We’ve all sent messages meant for someone else. Let’s just stop that.
Our emails aren’t always as well thought out, as accurately typed, or as succinct as we would like them to be—and that’s before you consider problems like sending emails without a required attachment, or typing the wrong person’s address altogether. If this happens to you often, you must know the “undo send” feature is heaven-sent.
This feature is easy to find on some platforms, but on others you may need to take some extra steps to set it up. Here’s how you can save yourself some embarrassment and enable it in all of your inboxes.
Gmail
Gmail already assumes you might make a mistake, so the Undo Sent button comes enabled by default. David Nield
A feature called Undo Send is built right into Gmail, and it works without you having to turn it on. Whenever you send a message, you’ll see an Undo link at the bottom left corner of the screen. If you tap on it, you’ll be able to bring your email back as a draft.
You can set the amount of time you’ve got before the email can’t be recovered anymore. On Gmail’s web interface, click the cog icon (top right), then choose Settings. Go to the General tab and you’ll see an Undo Send drop-down. There, you can choose from a time period of five (the default), 10, 20, or 30 seconds. Gmail will apply this choice across the web and mobile.
Emails you bring back from the digital ether pop back in the compose window and appear as if you’d never sent them. You can save them as drafts while you mull over your response, send them again, or delete them completely.
Outlook
You might have to jump through a couple of hoops before you can delay the shipment of Outlook emails.David Nield
The Mail app that comes preinstalled with Windows doesn’t have an undo send feature, but one is available in the free Outlook.com web client. You can set up a similar feature in the paid-for Outlook desktop app too, but it’s a bit more involved.
On the web platform of Outlook, click the cog icon (top right), choose View all Outlook settings, then Compose and reply. Use the Undo send slider to set up the window of time you’ve got for bringing the message back—from zero to 10 seconds (zero effectively disables the feature).
After you’ve sent a message on the web, click Undo at the bottom. This stops the message from being sent and returns it to draft status.
The desktop version of Outlook doesn’t have a simple undo send feature, but you can set a rule to delay every message you send. From the File tab, click Manage Rules & Alerts, then New Rule. Choose Apply rule on messages I send, then click Next twice, and Yes to confirm. You’ll reach a dialog box where you can click Defer delivery by a number of minutes. Check the box next to this rule, then click the link underneath to set how many minutes the delay should be—you can go from one to 120. Click through the wizard’s remaining screens to set the rule.
Any emails you send from Outlook from then on will sit in the Outbox folder for the specified number of minutes. If you want to cancel a sent message before the delay runs out, you’ll need to drag it back into the Drafts folder.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to undo the sending of emails in the Outlook apps for Android and iOS—if you want to be able to bring back your messages, you’ll need to use the website or the desktop application.
Third-party clients
Spark works with both iOS and Android, so you’ll never have to apologize for not sending the file you said you’d attach. David Nield
If you use anything besides Gmail or Outlook—including Apple Mail or Yahoo—you unfortunately don’t have a native undo send feature built in. If you think you’ll find a feature like this useful, you’ll need to set up a third-party client to access your messages.
Mailbird for Windows will set you back $20 per year or $40 for a lifetime purchase, though you can try it out for free for three days. If you click the menu button (three lines, top left), then Settings and Composing, and head to the Sending heading, you’ll be able to adjust the Undo send period from zero (disabled) to 30 seconds. Once you’ve enabled the undo send feature, you can click Undo at the bottom of the screen right after sending a message to bring it back.
Spark covers macOS, iOS, and Android, and is free for personal use (if you need team features, it’s $8 a month). The Undo option appears in the desktop and mobile apps as soon as you send a message, and you’ve got five seconds to change your mind—you can’t alter that time limit or disable the feature. If you undo a send, the message reverts to a draft.
Airmail for macOS and iOS is another option, yours for $27 for desktop but free on iOS. In the Mac app, open the Airmail menu and choose Preferences, Composing, and Sending Delay—you can pick from five to 120 seconds. While emails are waiting to be sent, you’ll find them in the Drafts folder, where you can click Cancel to stop them from being dispatched.
On iOS, tap the menu button (three lines, top left), then choose Settings, Undo Send, and either a five or 10-second time delay. For the specified time period, you’ll be able to tap Undo Send at the bottom of the screen right after sending an email.
Another option is Mailbutler, an extension that runs on top of Apple Mail on the Mac. You can pay for extra features, like support for teams, but the free version already includes the undo send feature. After installing it on your Mac, head to the web dashboard to set the undo send delay under Preferences and General from the web menu (the Mailbutler icon). With that done, you’ll see an Undo send pop-up appear whenever you send a message through Apple Mail.
Feature Image Credit: Did you just send that email to your boss? Yes, yes you did.Feedough via Depositphotos
Content and ads from politicians are not subject to review
Instagram began testing parent company Facebook’s third-party fact-checking initiative in the U.S. in May, and Monday, the program was expanded worldwide.
The social network’s 45 third-party fact-checkers will independently assess and rate false information on Instagram in order to help detect it and reduce its distribution.
Instagram said in a blog post that content rated as false or partly false by a third-party fact checker will be removed from its Explore tab and hashtag pages in order to reduce its distribution, and it will be labeled in order to enable people to better decide for themselves what to read, trust and share.
The labels link to the rating from the fact-checker and provide links to articles from credible sources that debunk the questionable content.
Instagram is using image-matching technology to find duplicates of the content and label them, and content that is rated false or partly false on Facebook will automatically be labeled as such on Instagram, as well.
The company uses a combination of feedback from its community and artificial intelligence to determine which content should be passed along to third-party fact-checkers for review.
Instagram said in its blog post, “We want you to trust what you see on Instagram. Photo- and video-based misinformation is increasingly a challenge across our industry and something our teams have been focused on addressing.”
Feature Image Credit: Labels link to the rating from the fact-checker and provide links to articles from credible sources. Instagram
Over the last 18 months,Time Out has been honing its audience segments since switching to first-party data-based data-management platform, Permutive. During that time, it’s scaled back to five core audience interest areas: Things to do, restaurant-goers, culture vultures, travel and family. These core audience segments have been further carved up as the team has tagged the site’s content under the most relevant and accurate categories. It now has around 170 different segments to offer advertisers covering a broad range, including art enthusiasts, Black Friday lovers, country explores and vegan champions.
The purpose: Gaining visibility over its addressable audience to then identify and target every user on their first visit to the site within 100 milliseconds. Targeting users while they are still on-site, showing them the right ad based on their interests and browsing behavior, reduces waste and, in theory, boosts ad effectiveness.
“It’s all about scale,” said Robyn Bartholomew, director of digital ad sales at Time Out Media. “How we can increase scale for campaigns, how we can increase lookalike models, how we can increase overlapping audiences and which segments index highly so we can bolster our overall reach.”
According to the publisher, the scale of Time Out’s audience was previously untapped due, in part, to inaccurate tagging. Now, the addressable audience pool has increased fivefold. It can also track reader behavior much quicker than previously, which ranged between 24 and 48 hours. Speeding up this process lets the ad team feed back to editorial teams who can make content decisions based on what people are reading.
Time Out can now show how segments overlap too, for instance, 90% of music lovers are also in the entertainment segment, or 44% regularly read the Things to do section, or are three times more likely to also fall into the dance-lovers segment. This level of detail means it can recommend who to target for future campaigns, giving clients a deeper understanding of how audiences engage with the site, a capability Time Out has been pitching in the last few months to U.K. agencies.
While the publisher has been on a mission to diversify revenues from advertising into commerce, events and food halls, digital advertising is its largest revenue source. In the first six months of 2019, it generated £7.3 million ($9.7 million) in revenue from digital advertising, a 4% increase from the same period the previous year, according to its financial results. Although it was unwilling to split out how much revenue was generated by interest in its ramped-up targeting capabilities.
Another hurdle that previously thwarted Time Out’s audience size is the crackdown from Safari and Firefox browsers on third-party tracking cookies. Around 49% of Time Out’s audience are iPhone users and so have the potential to go dark now Apple has unfurled Intelligent Tracking Prevention in Safari to stop companies from monitoring user behavior across the web. Using Permutive, TimeOut can recoup visibility of its audience because it does not rely on third-party cookies which are blocked by Safari and Firefox.
“[The impact] is not necessarily CPMs dropping,” said Bartholomew, “it’s more about how big the audience pool is and being able to target those people in the user segments. It’s a lot smaller by the time you push it through [Google Ad Manager] DFP, the avails just wouldn’t be there. Once you get down to criteria like device targeting the number of users dwindles significantly.”
Increasingly, publishers are finding new ways to make their first-party data sweat, targeting audiences at scale without relying on third-party cookies and expanding how that audience can be monetized. Publishers like The Washington Post,Insider Inc. and Immediate Media are exploring beyond-the-cookie strategies though more granular targeting around audience intents, behaviors, sentiments and interests. It all tallies up to new ways of commercializing publisher audiences and pitching new capabilities to advertisers.
Another opportunity for Time Out, thanks to its e-commerce business, is overlaying purchase data, so advertisers can target people who bought Taylor Swift concert tickets last year or who regularly visit the Royal Opera House.
Like other publishers, the race is on to grow logged-in users, a more overt declaration of user identity not reliant on first-or third-party data. Time Out has a small cohort of people who log in to access functions like leaving restaurant or show reviews. But to grow this it needs to understand what would encourage readers to share an email address in, whether that’s more tailored content or ads, to maintain a healthy identity-based advertising revenue stream.
As the decade draws to a close, Marketing Week looks back at the defining moments of the 2010s from the News of the World phone-hacking scandal to the launch of Instagram and the dawn of influencer culture.
2010 – The coalition government and start of austerity
Given the seismic ructions seen in politics in the years since the 2016 referendum, it’s easy to forget how significant the first government of the decade was.
After 13 years of New Labour, the country wanted change. The electorate, however, wasn’t entirely sure what the alternative was. The election of May 2010 was indecisive. David Cameron’s detoxification of the Conservative brand had helped the Tories become the biggest party, but shy of the requisite number of MPs needed to form a government.
Whether out of a sense of duty, or a naked pursuit of power, Cameron acted quickly and agreed with Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg to form the UK’s first post-war coalition. It was a government that would define politics, the economy and in many ways marketing for the next 10 years.
In 2010, the UK and world economy were still reeling from the financial crash, bank bailouts and subsequent monetary crisis in the eurozone. Consumer confidence was low, the deficit high and business brittle.
The response was brutal. To restore confidence in UK PLC, the coalition government prioritised debt control. A huge programme of cuts was unveiled.
Spend on marketing activity was immediately frozen, and then reviewed and cut by half in the coalition’s first year. The Central Office of Information (COI), the government’s marketing agency, was no longer the UK’s biggest advertiser and wouldn’t be long for this world.
Public information was an unnecessary cost. The language was unhelpful to the perception and standing of marketing.
Once shorn of much of its budget, its responsibilities were passed to the Cabinet Office. It left many agencies scrambling to fill the tens of millions they earned from being on the COI’s roster. Some suffered serious damage. Others reportedly worked for smaller margins in order to stay in line when the crumbs were being thrown.
The narrative around marketing communications was pejorative, with statements suggesting the government was taking decisive action by ridding Whitehall of the profligacy of marketers. Public information was an unnecessary cost. The language was unhelpful to the perception and standing of marketing.
Elsewhere, the coalition furthered the spread of brand purpose. Its flagship ‘Big Society’ initiative aimed to spread responsibility for societal advancement by marrying business, community and the benevolence of people.
While the Big Society was flawed and ultimately retired, the concept of brands having a wider role took deeper root. Corporations sensitive to the sense of injustice people felt following the near-collapse of the financial system at the end of the previous decade felt a growing need to do their bit.
The biggest act and legacy of the coalition, however, is austerity. The downsizing of the government’s marcomms operation was insignificant compared with other cuts to central and local government spending.
Although the economy stabilised through the decade from its 2008-2009 nadir, it remained in a perpetual state of uncertainty through to the end of the decade.
At the same time, those that bore the brunt of public sector cuts grew angry and frustrated. A sense of injustice that arguably played its part in triggering Brexit and yet more economic uncertainty. Marketers, as spenders of cash that would be otherwise returned to shareholders, were forced to tighten their belts. RP
2010 – The publication of How Brands Grow
Although the commercial viability of the printed word has undoubtedly lessened in the 2010s, one type of book appears to be in rude health – marketing theory.
Feeding the anxiety many marketers feel about their capabilities in wake of some of the big macro shifts seen in the decade, tens of such books appear to be published every month – with transformation, agile, disruption and customer experience particularly popular among publishers, at least.
Given the volume and often generic subject matter they are often sent for donation to charity after a short period as a talking point sat on your boss’s office desk. One very notable exception came right at the decade’s start: Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow.
“The first book in a decade to say anything new about brand strategy,” according to Mark Ritson, How Brands Grow cut through a lot of the theory, and indeed practice, that had become common in marketing to that point.
In very brief summary: penetration should be key for marketers, with more sales from more people reached through mass marketing being demonstrably more effective than targeting a segment of a brand’s potential buyers. A focus on distinctive assets such as colours, tag lines and logos trumps differentiation.
There are few other marketing books launched in the decade that would be as known, as consumed and as polarising as How Brands Grow.
“Sales growth won’t come from relentlessly targeting a particular segment of a brand’s buyers,” Sharp asserted.
Ally this “mental availability” with the “physical availability” of being on sale in as many places as possible and you have a recipe for success, the book argued. With the Ehrenberg Bass Institute at his back, the professor is unwavering in the belief that he and his book are right. This wasn’t finger in the air theory, Sharp argued, it was science.
As the decade wore on so did the momentum behind the high-profile converts. Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Pepsico and Mars have all at times underpinned activity for some of their brands with takeaways from How Brands Grow.
One thing can be guaranteed, the book and/or its author will be mentioned at some point during any marketing conference, anywhere in the world.
Ubiquity also attracts criticism. There are plenty that reject Sharp’s blanket conclusions. Indeed, Ritson has argued strongly against Sharp’s dismissal of targeting and differentiation, memorably in a debate at The Festival of Marketing in 2017. And despite its influence on some, the movement towards micro-targeting and the quest for ever deeper engagement has grown exponentially in the decade since How Brands Grow was published.
Whether it is used or not to inform brand strategy, whether you flinch at or favour its findings, the book’s conclusions are parked in marketers’ minds.
At a recent conference, I asked the audience if they had heard of How Brands Grow, most hands went up. When I asked how many had read it, only a few went down. When I asked whether they agreed with its findings, the audience was split.
There are few other marketing books launched in the decade that would be as known, as consumed and as polarising. Or as influential. RP
2010 – The launch of Instagram
Instagram began life in 2010 as a micro-blog for sharing photos. It was created by two college friends, Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom, with Krieger posting the first image on the platform – a lopsided shot of South Beach Harbour, San Francisco, with no caption. Later that day Systrom posted a pic of his dog and then girlfriend’s foot, with the word “Test”.
By October of that year, Instagram was available to download as an app and was gaining a following among a young, digital-native crowd. Just two years later Facebook bought the platform for $1bn (£700m).
At the time, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the acquisition of Instagram as an “important milestone” as it was the first time his company had purchased a product or company with so many users. He added: “We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all.”
The gamble of Instagram quickly began to pay off. By the end of 2012, Instagram boasted around 90 million active users and within two years of the Facebook buyout, the app was valued at $35bn (£26.5bn).
Instagram hit just as a more emotionally-entangled celebrity culture was taking hold, one that first surfaced in reality television.
Brands, attracted by a visual platform with a younger, predominantly female demographic, quickly started moving in. The fashion industry loved it, with Nike and Gucci among the Instagram early adopters.
Ads started appearing on the app in 2013 and, although never designed to be an ecommerce site, small independent sellers used artful images and caption info to direct users to their latest products.
Instagram hit just as a more emotionally-entangled celebrity culture was taking hold, one that first surfaced in reality television. It opened up the daily lives of TV and pop stars, not just from the back of a limo or getting ready for their close-up in a make-up room, but also hanging out in the kitchen or kicking off their heels in an airport lounge.
If a celeb’s daily life was increasingly being lived out on the platform, soon regular users behaving in an attention-grabbing way began to enjoy a certain type of fame. So influencer culture was born.
Hired by brands as a shortcut to users, seduced by images of their favourite Instagrammer posing in a new pair of shoes or sipping a poolside drink at a newly-opened hotel, the influencer’s bankability was measured by the number of likes they generated.
However, times are changing. The ‘Checkout on Instagram’ function now allows users to buy directly from brands within the app, while ongoing experiments around hiding the ‘like’ button – or deleting it altogether – will undoubtedly have a big impact on influencer culture as we know it.
Then there’s the credibility issue. In 2018, then Unilever CMO Keith Weed called on platforms like Instagram to take “urgent action” to rebuild trust amid accusations of influencer fraud around fake followers, bots and “dishonest business models”. Couple with this intense criticism regarding concerns about online bullying and peer pressure on the platform.
The issues around credibility and brand safety aside, Instagram remains a buoyant, creative space and with in excess of 1 billion users looks set to surpass Facebook usage in the years to come.
And to think, Zuckerberg very nearly opted to buy Foursquare instead. MB
2011 – News of the World shuts
It was the story that had everything. Espionage, power struggles, crime and punishment. The kind of story that would make the front page of Britain’s biggest selling Sunday newspaper, the News of the World.
Except in the summer of 2011, the newspaper was the story. What had been brewing for five years was brought to a dramatic, and sudden, conclusion when The Guardian broke the shocking news a private investigator working for the newspaper had hacked the voicemail of the then missing teenager Milly Dowler, who was later found murdered.
Celebrities were one thing. Dowler, whose disappearance and death had resonated deeply with the British public, was quite another.
Attuned to public opinion and fearing reputational damage through an association with the toxicity surrounding the tabloid, advertisers began to pull their patronage. Without the support of the public or brands, the newspaper was doomed. The stories that had given the News of the World brand salience became its undoing. It closed on 7 July.
The paper’s closure was significant. Even though sales were past their peak, the newspaper was still read by more than 2.5 million people just before its closure. The arrival of The Sun on Sunday just seven months later was evidence the market still existed. Indeed, it has been argued the extension of Murdoch’s favoured red top was something, if not planned, then welcomed.
Aside from the implications on the News Corporation newspaper empire and the liberty of editors Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson, the scandal also scuppered Murdoch’s plans to widen his UK broadcast empire.
The stories that had given the News of the World brand salience became its undoing.
News Corp’s bid to buy the remaining 60% of BSkyB was shelved two days after the closure of the News of the World. The company was bruised and therefore fair game for emboldened MPs who were preparing to pass a Commons motion to wreck the deal. Despite further attempts, the takeover never happened.
Rupert Murdoch had been irrevocably damaged too. Prime minister David Cameron launched the Leveson Inquiry to formally investigate the phone-hacking scandal. Up until then, politicians had courted Murdoch’s favour and the public perceived him as all-powerful. His appearance at the Select Committee hearing in front of unforgiving MPs may not have established any wrongdoing on his part, but it did at least reveal him to be fallible.
“This is the most humble day of my life” said Murdoch, the very least expected by way of contrition, doing nothing to redeem him in the minds of the public.
As a demonstration of the power of brands to force the hands of media owners, marking the beginning of the end for Murdoch’s stranglehold on British media, the events of July 2011 would resonate through the rest of the decade. RP
2011 – The John Lewis Christmas ad
It seemed the stars aligned when John Lewis revealed its Christmas TV ad in 2011. Suddenly the department store group was hot property, gaining social media shares and tabloid coverage for The Long Wait, by agency adam&eveDDB, which showed an excited boy waiting to give a present to his parents.
Most of the ingredients for success had been in place for a while. John Lewis ran its first Christmas TV ad in 2007, with a spot that used products to create shadow pictures, and followed it with a series of ads that focused on the range of gift products available in its stores.
All of the ads had some familiar features: a popular song, performed at a slower tempo and in a different key to the original – nostalgia, middle-class families, cute children.
Rival advertisers followed suit, making big budget Christmas adverts a fixture in the festive schedule.
What changed? In 2011, the retailer moved from a focus on products to broader brand building. This allowed more emphasis on story, without the need to squeeze in a bunch of products. And the brand timed the change well, picking up on the Christmas-shaped snowballing of social media participation.
The 2011 ad received such a positive response that subsequent John Lewis ads have been keenly awaited and commented upon ever since. The debut of the annual John Lewis Christmas advert is now promoted in advance, supported by product tie-ups and broadcast deals.
Rival advertisers followed suit, keen to capture some of that sparkle, making big budget Christmas adverts a fixture in the festive schedule. The Christmas advertising period has been extended and – like the Super Bowl in the US – there is as much discussion about the campaigns as there is about the big day itself.
Christmas ads are reviewed on mainstream breakfast TV shows and there is a growing tradition for low-budget independent ads to be touted as ‘even more heart-warming than John Lewis’. Spoof John Lewis ads are awaited almost as keenly as the real thing.
For its part, John Lewis has nurtured its theme carefully, not straying too far from a successful formula. The ingredients have remained the same, with a distinctive cute animal or fantasy character (or Elton John) taking centre stage. Audiences have now been charmed by dragons, monsters, dogs and a randy penguin. And, all the while, audiences wait to see what will be next. MV
2020 is set to be a landmark year for Apple. Jaws have already hit the floor on the back of reports the company will release up to six new iPhones with the iPhone 12 set for some particularly notable upgrades. And now yet another new iPhone has been revealed.
“The latest news coming from the supply chain is that Apple is likely to add yet another LCD-based model to its iPhone lineup for 2020m” DigiTimes explains. “This new member will be an upgraded version of the widely speculated iPhone SE2 featuring a [larger] 5.5- or 6.1-inch LCD display and available at the end of 2020 or in earlier 2021, said the sources.”
Gordon’s Top Apple Daily Deals:
AirPods with Charging Case – (typically $159.99) – Amazon: $139 / B&H: $144.99 ($10 price increase) / Best Buy: $144.99 / Staples: $144 / Target: $144.99 / Walmart: $139
AirPods with Wireless Charging Case – (typically $199.99) – Amazon: $169 / Target: $169.99 / Walmart: $169 (back in stock)
iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, iPhone 11 Pro Max – save up to $700 with second purchase + free year of Apple TV+ – Verizon – shop deal now
A lot of this makes sense. Acclaimed industry insider Ming-Chi Kuo has touted a circa 5.4-inch iPhone for several months. This ‘iPhone SE3’ appears to be based on the iPhone 11 while ‘iPhone SE2’ is based on the older 4.7-inch iPhone 8 and sports a Touch ID home button alongside 3GB RAM and (remarkably) the same A13 chip inside the iPhone 11 range.
A circa 5.5-inch budget iPhone has been rumored for some time. Here is a proportional representation … [+]
MAX RUDBERG
Apple iPhone 12: Everything We Know So Far [Updated]
So, big or smaller, premium or affordable, 2020 looks like the year Apple’s iPhones may just offer it all. Not bad when one iPhone, in particular, is already my favourite smartphone of 2019.
Feature Image Credit: 2020 iPhone 12 concept, Ben Geskin
I am an experienced freelance technology journalist. I have written for Wired, The Next Web, TrustedReviews, The Guardian and the BBC in addition to Forbes. I began in b2b print journalism covering tech companies at the height of the dot com boom and switched to covering consumer technology as the iPod began to take off. A career highlight for me was being a founding member of TrustedReviews. It started in 2003 and we were repeatedly told websites could not compete with print! Within four years we were purchased by IPC Media (Time Warner’s publishing division) to become its flagship tech title. What fascinates me are the machinations of technology’s biggest companies. Got a pitch, tip or leak? Contact me on my professional Facebook page. I don’t bite.
Currently one of the most popular social media apps on the market, Instagram is now a fertile ground for growing internet fame and promoting brands and businesses. However, with the vast amounts of competition across the site, growing an authentic following requires a careful and strategic approach. Below is seven of the key steps one can take to growing a genuine following on Instagram.
Tune your profile
There are surprising amounts of Instagram accounts that neglect to do it. Carefully create every piece of your Instagram profile to evoke your brand and appeal to your target market. Craft your username to contain keywords relevant to your business so that it pops up when people search for your services. Use your bio to succinctly describe what your business does and what makes it great. Post carefully crafted images that evoke your business. Put together a profile that looks promising to follow.
Get your hashtag out there
By now, pretty much everyone knows that a major key to getting word of your brand across the internet is to create your own custom hashtag – #jennyssalon, #eatatjoes, #mikesgarage, whatever might be relevant. However, according to SMMRank online media platform it’s simply not enough to just throw your hashtag out there and hope that people will not only use it, but also associate it with your brand.
You need to go a bit further than that if the hashtag is going to gain any real momentum.
Consider the places that you advertise your business, both online and offline. Digital ads? Posters? TV or radio ads? Billboards? Put your hashtag in all of them. Feature it prominently next to your logo. Not only will this get your hashtag out there, it’ll also ensure that it’s associated with your brand.
WOW! Budapest is one of the most Instagrammed UNESCO sites!
Incredibly sexy plus-size Hungarian girl taking over Instagram! — PHOTOS
Look into influencer marketing
Marketing your Instagram profile (and your brand in general) through influencers might, be one of the most effective approaches to marketing.
Really, think about it.
Internet celebrities have some seriously loyal followings nowadays – hearing your brand recommended to them by a third party that they trust is likely to do a lot more to entice potential customers to your brand than any direct advertising.
Of course, you’ll need to ensure that the influencers you choose to market you have decently sized followings that cross over with your target market; but considering the sheer amount of prominent individuals to choose from on Instagram alone, chances are that you won’t have any trouble finding the right one.
Post at a consistent rate
It goes without saying that what you post ought to be engaging and relevant to your business; but besides that, if you’re going to keep your profile prominent, you need to be sure that your posts are also consistent.
Settle on a certain number of posts per day (and think out the number carefully – too few will likely cause you to get lost in the sea of other content, but too little might come off as spammy).
Then decide when they’ll be posted (consider the time zones of your target market, what time they’ll most likely be looking at their feeds, and so forth). Then, schedule the posts ahead of time to ensure that this schedule is maintained. Followers and newcomers who can rely on your content to be both engaging and to crop up on their feed at a consistent rate are much more likely to become genuinely loyal followers.
Participate in relevant conversations
An Instagram profile that simply makes posts and does nothing else is apt to come off as a bit detached. If you’re really going to get your name out there and gather a loyal following, a key tactic is to actually engage with other Instagram users – especially in conversations that are likely to interest your target market.
When followers comment on your posts, engage with them – let them know that you are hearing their feedback, and that you appreciate their support and loyalty. But take it beyond your profile, too – follow other accounts that relate to businesses like yours, and engage with them, and their followers. Get involved in conversations about matters relevant to your target market – though, of course, do so in a manner that averts stirring up controversy. Doing so will not only introduce your profile to a host of new potential followers; it’ll also give new followers the sense that your profile, and brand in general, has a team of actual human beings behind it, who are interested in actually engaging with the community, rather than just selling a product or promoting a brand.
Tap into what appeals to your audience
Whatever your brand or business may happen to be, it has a specific target market – a market with specific demographics, who have specific interests, and are likely to follow specific things.
Do research into what your target market enjoys. That’s to say, organic research – go onto chatrooms and websites frequented by your target market and follow accounts that they follow. Keep an eye on the sort of things they talk about and use this to inform yourself about what is popular among them now, and what will likely be popular in the future. By tapping into these interests and catering to them via your Instagram account, you’ll be much more likely to draw the interest of potential customers.
Prompt your followers to help
Last, but not least, is this one. And that’s referring to small things here – stuff like ending a post with “don’t forget to drop a like!” or “hit like if you can relate!” Minor prompts like that, which ask very little of your followers and only take a moment of their time could result in a serious influx of likes – which, in turn, will push your account up on the algorithm and make it far more likely to be found by fresh followers in the future! In addition, of it you always can buy high-quality Instagram followers on Instagrowing. This will make it possible to get new subscribers as soon as possible.
Every business needs a marketing plan – a systematic approach to attracting the consumers you hope will become your customers. A marketing plan is a prime component of your business plan; your business can’t survive unless people buy your product or service, and they can’t buy your product or service if they don’t know it exists.
As with any other section of your business plan, the marketing component will be highly specific to the nature of your business and industry. Still, there are guidelines that can get you started and shape how you approach your marketing research and choices.
In this article, I’d like to share an overview of the process of developing a great marketing section that will make your business plan stand out to potential investors, partners and loan officers.
In the marketing section of your business plan, your overarching goal is to show how you’re going to expose your potential customers to your product or service, and show how you’re going to get those potential customers buy what you’re offering. That means fleshing out the “four P’s” of marketing:
• Product (or service): What exactly are you selling, and why will people want it?
• Pricing: How much will you charge, and why?
• Place: How and where will customers buy your product or service?
• Promotion: How will you attract those customers (and keep them coming back)?
1. Describe your product/service and target market.
The idea is to paint a picture of your product or service as valuable to the customers in your target market. This component details what you’re offering to customers, how they’ll benefit from it and why it’s better than what everyone else is offering to that market.
You’ll detail topics such as:
• Your product/service’s traits and features.
• Your target market and ideal customer.
• How your product/service benefits that target market/ideal customer.
• How your branding strategy relates to that target market/ideal customer.
• New products/services you’ll offer the same market down the road.
Tie all of the elements together to show that your product, strategy and target market are in perfect alignment.
2. Explain your pricing strategy.
Pricing is a huge consideration. In involves balancing value, competitiveness and profit, and it affects other aspects of your marketing plan, including your budget and where you advertise.
To come up with the ideal price for your product, consider factors including:
• Your target market’s needs and finances.
• Your costs to produce and sell your product or service, both fixed and variable (materials, shipping, labor, rent, utilities, administration, promotion).
• Product availability.
• Pricing of similar products.
Include information on your profit margin, and explain how your pricing choices relate to your target market, providing detailed information that shows your strategy is on the mark.
3. Lay out your sales and distribution methods.
For the “place” component, you’ll show how and where your customers will access and buy your product or service. The basic components are product distribution and sales transactions.
Describe your plan to get your product or service to your customer, including information on distribution channels and customer transactions. You’ll address topics including:
• Distribution channels: Will you sell the product directly to the customer, or indirectly, through an outside distributor?
• Customer transactions: Where/how will the customer have a chance to buy the product or service (retail location, home delivery, sales representatives)? What are your payment methods and terms? What are your warranty and return policies?
If your distribution involves sales representatives, the “place” component should also include details on any sales-related training, metrics and incentives involved in your strategy. Either way, include how much you expect to pay for all of the distribution elements.
4. Show how you’ll get the word out.
Detail your approach to advertising and promotion. Explain the reasoning behind that approach, and project your return on investment (ROI) if you utilize your strategy.
There are myriad options available when it comes to getting a product or service in the public eye, including:
• Internet, newspapers, magazine, TV, podcast, or radio advertising.
• Billboards, bus or subway ads.
• Direct mail, telemarketing or flyer distribution.
• Trade shows, press releases or product-launch events.
• Online presence (web site, social media, email marketing).
• Community involvement (sponsoring a local fundraiser, hosting a community barbecue).
Don’t try to do some of everything; focus is the key. Use your understanding of your target market and your unique selling proposition, along with research into the costs associated with various promotional approaches, to develop a strategy to most efficiently convey that message to that market.
In the process, you’ll gain the knowledge to estimate your ROI and develop your advertising/promotions budget, in which you’ll indicate the percentage you’ll devote to each method employed in your strategy.
Effective marketing is critical to the survival of any business, so take the time to get it right and convey it clearly. It should be obvious to anyone reading your business plan that you know your customers, what they want and the perfect amount to charge for it.
The days of crafting brands without incorporating a CX design mindset are drawing to a close.
One of the hardest things about design is keeping track of the terminology. There are many words to learn, and definitions frequently overlap. But don’t think for a moment that any two terms mean the exact same thing. Distinctions abound. Abbreviations matter.
So it is with user experience and customer experience design, or UX vs. CX. The two disciplines are so closely related, their differences so murky, that they are sometimes used interchangeably.
Originally, the UX umbrella was meant to cover every facet of an individual’s interplay with a company, but our distinctly digital age complicated things. UX is now associated with the quality of interactions between a user and a digital product, and CX design has come to encompass all the other encounters that a person has with a business.
All other encounters—the scope is enormous.
[Image: courtesy Toptal]
Today, UX designers typically focus on a series of goal-driven tasks and the overall quality of interactions; for instance, “How can we improve mobile navigation so people can find things more easily?”
To create cohesive experiences, UX designers must also be aware of the ways in which their work impacts existing features. “Does changing our navigation improve discoverability and speed up our purchasing process (or increase our conversion rates)?”
Zoom in with UX. Zoom out with CX. It’s a natural pairing.
But what about other design disciplines? How do they fit into the CX design equation? More specifically, what impact does brand design have on the customer experience? At the very least, it seems like brand designers ought to be aware of all the ways in which their clients interact with customers.
[Image: courtesy Toptal]
Avoid a myopic brand
Brand designers have an uncanny ability to pinpoint the attributes that make companies special.
What do they do best?
How are they different than the competition?
Why should anyone care?
With these insights in hand, brand designers unify the most essential truths into a promise between company and customer.
This promise, the brand promise, has few words but permeates every aspect of a company’s activities. It names a common goal and inspires everyone involved to move with a shared sense of mission.
[Image: courtesy Toptal]
But, a brand promise can be restrictive—especially when a brand designer doesn’t appreciate the full scope of a company’s touchpoints (aka any interaction that has the potential to change a customer’s feelings toward a business). For example, a design team lands a contract with a grocery chain and goes all-in on a strategy that makes digital interactions top priority. They define a compelling brand promise and outline a companywide mindset that emphasizes high-quality digital tools and content. Unfortunately, the team doesn’t give the same level of care to the grocer’s brick-and-mortar experience, and they fail to develop a plan to infuse in-store interactions with the updated brand sentiments. A crucial aspect of CX design and customer engagement has been ignored. With time, customers grow frustrated because the glossy rebrand they encounter online doesn’t translate to the real world. In-person interactions with the grocery chain didn’t become markedly worse, but they feel slow and dated in contrast to the lofty expectations set by the rebrand.
CX apathy causes irrelevant brand collateral
Visual identity design builds on brand design. A brand promise is the foundation, brand values are the frame, and the elements within a visual identity are the fixtures and finishing touches. They embody the most important aspects of the brand in visual form and serve as aesthetic benchmarks for a host of promotional collateral.
Chobani’s visual identity was designed so that the brand, despite being a household name, would be perceived as a small, humble craft company (like its early days). [Image: courtesy Toptal]
To create an effective visual identity, it’s crucial that a brand designer have big-picture knowledge of a company’s customer journey—all the ways customers interact with the company and perform tasks over time. Why is this so important? Designing promotional collateral for brand channels isn’t like creating a responsive interface for different screen sizes. It’s not enough to recycle and resize the same design elements over and over. Every channel has unique constraints and content demands. Time, scale, distance, environmental distractions, and user expectations are just a few factors that come into play. It’s not necessarily the brand designer’s job to create promotional collateral, but it is their job to design a visual identity that is adaptable to multiple scenarios. Let’s expand on our example from earlier—the brand team that goes all-in on digital.While building out the grocery chain’s visual identity, the brand team decides to outline a set of photography guidelines that will give the grocer a more intimate and human feel. The intentions of the team are good: They want to cultivate a more relatable web and social presence by showing happy people enjoying the grocer’s goods.But the human-centric photos don’t account for the chain’s past success promoting products out of home—where ads must be interpreted in the blink of an eye. When a new set of billboards, bus wraps, and kiosks are designed following the brand team’s guidelines, they are visually attractive, but the photos of smiling people don’t fully communicate the deals the grocer is offering. The ads fail to grab the attention of motorists and pedestrians, and the campaign fizzles.
Brand designer keys to omni-channel awareness
Brand channels are unique and evolving
Every channel that a company uses to communicate with customers has its own idiosyncrasies. What works on one channel isn’t guaranteed to work on another.
Some channels are structured for highly personalized interactions—others less so. One channel may be geared toward in-depth videos while another is known for short audio clips.
Channels aren’t static either. Features, popularity, and demographics are always in flux. Just when everyone thinks they have a handle on “where users are spending their time,” a new channel emerges and disrupts everything.
The paradigm can’t be controlled. Flexibility is paramount.
There’s no way to dominate every channel. Fit is crucial.
Consistency is the lifeblood of engagement
Engagement measures a customer’s feeling of relationship with a product or company. Feelings and relationships may be fickle, but they thrive on consistency.
The takeaway for brand designers? Consistency encompasses more than visual design decisions like logo placement and color use. Every touchpoint makes an impression. Every interaction impacts perception. No part of the customer’s journey is inconsequential or dismissible.
[Image: courtesy Toptal]
The customer experience is interconnected
Customer experience design is a web of interconnected interactions. Touchpoints don’t exist independently of one another. They’re all part of the same story, all linked to a brand’s core promise.
A purchasing experience on mobile doesn’t end. It extends into unboxing, setup, and regular use. It continues through ad campaigns and customer support. It endures on social media. Finally, it breathes new life with the choice to make, or not make, another purchase.
Click here for a larger version. [Image: courtesy Toptal]
CX strengthens brand relevance
Branding is dead? Hardly. It’s stronger than ever, but that doesn’t change the fact that a crummy interaction completely undermines even the most inspiring brand promise. Can brand designers control what happens at every touchpoint? No, but they can design brands that are disconnected from reality—brands that make big promises but don’t deliver when it counts. When such a disconnect exists, customers tend to look elsewhere.
Branding isn’t dead, but the days of crafting brands without incorporating a CX design mindset are drawing to a close.
Feature Image Credit: Toptal
By Micah Bowers.
Micah Bowers is a senior designer at Toptal. Follow him on LinkedIn and Dribbble. This article was originally published on the Toptal Design Blog.
Outset Agency, Basement 7 Pembroke Street Upper, Dublin.
Outset Agency seeks a highly motivated, creative and skilled Senior Account Executive to join our growing team, who will have a particular focus on the Creative Campaigns area of our business.
We are a new-age agency that focuses on how audiences and businesses connect. We work directly with both brands and agencies, helping them to achieve their goals.
Our work is focused across 3 key areas; Creative Campaigns, Influencer Marketing & Live Experiences.
The successful candidate will have experience working within the client services area of a marketing or media agency and have a strong knowledge of all the different marketing functions across digital, content, experiential and beyond.
The Senior Account Executive will be responsible for managing a portfolio of client accounts, as well as assisting the Key Account Manager on other projects.
Responsibilities:
Liaising with clients on a daily basis – with the Client Services team the lead point of contact on all Agency work
Plan, develop and assist in the delivery of client campaigns and projects
Plan and manage client budgets and advise on campaign elements and distribution channels
Internal project management of Agency’s work across Digital, Content, Influencers and Events
Supplier management and building business relationships
Creation of client proposals
Working closely with and reporting into the Key Account Manager on all Agency work
Requirements
Requirements:
Minimum 3 years of experience working in Marketing or a related field (preferably Agency side)
Strong understanding of current online and offline marketing concepts, strategies and best practices
Ability to prioritise tasks and focus on multiple projects and deadlines simultaneously
Strong presentation skills
Excellent communication skills with the ability to interact professionally with clients and business stakeholders
A creative thinker – we want someone that is resourceful and has the ability to think outside the box
Ambition – we are young company that is moving and growing quickly, there is a huge opportunity for personal growth within the business for the right candidate
Groupon provides a global marketplace where people can buy just about anything, anywhere, anytime.
We’re enabling real-time commerce across an expanding range of categories including local businesses, travel destinations, consumer products, and live or lively events. At the same time, we are providing advertising options and tools that merchants can use to grow and manage their businesses. Culturally, we believe that great people make great companies and that starting with the customer and working backward moves us forward.
We are looking for an expert in Paid Marketing to lead our International markets. You will have experience managing / optimizing performance marketing campaigns, building and leading a team, and partnering with analytics and engineers to scale these efforts through automation. You are a marketer and a leader of teams who’s particularly energized by performance marketing, growing efficiently and looking for new areas to optimize. If this sounds like you, please reach out to us.
Key Responsibilities:
Manage all aspects of Paid Marketing for our International businesses, including strategy, forecasting, and technology.
Develop the strategic roadmap for paid marketing and SEO while partnering on overall multi-channel strategy
Collaborate with engineering and product to drive automation for the channels
Build and optimize Paid marketing campaigns for specific KPIs
Create and manage relationships with internal and external partners (cross functional teams and external teams)
Integrate and align the channels into a unique customer centric approach.
Establish and track key performance indicators and other supporting metrics to measure digital marketing effectiveness and ROI
Champion analytical insights and dashboards that demonstrate the specific value of digital platforms and channels
Manage the digital marketing budget and create compelling business cases for future investment
Lead, develop and manage the internal SEM, SEO, Display and Affiliates teams
Partner with cross functional Ad Tech team to build automation, optimization, and scalable tools for the online marketing team
Champion excellence within online marketing team and our cross functional partners
Who you are:
Minimum of 10+ years of work experience in a global organization as a Digital Marketing or business leader, including the strategic management and hands on execution of Display, SEM, SEO and Affiliates, and other digital advertising platforms
At least 5-7 years of people management experience, excellent leadership skills with the confidence to lead, manage and engage team members (both direct and indirect reports)
BS degree in Business, Economics, Math, Engineering, Statistics or related field preferred. Masters degree is a strong plus
Expert in online advertising management and budget optimization
Strong ability to manage external vendors and agency partners
Ability to synthesize data and analytics from a wide variety of sources into concise, actionable insights and recommendations
Ability to collaborate with cross-functional teams and influence decision making across all levels of the organization
Strong ability to develop and implement plans while continuously monitoring results and implementing continuous improvement methodologies
Innate ability to stay in tune with and take advantage of emerging technology trends and platforms within web/digital marketing
