (KPI).

4. Google Analytics helps improve website usability.

With data on user behavior, you can better understand how visitors use your website. For example, you can identify the types of content potential customers look for, as well as gain insight into how they navigate your site and the pages from which visitors exit. All of this information can help you modify website navigation and improve overall site performance.

A hypothetical data point that can be used to make a website usability decision would be the bounce rate of entrance pages into the website for core content (not blogs). If the bounce rate for these entrance pages is above 70%, has a low average session duration and results in no conversions for the session, that can be an indication the page is not properly engaging a visitor to explore the website further and ultimately result in an outreach conversion.

5. It identifies devices used to access websites.

GA also gathers data regarding the types of devices used to access your website. If the data shows that many of your visitors use mobile devices to reach your site, take steps to ensure that it is mobile-responsive and user-friendly.

6. Google Analytics can help to optimize online campaigns.

GA tracks information about the location, profile and behavior of your visitors. Such data can help identify your user segment, which enables you to modify your content marketing, promotions and offers to match your target market.

Segments can be used to home in on specific traffic sessions that resulted in a conversion or other KPI metrics. As a result, you can reverse-engineer this data to see what traffic mediums or locations most commonly occur for conversions and leverage those data points. For example, you may want to initially cast a wide net with different types of paid advertisements, but you can later determine which mediums perform best. Then you can cut ties or reduce spending with the channels that are unsuccessful and put more spending toward the paid channels that work.

7. Google Analytics has a campaign tracking feature.

Google Analytics shows how your marketing efforts are working. You can identify how your emails, social media messages or paid ad placements are performing. It enables you to measure campaigns and identify those that actually convert to customer engagement.

8. It can help you understand your target audience.

The tool provides user-specific information including their age, gender, location and even interests. By understanding who your target audience is, you can determine what type of content or product lists should be featured on your site.

This user-specific information in GA can help you create personas for your website and marketing. For example, if the majority of visitors coming to your website are females between the ages of 55-64, a designer could optimize the site experience in the future to have a softer touch, use certain graphics that appeal more to women and make sure usability is at the forefront for an older population. The same could be said from a content generation perspective and what topics might resonate with certain audiences and ages.

9. Other Google products can be integrated with Google Analytics.

Google Analytics has an easily usable interface where you can integrate other tools and platforms, such as Google Adwords and the Google Search Console.

The integration of Google Adwords and Search Console simply allows you to have all your marketing data in one central location within GA. For example, GA by default doesn’t include much information regarding the queries that send traffic to your site. But when integrating Google Search Console, that supporting information can be readily available, which includes clicks, impressions, CTR and average position. Overall, this helps you streamline account reviews and be more efficient with your time.

A Great Tool For Business Growth

Google Analytics offers plenty of benefits to businesses. We hope this information helps you gain further insight into its additional features — it can help take your analysis and usage to the next level to make more actionable decisions to help with your website and marketing.

By Peter Boyd

Peter Boyd is a Florida attorney who founded PaperStreet. He has helped over 1,000 law firms with their websites, content, and marketing.

Sourced from Forbes

In News

In 2020, marketers will find a middle ground between agencies and DIY

January 13, 2020 No Comments

By Kristina Monllos

In recent years, marketers have been on a tear to take back control of their brands. Much of that has been in the form of taking various agency functions in-house — creative, social, programmatic, even media buying — in the hopes of not only saving money but becoming more nimble. But doing so isn’t a quick fix, nor is it as simple as it may seem. As marketers start to wake up to that reality, they will start to work with agencies again — albeit in a hybrid model.

The CMO’s pitch to taking marketing in-house to CEOs and CFOs will certainly be more difficult next year as the challenges of handling marketing services in-house are no longer theoretical. As more and more major marketers have tried it, the difficulties of doing so have become clearer, especially for programmatic. There are myriad issues. Staffing is chief among them. Marketers not only have a hard time finding talent but retaining that talent. Others find that it’s not the cost-saving solution they thought it would be. And with former in-house success stories such as Intel’s Agency Inside and Thomson Reuters’ GSC dismantling their in-house teams as well as major marketers like Uber reducing their internal marketing headcounts, the question of long-term viability of in-house teams is starting to come into focus.

Marketers all year have voiced some of the issues with in-house teams. “If you want to take something in-house, it takes a lot of work and eventually you’re going to need the amount of headcount you have at your agency,” said one marketer.

“Whatever you do [in-house or agency], you get the best work when you’re working with a team who will tell you no or that your idea is bad,” said another, adding, “sometimes bigger corporations need an agency to step in to tell them that something is a bad idea, that they don’t have the pulse on culture.”

Another put their in-house issue bluntly: “Agencies will always do a quick turnaround. We can’t reach in-house talent on weekends.”

That doesn’t mean the business will shift fully back to agencies. Instead, marketers and agency execs believe that a new hybrid model will rise. Work will likely be split between in-house teams and external agency partners with those teams working together at times so that marketers get the best of both worlds. Anheuser-Busch, the world’s largest brewer, is already running a hybrid model of sorts. Over the last year or so, A-B InBev built out its own in-house team but doing so hasn’t been with the aim of reducing its agency relationships. Instead, the company has looked to build out a new hybrid model with its in-house and external agency teams so that it “frees up time for the big creative agencies to focus on big things” like Super Bowl, A-B InBev CMO Marcel Marcondes previously told Digiday.

That model of agencies taking the lead and in-house teams handling the day-to-day will likely become popular among marketers, said Sandra Duff, svp of strategy, activation and operations for consulting firm Jackman Reinvents. That may be especially true for marketers that have in-housed creative functions as over time those teams can lose their original intent and become more like a production house. “So the cycle may be turning in 2020 with agencies taking the lead creative role once again, delivering bold thinking for brands and using a smaller scaled internal team for smaller executions,” per Duff.

That’s not only the case for creative services handled in-house. “What we’re hearing from our members is that at the current level of in-housing many of them are finding ways to partner with these in-house resources and that the in-house resources are actually becoming clients themselves,” said Matt Kasindorf, svp of agency management services for the 4A’s, adding that he predicts it will “slow down” and that a hybrid model will likely be more popular going forward.

How agencies and brands will manage the hybrid model in the long-term is still yet to be seen. Of course, the looming threat of marketers moving services in-house doesn’t seem as bad if there’s still some work for agencies. “Movements in business may plateau or even perish, but a new synthesis nonetheless prevails. It’s no different with the matter of in-housing,” said David Rolfe, head of integrated production for BBDO. “I think we’re entering a new era of client-agency collaboration, optimized through operational co-dependence. And agencies will recognize that there’s opportunity on all fronts: responsiveness, proactiveness and complementariness.”

By Kristina Monllos

Sourced from DIGIDAY

In News

Three Ways To Make Your PR Campaigns More Data-Driven

January 10, 2020 No Comments

By Jodi Amendola

The marketing world has become increasingly data-driven. Just ask anyone who has innocently searched for a product online only to be inundated by ads for said product in their email, social media, visits to websites that accept advertising, and even in their dreams. (OK, the dreams part isn’t quite true yet — although I hear Google and Amazon are working on it.)

The one segment of integrated marketing that has been less cut and dry when it comes to measuring outcomes is public relations. While agencies have always tracked results, the ROI of media exposure that you earn (rather than buy) has never been as straightforward as measuring exposure and lead generation from marketing and advertising. With digital marketing, an email campaign and most other marketing strategies with a CTA, there’s generally an immediate, easily traceable action taken by prospects.

With PR, though, there is often no immediate action for readers to take (although sometimes readers are so impressed by a thought leadership article, for example, that they check out your website based on its inclusion in the “about the author” information).

PR is typically leveraged to build visibility and credibility — maybe you or someone on your executive team is quoted in an article or contributes a vendor-neutral thought leadership piece. The goal is to create awareness so when the time is right for a purchase, your company is included on the shortlist. But how do you measure that?

PR has always been difficult to quantify, let alone track. Fortunately, today there are tools to help measure, track and assess. Following are three steps you should take to leverage a data-driven approach to measure the success of your PR campaigns.

1. Align PR measurement with business goals.

In our data-happy age, there are all kinds of metrics you can track, but it’s a good strategy to focus on the ones most important to your business.

For example, you may want to measure how much media coverage you’re earning versus your competitors (“share of voice”). It’s important to not only grab more share of voice than your competitors, but to ensure it’s the right kind of attention.

Look for media monitoring and analytics tools to measure not only share of voice, but also the current sentiment — neutral, positive or negative — and whether it changes after launching your campaign.

If one of your PR goals is to reach specific decision-makers to increase awareness, you can track media outlets that mention your company/products/services. Multiply that media coverage by the total circulation of each outlet and weight by the importance of the media outlet by your target audience.

Another approach to see if your efforts are moving the dial on your business goals is to do a pre-campaign survey of your market, focused on brand awareness. Once the campaign is active, survey your market again to see if statistics are trending up.

If you start by aligning your PR goals to your business goals, you’ll get valuable guidance that can make a real difference in the business.

2. Establish what you’re going to measure before launching the PR campaign.

Nothing is less effective than setting goals after a campaign has launched. In PR, it’s particularly crucial because you don’t have as much control over when placements land. Unlike marketing campaigns, it’s up to reporters and editors when the thought leadership articles or quotes from interviews with your thought leaders will run in media outlets.

It’s just like taking a trip. If you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t want to start driving before you set the GPS. You could be starting out in the wrong direction entirely. Determine what you want to measure, and then put the mechanisms in place to do it.

3. Set your KPIs.

Once you know what you want to measure, you need to know how success will be defined. And you must be sure all stakeholders agree.

Some common KPIs include:

• Web traffic changes on days when PR materials (press releases, thought leadership articles, thought leadership quotes in articles) go live.

• Coverage by type of activity.

• Share of voice.

• Positive/negative/neutral coverage.

• Traffic to landing pages vs. engagement (e.g., a request for more information and/or downloads of high-value marketing materials such as a white paper or case study).

• Social media shares/retweets by month.

• Social media @ mentions or hashtag use.

It’s best to start by focusing on three to five metrics that most closely align with your business goals or that you believe will help you move the needle. You can always reevaluate and change them later.

Show Me The Data

If you’re not ready for a subscription-based media monitoring and analytics tool, Google Analytics has a lot of free tools. For example, you can use Google Analytics to measure web traffic when PR materials go live.

You can also use UTM codes to see how much web traffic a specific placement drove. To do this, simply create a custom URL to a homepage or product page with the UTM code embedded in a link, and include it as a hyperlink for PR efforts such as press releases and social media. Google Analytics will track where users come from if they click through to a page on your website using a link with the code.

Evaluate, Rinse And Repeat

The purpose of data-driven PR measurement isn’t to determine if PR is “right” for your organization. You should already have made that decision before the campaign launches.

Instead, its purpose is to help ensure your PR campaigns stay on track and that you’re optimizing your program to deliver the best possible performance based on your business goals and KPIs. If it is, great! Keep up the good work. If it isn’t, determine what needs to change, and then pivot.

Finally, remember that business goals change, as do audience perceptions. Evaluate the structure and performance of your program constantly, and you’re far more likely to create PR wins for the organization over the long term.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Jodi Amendola

Jodi Amendola is CEO of Amendola, an award-winning healthcare and technology public relations and marketing agency based in Scottsdale, AZ.

Sourced from Forbes

In News

15 Smart Writing Tips For Crafting Copy That Sticks

January 10, 2020 No Comments

Sourced from Forbes.

In a fast-paced world consumed by digital media, it can feel impossible to grab someone’s attention. Companies often struggle to stand out among all the noise to busy consumers. Sometimes they only have a few brief words to gain someone’s attention.

To help you do this well, 15 members of Forbes Communications Council gave us their tips for writing short, quick copy that will stick with your audience long after they’ve read it. Follow their tips to improve your marketing copywriting.

1. Add An Element Of Intrigue

“Bad writing transfers the burden of understanding onto the reader.” While I agree clarity is king when it comes to copywriting, sometimes an element of confusion provides the necessary hook for readers to inquire further. When you only have a few words, write to engage before writing to inform. Practice this method with caution, though — there’s a fine line between great hooks and clickbait. – Lucy Mehrtens, Templafy

2. Refine Your Key Messaging Hierarchy

Short copy is tough because you’re working with fewer variables and it may be more difficult to determine what is and isn’t working. One thing you can test, however, is your key messaging hierarchy. Whether you want to improve clicks or conversions, you can always test benefit messaging versus a call to action. Depending on what you’re selling, these copy elements will vary in appeal. – Daniel Lalley, Brondell Inc.

3. Effective Emotion

Effective copy is just that — it has an effect on its intended audience. First, determine your end-game emotion and make it specific: Will your readers be surprised? Seasonally delighted? Nautically inspired? Next, write five versions, then shut your computer. Like a fine wine, good copy has to breathe. When you return with fresh eyes, you’ll be able to discern the headline that just works. – Melissa Kandel, little word studio

4. Humor Consumers

Use humor. Do something that makes the reader crack up. Humor is a way to make a quick emotional connection with the consumer. It breaks them out of the rut of endless cookie-cutter copy and will make them remember you and your brand. – Seema Kumar, servicechannel.com

5. Use Everyday Language

I have said it before and will say it again: Use small words and short sentences. Everyday language helps to avoid confusion. Formulating brief, catchy, memorable copy that speaks to customers will capture their attention nearly every time. That is why Nike’s slogan, for example, stands the test of time. – Marija Zivanovic-Smith, NCR Corporation

6. Be A Drama Queen

Humans have emotions and like drama — there’s no communication without storytelling and storytelling without drama. Create some drama and play with emotions. Too much copy out there is plain flat, has no substance and doesn’t trigger any emotion. Create some drama and intrigue in a way that itches in your audience’s brain. – Hugo Macedo, Unbabel

7. Speak To Their Pain

To get their attention, you must speak to the pain your customers are feeling. First, envision your customer. Who do they want to be, ideally? Second, identify their problem. What is it that’s keeping them from their ideal? Third, incorporate both of those things into a single line and then let them know how you can help. Be as clear as possible about their needs and cut out everything else. – Kate Barton, Clearview Advisory

8. Avoid Clutter

In our experience, there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to copywriting. However, we see the most success with copy that’s concise and helpful to the customer. When guests are looking for answers, they don’t always want to dig through cluttered content. In this scenario, less is more. – G’Nai Blakemore, Mattress Firm

9. Crawl Public Social Media Data

Chances are your audience may already be talking about the topic on social media. Use topic-specific keywords to crawl public social media data, run word clouds and identify the most common words your audiences use while conversing about this topic. Draw some inspirations from sample social media posts driving these words. Now you get some inspiration to write the attention-grabbing copy. – Prashant Saxena, Isentia

10. Know What You Want Them To Leave With

Ask yourself and write down the answers: What is the audience thinking about my brand going into the conversation? What do I want them to think about us and/or what do I want them to do after seeing my message? And last but not least, what should I tell them to bridge the gap? Then read it out loud. This methodology forces you to write down the ideas and read them out loud to can check its effect. – Valentina Marastoni-Bieser, Cuebiq

11. Ride The Coattails Of A Trend

If your copy is intended for short-term (that is, part of a campaign and not your brand fundamentals like a tagline), try twisting a current pop culture trend or phrasing to your benefit. It will make an instant association in the reader’s mind which will help it stand out, strengthen their affinity and pique curiosity. Even better if you can twist it to be clever and tongue-in-cheek. – Ellen Sluder, RingBoost

12. Promise Solutions To Problems

The best way to attract and impact readers is by promising solutions to a challenge. Know your target audience and then write it in a way that solves their needs. It’s effective because people are hungry for answers to problems. They don’t want “fluff” but rather actionable ways to improve their experiences. If the headline follows best practices, people will not only read it but also tell others. – Stacy Sherman, Schindler Elevator Corporation

13. Show How You ‘Relieve The Pain’

The best copy means that it resonates with your audience and you are showing why their attention is valuable. If you write copy that highlights how you “alleviate the pain,” you are more likely to capture your target buyer’s interest. – Alyssa Kleinman, CipherHealth

14. Deliver On Your Value Proposition

Consumers are bombarded with messaging. One effective way to cut through the noise quickly is to deliver something helpful to your audience — a nugget of wisdom, a solution to a specific problem, an idea that will free up their time. Storytelling has become the buzzword of the day, but don’t forget the value proposition. – Eric Hadley, iHeartMedia

15. Get To The Point

Just like a brand elevator pitch, be short and to the point. Ask this question before you create your copy: What is the one thing I want to convey that is important to the person I am targeting? Then write your answer using direct and simple language. – Teri Llach, Krome Photos

Sourced from Forbes

In News

How top marketers will do their jobs better in 2020

January 10, 2020 No Comments

Sourced from AdAge

CMOs go on record about their New Year’s pledges

According to an oft-cited statistic from U.S. News and World Report, 80 percent of people will fail to stick with their New Year’s resolutions by February. But that did not stop us from getting marketing leaders on record. Our question—name one thing you will do better in 2020 than in 2019—was met with a variety of responses, from getting more sleep and meditation to “buy more brave ideas that move the needle.” What we did not tell our subjects is that we will be checking back with them in 12 months to see how they did. Pressure’s on.

Ed Pilkington, chief marketing and innovation officer, Diageo North America

Keep exploring new places! There’s always more to see, do and learn by visiting cities and states that are “firsts”—not only is it valuable for the job, gaining new insights and greater understanding of what makes our consumers tick, but it’s just great to travel and see new places. Also, in my line of work, it’s a great excuse to go to amazing bars all around the country!

Allyson Witherspoon, VP of marketing communications and media, Nissan North America

In 2020, I would like to spend more time learning and testing the next round of consumer behavior and marketing trends so we can anticipate and optimize quickly instead of mostly reacting.

Colin Mitchell, senior VP, global marketing, McDonald’s Corp.

Get out and about more. I want to spend more time in our restaurants talking to our customers and our operators and our crew.

Michelle St. Jacques, chief marketing officer, Molson Coors

Buy more brave ideas that move the needle.

Martin Renaud, global CMO, Mondelēz International

Live our purpose by helping our brands take a stand on issues that matter to our consumers: sustainability, mindful consumption and diversity and inclusion.

Jenna Lebel, CMO, Liberty Mutual

In 2020, I’m focused on explaining the ‘why’ more so my team can more effectively build on the ‘what.’ I’ve quickly learned that my job is really to provide my team with context on our marketing strategy, our business and our category so they can be more empowered and inspired to innovate.

Vineet Mehra, global CMO, Walgreens Boots Alliance

My resolution is to continue investing in our people to cultivate and develop unicorn marketing talent from within.

Meredith Verdone, CMO, Bank of America

In 2020, I resolve to continue to advance diversity of thought and an inclusive culture in my organization, and require the same from my agency partners, so we can tell the stories of the people we serve across our businesses and communities.

Raja Rajamannar, CMO at Mastercard

Sleep for at least seven hours a day!

Diego Scotti, CMO at Verizon

My focus for the year is on scaling up ways to leverage these technologies, particularly those powered by 5G, to shape the future of our marketing and customer experience.

Stephanie Buscemi, CMO at Salesforce

Our team will find a way to top Dreamforce 2019. It’s like planning a music festival—you change the acts every year, but you get people to come back because they know it will be a great experience.

Matthew Anderson, CMO at Roku

Today, one in three Americans doesn’t have traditional pay TV; we expect that to rise to around half within five years. One of my 2020 goals is to attract the next generation of full-time streamers and help fellow CMOs reach this large audience that no longer watches linear TV.

Susan Vobejda, CMO at The Trade Desk

I want to increase my offline connections with my team in 2020, as I find that personal relationships generate the best global collaboration that our team needs to thrive. It’s critical to build that level of trust and transparency so that anyone can reach out to me directly when they have a great new idea or question.

Matt Staneff, executive VP, CMO at T-Mobile

As my 4-year-old constantly reminds me, I am not in control, great ideas can come from places you least expect and there’s always a path to ‘yes.’ You just have to be creative, committed and caring enough to find it. For me, 2020 is about applying those lessons at T-Mobile, listening to customers —whether that’s with sophisticated analytics or just talking over a beer—and giving them what they want.

Ann Lewnes, CMO at Adobe

In today’s hyper-intense world, you need to focus on the needle movers. To make the space for that, I need to be better at creating boundaries and saying no. When you’re an executive, you have a lot of demands on you coming from every direction—employees, customers, press, media companies and partners. I have a tendency to say yes to too many things and I’ve come to understand that I just can’t—and shouldn’t—do everything. That means resting more responsibility on my incredibly capable team and spending my time on what’s most critical to Adobe’s success.

Sherina Smith, marketing VP, American Family Insurance

In 2020 I want to work on being a better leader by focusing on more mindfulness, meditation and getting out of my comfort zone. Team dynamics are often a reflection of the temperament of the leader, and as we continue to challenge ourselves to be better, we have to be comfortable pushing out of our comfort zones. And that starts with the leader. I find when I set aside quiet time for meditation and mindfulness I’m better able to help my teams maintain focus and perspective on what matters most and help them navigate new and innovative solutions to solving business problems.

Lorraine Twohill, CMO at Google

Read more. Not only because it is good for me and I learn a lot. But because I discover different points of view and perspectives. And it makes the work we put out into the world way better. That, and my reusable water bottle.

Feature Image: From top l to r: Ed Pilkington, Allyson Witherspoon, Colin Mitchell, Michelle St. Jacques, Martin Renaud, Diego Scotti, Stephanie Buscemi, Matthew Anderson, Susan Vobejda, Matt Staneff, Jenna Lebel, Vineet Mehra, Meredith Verdone, Raja Rajamannar, Ann Lewnes, Sherina Smith, Lorraine Twohill. Credit: Submitted

Sourced from AdAge

In News

AAIToolkit – Breaking the Sound Barrier with Damian Loscher

January 9, 2020 No Comments

“Breaking the Sound Barrier”

AAI Nuts and Bolts of Advertising seminars form part of the AAI Advertisers’ Toolkit, an initiative to help advertisers and marketers keep up-to-date on important advertising topics and useful marketing questions.

Seminar Details

In a world where our choice of media has continued to explode, why do we still listen to more than three hours of radio every day? Radio has proven to be more resilient than we could ever have predicted, or imagined. But the challenge for radio has not gone away and new services like Spotify are nibbling away at radio’s franchise, and may have taken a small bite out of younger audiences.

Breaking The Sound Barrier is a wide and deep examination of listening behaviour in Ireland. Derived from more than 3,000 interviews conducted during 2019, the dataset is rich enough to delve into every demographic and explore audio consumption in all its facets. And because this is not the first time this data has been collected, we are able to trend behaviour, thereby adding a new dimension to our understanding of how our listening has changed and is likely to change in the years ahead.

About the Speaker:

Damian Loscher is Managing Director of Ipsos MRBI (Ireland) and a Partner in the Ipsos Global Network. During his almost 30 years in research, Damian has directed more than 1,000 studies, covering almost every industry sector, giving him a unique perspective on the marketing questions that seem to challenge every business. He has a particular interest in media research and is involved in ongoing projects in the TV, Radio and Out Of Home sectors.

Damian is Ipsos MRBI’s chief methodologist and pollster, and writes regularly on polling and politics for The Irish Times. He is also a former Chairman of the Marketing Society.

Keep up to date and join the interaction

Free to AAI Members – please register your attendance

€40 + booking fee for non-members
Book now

Tuesday 28th January, 8.15am

Sourced from Association of Advertisers in Ireland

In News

The Most Captivating Brand Campaigns We Saw on Social Media in 2019

January 9, 2020 No Comments

By Mónica Marie Zorrilla

Unmetric analyzes dogs, K-pop and Colonel Sanders as engagement perfection

For the past decade, brands have been capitalizing on the pervasiveness of social media in consumers’ daily lives and shopping habits. And this past year was no different.

Social media analytics company Unmetric found that brands that promoted messaging with edge, savvy, conviction—and occasionally dogs—won the marketing game.

Of that messaging, video—particularly those with memorable storylines, guest appearances or creative approaches to addressing social issues—reined as the overall best-performing format for branded and original content, a consistent trend in their numbers since at least 2015.

Lux Narayan, CEO of Unmetric (now a Falcon.io/Cision company), observed that the majority of Facebook and Instagram’s top advertising posts this year were videos. However, the majority of brand posts on Twitter with the most engagement in 2019 were posts accompanied by images that involved controversy, humor and one-liners, riffing on trending topics or roasting celebrity personas and political figures.

Brands that were quick to troll kept their follow-up memes relevant while also retaining and promoting their core identity for plenty of retweets, like this SparkNotes tweet from July:

Per Unmetric, retweets on the platform are a far more valuable metric for brands than favorites.

To determine levels of engagement, Unmetric analyzes brand posts on a month-by-month basis across social platforms and scores them between zero and 1,000 based on variables such as the number of shares. For YouTube, there is no engagement score, but likes, views and comments are important. Unmetric’s own algorithms and human insights also figure into the ranking and paid, not organic, reach is measured.

Narayan pointed out that certain types of campaigns performed better than others in 2019, listing the most popular categories as social responsibility, satire, anything with animals, music industry partnerships and holidays and observances.

Here’s a breakdown by category of some of the social posts that Unmetric designated a perfect score of 1,000:

Social responsibility

Gillette’s “The Best a Man Can Be” campaign featured a 90-second spot created by AOR Grey New York this past January. Director Kim Gehrig beckons viewers to redefine masculinity and reconsider the age-old “boys will be boys” excuse. This #MeToo era twist on Gillette’s 30-year-old “The Best a Man Can Get” garnered thousands of retweets and YouTube views, making it one of the most engaging brand posts at the start of 2019.

Another top performer in this category was similar to the Gillette ad. Nike’s “Dream Crazier” spot, also directed by Gehrig, was also created to celebrate a 30-year-old slogan (“Just do it”) while focusing on the subject of gender. Narrated by Serena Williams, the 90-second spot acknowledges the double-standard female athletes are subjected to whenever they show emotion and are labeled as “crazy” instead of ambitious or passionate. Per Unmetric’s research, the ad was one of the most engaging brand posts on Instagram in February.

Click HERE to read the remainder of the article.

Feature Image Credit: Ray-Ban’s #ProudToBelong is a campaign ran across most of its social networks throughout 2019. It was one of the most popular YouTube ads this year. Ray Ban

By Mónica Marie Zorrilla

Sourced from ADWEEK 40

In News

5 digital marketing skills to learn in 2020

January 9, 2020 No Comments

Sourced from engadget.

Give yourself a leg up in 2020 with these e-learning packages covering marketing’s hottest skills.

You don’t need to work in the ad sales department at Facebook in order to understand the importance of digital marketing today. And, if you want to land any of the growing number of lucrative positions in this constantly-evolving field, you need to be up-to-date with the latest tools and platforms. That’s why we’ve rounded up five of the best and most popular digital marketing training packages around to give you a leg up and set you up for success in the field. Read on for details:

SEO

The Complete 2020 Google SEO & Growth Hacking Bundle

stack

MSRP: $1400 | Sale Price: $25 (98 percent off)

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In News

These were the most-downloaded apps and games of the decade

January 9, 2020 No Comments

By Chance Miller.

We’re officially in the final weeks of the decade, and App Annie is celebrating with a look back at the biggest apps of the 2010s. According to the App Annie data, there were a few surprises, but some of it is just as you would expect.

App Annie’s charts are based on data from the iOS App Store and Google Play beginning in January 2012. Data through December 31, 2011 accounts only for iOS.

In terms of pure downloads, Facebook heavily dominated the charts for the 2010s. The Facebook app itself came in as the most-downloaded app, followed by Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram in second, third, and fourth places, respectively. Here are the full rankings for downloads from 2010 through 2019 – the inclusion of TikTok is especially notable given how much of a newcomer it is.

Facebook
Facebook Messenger
WhatsApp
Instagram
Snapchat
Skype
TikTok
UC Browser
YouTube
Twitter

What about the top apps in terms of spending? That list is heavily dominated by subscription applications, with Netflix coming in at number one. Even though Netflix ditched iTunes billing for new customers last year, it still has a large user base paying via iTunes.

Netflix
Tinder
Pandora Music
Tencent Video
LINE
iQIYI
Spotify
YouTube
HBO Now
Kwai

If you narrow things down to games, the most-downloaded list is a quite a nostalgic collection of some of the most viral games of the decade:

Subway Surfers
Candy Crush Saga
Temple Run 2
My Talking Tom
Clash of Clans
Pou
Hill Climb Racing
Minion Rush
Fruit Ninja
8 Ball Pool

And the top 10 games in terms of consumer spending:

Clash of Clans
Monster Strike
Candy Crush Saga
Puzzle & Dragons
Fate/Grand Order
Honour of Kings
Fantasy Westward Journey
Pokémon GO
Game of War – Fire Age
Clash Royale

All in all, App Annie says the app economy is poised to continue growing as we head into 2020:

This decade has been a time of remarkable growth for the mobile economy. With a 5% increase in downloads, and 15% growth in consumer spend (excluding third-party Android) year-over-year in 2019 this looks set to continue in 2020

What were some of your favourite apps and games of the decade? Do any of the apps that made these lists surprise you? Let us know down in the comments. You can read App Annie’s full report here.

By Chance Miller

@ChanceHMiller

Chance is an editor for the entire 9to5 network and covers the latest Apple news for 9to5Mac. Tips, questions, typos to [email protected]

Sourcerd from 9TO5Mac

In News

News publishers adopt ‘show don’t tell’ for marketing subscriptions

January 8, 2020 No Comments

By Max Willens

News publishers have reaped the early rewards from paywalls and are increasingly turning their focus on the overall consumer marketing challenge of marketing their products beyond the most hard-core loyalists.

Part of that is bringing in new talent. Witness Condé Nast hiring former Stitch Fix marketer Dierdre Findlay to be its new chief marketing officer. And part of that is more robust marketing strategies that move people down the funnel to purchase a subscription by emphasizing the product benefits.

“When we look at the number of readers who’d encounter a paywall or encounter an offer from us, it is a very small percentage of our total audience,” Washington Post CMO Miki King said. “And while I think that the public understand to some degree that the Washington Post is a paid news product, there are many people who won’t necessarily encounter a paywall. We are trying to find ways to introduce the commercial aspect of our business in ways that are not intrusive.”

Over the summer, The Washington Post assembled a 12-person team tasked with improving the way that content is marketed and delivered to subscribers, King said. The team includes members of the Post’s newsroom, marketing, audience, product and engineering, whose goal is “to translate everything we’re doing across the organization into ways we can deliver things to subscribers,” King said. That group, which was assembled from existing staffers who still report in to their respective lines of business, coordinates to ensure that big stories are promoted in a more extensive, timely fashion.

For example, when the Post released “Where the Pain Pills Went,” a large editorial project around where prescription opioid medications were distributed across the United States, the Post’s team had a several-days head start creating messaging around the project for the Post’s subscribers.

Whereas in the past the Post’s consumer marketing team would largely have to rely on marketing stories after they had come out, coordination among the new team ensured that the Post was able to create several emails’ worth of marketing messages around several of its largest projects this year, including its opioid database.

King said at the Post, a newsroom representative keeps the group apprised of stories or projects that could work, ideally giving the marketing and product teams a chance to develop messaging and schedule promotions that can go out at the right time.

But the sensitive nature of many newsroom investigations limits the amount of coordination possible. For example, The Guardian’s blockbuster story about Cambridge Analytica was one of The Guardian’s biggest drivers of reader contributions and subscriptions, said Mark Rice-Oxley, the Guardian’s membership editor in the U.K. But the story was a closely held secret even within The Guardian’s newsroom, which required the contributions team to develop messaging and chatter around it after the fact.

“Ninety-nine percent of editorial didn’t even know about Cambridge Analytica,” Rice-Oxley said.

New publishers’ impulse to tailor messages about how much consumer revenue is valued must be balanced with an impulse to create messages that are broadly applicable. The Guardian, for example, tries to frame its requests for revenue and messaging around subscriptions in ways are “clear over clever,” said Amanda Michel, The Guardian’s global director of contributions.

“We have to write these things in a way that translates regardless of someone’s first language,” Michel said.

Publishers’ recent focus on consumer marketing are designed to support ambitious subscription targets that many news publishers have laid out. The Guardian plans to double the number of people directly contributing money by 2022, to 2 million; The New York Times has vowed to amass 10 million paying subscribers for its portfolio of products by 2025.

“We’re telling the story of our work,” Michel said.

By Max Willens

Sourced from DIGIDAY