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The Four-Part Formula For Marketing Success

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By Udi Ledergor.

I spend a couple of hours each week helping less experienced chief marketing officers (CMOs). They usually seek my advice looking for quick wins, tips and hacks.

By now, I’m used to their sigh of disappointment when I share with them what I’ve found to be the four-part formula for marketing success. It includes no hacks, trickery or sorcery. Just four, time-tested elements I’ve found you absolutely must get right to build a successful marketing operation: strategy, execution, people and creativity.

Strategy

Here’s what it’s not: pulling together an odd mix of campaigns in hopes of them coming together. They won’t.

Strategy can be difficult to achieve but should always be simple to articulate. What’s “the big idea?” If you can’t easily explain it, you probably haven’t found it yet. I’ve found it useful to have a “big idea” for my overall strategy and for smaller components of it, like trade shows (why will people line up at our booth?) or content (what will make them download it?). There should be a simple way of describing what success will ultimately look like. Then reverse-engineer your tactics to get there.

Different is better than better. I explained one aspect of this in my recent article on the unwritten rules of business-to-business (B2B) branding and why you should break them. Now I propose being different in your overall strategy. Unless you want to be a “me too” company, you’re probably better off choosing a strategy others haven’t tried rather than attempting to be 10 times better than another player already using the same strategy.

Plan for galactic scale. You don’t need to understand all the details just yet, but you should be able to grasp the big picture of what your success will look like in one, two and three years. You’ll likely change a few things on the way — maybe even big things. But without a firm grasp of what future success looks like, you’re unlikely to put the right wheels in motion to get you there.

Execution

Open-water diving lessons often start with “Plan your dive; dive your plan.” The same truth holds for your marketing. Execution excellence starts with detailed planning and key performance indicators (KPIs).

How detailed should you be? Our events manager is measured on the number of event-driven opportunities we create and tickets sold to our annual event. Our weekly marketing team meetings start with reviewing every KPI we’re tracking this quarter. How well are we doing? How much have we advanced since last week? What bottlenecks do we need to solve for? We currently have 10 quarterly KPIs, each with an owner whose compensation is tied to this number. That’s how we create accountability.

I’m a big believer in the “fail quickly and learn from it” approach. Constant experimentation is the basis for fast empirical learning. We could argue until the cows come home on which subject line will perform better, but a simple A/B test gives us the answer and allows us to move on. Does someone have an ad creative idea? Great! What time can it go live? If it works, we scale it. If it doesn’t, we kill it. Rinse and repeat.

People

Hiring mistakes are painful to correct. We’re all human. So when things don’t work out for a new hire, we’ll give them another chance. And then a performance plan. And a final warning. By the time we’ve come to the conclusion things aren’t going to work out, we’ve wasted nearly 12 months we’ll never get back.

Don’t compromise. Hire the best people you can. You’ll need to reach out to the best candidates because they might not be actively job searching. This is hard work, but in my opinion, nothing else you do will yield higher returns. Candidates for junior positions are often surprised that I take the time to interview them. I respond that there’s no better use of my time. If we hire them and it works out, they’ll make our company millions. If we hire the wrong person, we could lose millions. Once you look at hiring through this lens, you’ll quickly realize the resources you need to invest in the process.

If your company is growing fast, hire overqualified people. Within a short time, you’ll promote them to fuel your growth. They’ll evolve from individual contributors to managers. It’s far easier to promote the people you have on your team than to parachute external managers.

Hire people better than you in at least one key skill the team needs to succeed. I struggled with this in the early stages of my career. I felt that I needed to be the best at every skill my team needed. I eventually realized how crippling that approach was and started hiring amazing people who were much better than me at their craft. That’s when things really took off.

To run an amazing marketing organization, you don’t have to be the best marketing operations person. You don’t have to be the world’s greatest writer. You only have to know how to hire, motivate and coordinate the efforts of amazing people who can do all those things.

Creativity

Don’t wait for your muse. Get systematic about your creativity. We hold regular creative brainstorming sessions on everything from our next event’s swag to our social media videos. Some of the best ideas have come from team members who don’t regularly get to flex their creativity muscles.

You never know where your next brilliant idea will come from. Get everyone involved. Make it fun. Follow up on the good ideas to motivate everyone to contribute more. There are no stupid ideas at these meetings and nothing gets knocked down. We list everything on the whiteboard, then prioritize by voting and taking into account production considerations. Some of our best work was created this way.

Marketing teams fail in many different ways, but the best ones I’ve seen or experienced firsthand always got these four elements right: strategy, execution, people and creativity.

By Udi Ledergor

CMO at Gong, the leading Conversation Intelligence Platform for Sales.

Sourced from Forbes

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8 Self-Development Activities Every Founder Should Make Time For

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Sourced from Inc.

Even the busiest entrepreneurs should devote time to personal and professional development.

As an entrepreneur, you invest a great deal of yourself into your business. That’s why it’s important to continually learn and grow, even when you’re off the clock.

Putting in the effort to grow yourself and your business can reap huge benefits for both, so it’s important to make time for these types of activities in your schedule. We asked eight successful entrepreneurs what they do in their down time for personal and professional development. Here’s what they recommend doing and why.

1. Physical activity

A healthy business starts with a healthy leader — and that means both mentally and physically. Jinny Hyojin Oh, founder of WANDR, recommends making time for physical activity as a regular part of your work week.

“I enjoy surfing when I can, not just for the great workout, but because it allows me to clear my mind,” Oh says. “Some of the best ideas that got implemented in my business have come to me while paddling out to the waters.”

2. Journaling

Many entrepreneurs recommend keeping a journal to reflect on daily thoughts and focus on the “big picture.” As Richard Fong, founder and CEO of Bliss Drive, puts it, founders tend to run all over the place, doing a million things at once, which can often create tunnel vision.

“One of the most powerful methods for keeping your eyes on the big picture is through journaling,” Fong says. “Revisit your weeks in a journal. Review your previous entries. Grow the masterplan and the ways to get there.”

3. Spending time with other entrepreneurs

Networking with others, especially fellow entrepreneurs, is the key to staying inspired in your business. Andy Karuza, CEO of FenSens, says he spends time with other founders socially, since they’re all interested in building and growing companies.

“It’s common to want to hang out with people that you share similar interests with,” Karuza adds. “It just so happens that entrepreneurs have a lot of great relevant insights, ideas and just plain fun stories to share.”

4. Solo travel

Many professionals find that breaking the routine and traveling to new places helps spark creativity and innovation. Daisy Jing, founder of Banish, recommends solo trips for this very reason.

“It’s nice to stay in your hotel room for an entire day while traveling because there is nowhere you need to be, no errands to run — just relax and recharge!” says Jing. “Just pause and rest, clear your head. I am most energized and recharged when I am alone in a hotel room, away from all the distractions. Then, creativity and ideas come in.”

5. Pursuing outside hobbies

Rana Gujral, CEO of Behavioral Signals, believes that being a well-rounded person with interests outside of your business makes you a better entrepreneur.

“I have found that having a hobby that has no relation to what I do professionally has helped me grow tremendously,” explains Gujral. “It gives me an outlet to be passionate about, to meet new people and give my brain a rest from the daily grind.”

6. Continual learning

A good entrepreneur knows they are never done learning, and Jared Weitz, CEO of United Capital Source Inc., recommends pursuing knowledge in any way you can.

“Make sure you are staying present in the industry and what your competition is doing,” Weitz says. “Listen to podcasts, read books and subscribe to blogs and articles that cover your area of expertise. The more you know, the more you can do.”

7. Connecting with friends and family

When you have a healthy mindset, you’re better at your job, says Chris Christoff, co-founder of MonsterInsights — and what better way to improve your mindset than by spending time with the people who care about you?

“Spending time with loved ones is a great way to recharge and refocus for the upcoming workweek so you don’t feel lethargic, overwhelmed or overworked,” Christoff adds.

8. Self-care activities

Chelsea Rivera, co-founder of Honest Paws, acknowledges that learning is essential to self-development. However, one thing that is also vital — and often not talked about — is rest and relaxation.

“It is important to practice good self-care so as to not burn out,” Rivera says. “You’ll be surprised at how simply spending some time with your own thoughts, without any ‘noise,’ can spark creativity and innovation.”

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

Sourced from Inc.

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Adobe and Amazon launch Alexa skill aimed at creatives, the Inspiration Engine

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By Jenny Brewer.

Adobe and Amazon have collaborated on a new Alexa skill aimed at creatives, titled the Inspiration Engine. Ask your Alexa-controlled device to “open the Inspiration Engine” and you can unlock a host of features intended to aid creative block and inspire work. This ranges from “quick sparks” – inspirational quotes and one-sentence “meditations” from creatives such as Jessica Walsh, Pascal Campion or Weitong Mai – to creative-thinking exercises that can, for example, guide the viewer through one’s senses or environment in order to explore a project from a new perspective.

With an Alexa-compatible screen device, users can ask for inspirational imagery, displayed on Behance, Adobe’s online portfolio site. Users can also take the Creative Types quiz, created for Adobe by Anyways, which asks a series of multiple choice questions to define an individual creative personality – for example an Adventurer (seen above), a Visionary or a Dreamer. Previously an in-browser experience, for the Inspiration Engine, Alexa will take users through the quiz and reveal their type.

The launch comes off the back of a recent study by Adobe, finding that 89% of respondents often struggle to find inspiration. This new Alexa skill targets those designers and artists “staring at an empty page, canvas or dartboard for too long,” says Adobe on its blog, and hopes, with the new tool, to be involved in the earliest stage of the creative process – whereas its other products are used once ideas have already sprouted.

The Inspiration Engine is available in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Feature Image Credit: Anyways: Adobe Creative Types, the Adventurer

By Jenny Brewer.

Sourced from It’s Nice That

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How To Effectively Build Traction For Your Startup Idea

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By Abdo Riani

Investment in marketing activities can start even if you have no clue what to build yet. Marketing channels and initiatives created to build and nurture an audience make it a lot easier for entrepreneurs to find ideas worth pursuing. Furthermore, startups that launch with an established audience can generate revenue quickly and build better products by engaging their subscribers.

Here are 3 effective marketing channels that will help you build traction for your startup idea before and after going to market.

1. Publish Frequently

Content marketing takes the form of text, audio and video. Pick any of these three, preferably based on how your audience prefers to consume content, and start publishing as soon as possible even if you are not ready to launch a startup or don’t have an idea yet.

If you have an audience of active readers, you can reach out to them for insights, feedback, sales and referrals. Research conducted by ProfitWell shows that companies with an active blog gets around 70% more leads. Furthermore, close to 50% of buyers consume 3 to 5 pieces of content before expressing interest in the product or service, and the close rates of active readers is up to 10 times higher.

Content marketing takes time but pays off big time in the future. One way to leverage the power of content marketing without necessarily producing original content is by curating the best posts and stories in your industry through a weekly or daily newsletter. This will allow you to build an audience and relationships with the readers and content creators, and finally, it’s a good exercise to learn more about the market, discover trends and carefully monitor readers’ interests and comments.

To start writing, you can use platforms like Medium, LinkedIn, or preferably through your own site that you can create in just a couple of hours. Many no-code tools can help you create a blog quickly. To launch a newsletter, you need a landing page to collect email addresses and an email marketing platform to broadcast the newsletter.

2. Organize Events

Networking and educational events are a different form of content marketing. Events are powerful because they allow you to gather different stakeholders around a topic of interest and give you an opportunity to build relationships, gain insights, introduce and sell your product.

Furthermore, events can help you create a network effect by leveraging the audience and followers of your attendees, experts and partners. A small event can grow quickly just by seeking the promotion of influencers such as expert guest speakers. If you’re seeking quality feedback or if you want to presell an idea, use in-person or online events to attract key stakeholders.

3. Build A Community

Anyone can attract website visitors. If not through the first two channels, it can be done with paid ads. The challenge is in turning visitors into followers and fans. Building a community will play the biggest role in your ability to continuously drive traffic and referrals.

It starts by creating a home for the members. This could be an email newsletter, private groups on social media or slack, and/or social events. A small community with dedicated members is much more effective in terms of collaboration and referrals than a big community with most members having no interest to contribute to it. As such, size is not a reference, start small.

A simple marketing funnel shows how potential buyers go through several stages before making a purchase starting by becoming aware of the product followed by building interest in it, wanting to try it, and finally, convert into paying customers. When you make marketing a priority since the beginning, you are accelerating acquisition by proactively building awareness and interest in the product you’re creating. By the time the app is ready to go to market, people will be lined up to use it.

Feature Image Credit:  Startups that launch with an established audience can generate revenue quickly and build better products by engaging their subscribers. Here are 3 effective channels for building traction for your startup idea. Getty

 

By Abdo Riani

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website.

I help tech entrepreneurs build startup products (apps) that generate revenue quickly with a higher probability of success to serve either as a side business venture or a stand-alone startup with growth potential. I am also the founder of StartupCircle.co, a mentorship platform for passionate startup founders.

Sourced from Forbes

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How food companies use packaging to fool you into thinking an item is healthful

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By Ellie Krieger 

Next time you grab a package off the grocery store shelf thinking it looks like a healthful choice, take a beat before you toss it into your cart. The better-for-you allure of it could be as superficial as the wrapper itself. From print colour to bottle shape, specific package design elements can have a real influence on the perceived health benefits of the food inside.

But unlike explicit written nutrition claims such as “low sodium,” which are subject to strict governmental regulation, the implied health messages of package design are entirely up to the manufacturer. While design techniques are often used fairly to communicate the presence of a more healthful product, they are also sometimes employed in misleading ways. Keep an eye out for these tricks of the trade to avoid being duped by a product with a deceptively healthful veneer.

Thin, shapely containers: It’s no accident that many packaged lower-calorie drinks such as skinny margaritas and flavoured sparkling waters come in thin bottles. That silhouette propels the message that the product is slimming, since research demonstrates that people perceive food and drinks in elongated packages as less caloric than those in wide packages. And when a thin container also has a curviness to it, with an indented “waist” (a concave shape), the product inside is perceived as healthier, particularly by women who have a high body mass index, according to a recent study published in the journal Food Quality and Preference. Such a container may actually hold a better-for-you, lower-calorie option, but it could also serve as an unwarranted health halo on a drink you’d be better off avoiding.

Images of fields, farms, grains and produce: The images printed on many packages can reveal more about what the manufacturer wants you to associate with the food than the quality of the food itself. As I browsed the grocery store recently, I saw pictures of whole wheat still in its husk on boxes of crackers made only with refined flour; sketches of garden leaves on bags of coconut sugar, and prominent images of ripe whole fruit and vegetables on snack bars and puffs that contain more sugar than produce on the ingredient list, and the produce was in powdered form at that. Pictures on packages can be powerful unconscious cues, connoting unprocessed, farm-fresh, natural foods that are flush with healthful properties. Very often the ingredient list tells a different story.

Muted colors: When food manufacturers want to give you the impression that their food is more healthful and natural (read: free of artificial ingredients, less processed) they tend to steer clear of bold colours on their packaging in favor of lighter, more muted tones. That’s because research shows people associate paler hues with a better-for-you products and bright colors with more intense, possibly artificially boosted, flavors. Healthier products in the United States tend to have pale white, green, brown and yellow coloration, so plucking a product off the shelf based on package colour might actually lead you to a better choice. But then again it might not. Colour impacts our perception more powerfully than we might realize — even to the point of defying logic. One study, for example, found that a candy bar with a green calorie label was perceived as healthier than the exact same bar with the same calorie information on a red label.

Brown paper packaging: In the same vein, packaging material considered to be eco-friendly, such as glass or brown cardboard or paper, can lead us to believe the food inside is better too — higher quality, more sustainably produced and healthier. Since environmentally conscious consumers are often willing to pay more for those attributes, it’s a ripe opportunity for marketers to rebrand the same old product, often at a price premium.

Transparency: Another design that has become increasingly popular is transparent material for all or part of a food package. A window into what is inside a container not only provides the obvious benefit of allowing you to see what you’re getting before you make a purchase, it also informs, correctly or not, our overall impression of the food inside. Research shows that foods in transparent packages are perceived to be higher quality, more attractive, fresher, and healthier than those in opaque packages.

Taken together, these design techniques are not necessarily a bad thing — they will often lead you to products that are genuinely better for you and the planet. But to be a smart consumer, don’t judge a food by its container. At the very least, make a habit of turning a package over to read its ingredient list and nutrition facts before adding it to your cart.

Feature Image Credit: Packaging material that is considered eco-friendly, such as brown paper, can lead us to believe the food inside is better, too. (iStock)

By Ellie Krieger 

Sourced from The Washington Post

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‘Ad tech companies have stopped innovating’: Why BuySellAds is buying up media brands

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By Kayleigh Barber

BuySellAds is a small ad tech company that has found a way to stand out on the Lumascape — by buying publishers.

The advertising marketplace for publishers and marketers last week scooped up Pando, a tech news site formerly known for its strong opinions and a membership model that had fallen by the wayside, following its purchase 18 months ago of digital news aggregator Digg. The bet, according to Todd Garland, CEO of BuySellAds: Use these sites to prove out BSA’s model of being a one-stop monetization shop for media publishers.

This is something of uncharted territory for ad tech, which normally plays a middleman role. It’s not unheard of, as the biggest player in ad tech, Google, owns and operates media. The Washington Post and Vox Media are both publishers who license monetization platforms.

Garland said that BSA is still very much in the vision-and-mission phase and hasn’t yet released the products to its clients; however, Pando’s acquisition is the next step in the testing process. The newly acquired brand will be moved onto the publishing platform that was created for Digg and will be used as a test case before opening the platform up to clients.

“Part of our general premise is that the big ad tech companies have stopped innovating, and we’ve seen our customers looking for new revenue sources,” said Garland. Therefore, his goal is to transform BuySellAds into a revenue tech company in order to figure out how to create monetization tools for its publishing clients beyond programmatic ad sales and direct ad buys.

While Digg is profitable now, Garland said that the goal of buying the site was never to earn revenue off of it. Instead, it’s a testbed for creating a publishing platform that he can be licensed to other publishers. It’s a model that carries echoes of Say Media, which started as a video ad tech company before scooping up publishing brands.

When Pando launched its membership product in 2015, former co-founder of Pando Paul Carr said that the small, in-house team had to invest a lot of time and money into building the current CMS. Garland’s goal is to remove the financial and time burdens that go into producing the system, so that journalists and publishers of any size can create profitable platforms for their content.

Similar to what the Washington Post created with its Arc Publishing and Zeus platforms, which give publishers ad optimization and other publishing tools, BuySellAds is focused more on journalists and smaller publishers that want to build profitable platforms for their journalism without having to sink tons of money into multiple vendors or web developers.

“Not everyone has figured out how to successfully monetize digital media,” said Garland, which is why he sees “an opportunity for small to midsize folks to get the tools they need to have successful businesses and operate successful platforms.”

With Digg, Garland said that BuySellAds was also able to learn about the struggles that its partners are dealing with firsthand and he noted that operating Digg has been a challenging experience on par with the general struggles of the industry.

A former employee of Digg said that immediately after the acquisition, half of the roughly 30-person staff — the technology team — was let go, and the sales and business-side staffers were absorbed into BuySellAds. From there, the staff’s video editor, general manager and two original content editors were laid off over the course of the following 11 months. In addition to the layoffs, other editorial members departed and currently the brand’s entire staff consists of five full-time employees and one part-time staffer.

Pando’s former owners, Carr and editor-in-chief and CEO Sarah Lacy, both departed the staff and not including the two recent posts announcing the sale of the publication, only eight articles had been published on the site this year. Garland said that the company will be relying on freelancers and outside contributors to provide content for the site.

“I’m not trying to enrich myself directly with these properties but trying to figure out how to enrich others,” said Garland.

“We know [Pando had] been stale for a while, but we didn’t want to start from scratch,” said Garland. “We wanted something workable that we could experiment with as well as learn to build better tools for publishing clients.” And similarly with Digg, the media brand had been in desperate need of money, according to former employees’ accounts, who said that when the brand was acquired in April 2018, it wasn’t profitable.

Garland and BuySellAds have been aiming to learn more about the media business for some time, but it doesn’t appear that the editorial staff at Digg was aware that this was the driving reason for the brand’s acquisition in the first place.

By Kayleigh Barber

Sourced from DIGIDAY

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How to Get Influencers to Promote Your Brand

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Earlier this month, I published an article on how to leverage a large Instagram account to build a lucrative career. Today, I want to approach the same topic, this time from the brand’s point of view. Indeed, influencer marketing is a powerful tool. According

As this marketing channel blossoms, it becomes evident that there’s still confusion and uncertainty around how to approach it. Sixty-one percent of marketers responded to a survey agreeing that it’s difficult to pinpoint the correct influencers for a given campaign, which is why I wanted to find an entrepreneur or brand that has made a name for themselves through influencer marketing; a brand that others can learn from.

That’s how I was introduced to Sean Kelly, founder of Jersey Champs, an online clothing company that almost exclusively uses influencers to sell jerseys. In a recent interview, I took the opportunity to ask Kelly in-depth about his overall influencer strategy.

In the early days of Jersey Champs, Kelly was enrolled in Rutgers University and running the company out of his dorm room. After seeing a business opportunity in the popularity of sports jerseys, Kelly set out to see if he could sell jerseys with custom designs that weren’t necessarily related to sports. Fast forward three years, and Jersey Champs has sold hundreds of thousands of jerseys, with influencer partnerships including Logan Paul, rappers 2 Chainz and Logic, Mark Cuban and other celebrities and athletes. Kelly attributes much of his success to celebrity and influencer endorsements, telling me that “at first it was a matter of sending a free jersey to an influencer and praying that they would share it, and when they did it made our day, But now that we’ve grown so much and understood the importance of it, we have annual partnership contracts set up to legitimize and scale it.”

Kelly went on to explan that there are three significant lessons he believes have been responsible for Jersey Champs’s most successful influencer campaigns.

1. Be hyper-specific when considering partners.

With so many influencers to choose from, considering who to partner with can be difficult. “We defined our absolute ideal customer and then built our entire business and growth strategy around that, including the influencers we work from,” says Kelly. He and his team have positioned their brand around high-schoolers and college students, and their choice of influencer follows.

“We spent a lot of time trying to figure out who our customers follow on Instagram, the music they listen to and who they watch on YouTube to determine who we reached out to for a partnership,” he elaborates. “Once we discover a rapper or personality that’s gaining popularity, we don’t waste any time reaching out to them.” Kelly attributes a lot of this to being “tapped-into” the social media hype himself, making an effort to pay close attention to the Explore page within Instagram, trending news on Twitter and Google News, as well as frequently engaging with customers.

2. Judge an influencer’s value on engagement, not audience size.

With so many fake followers and unengaged audiences, Kelly jokes that he’s become a bit of an Instagram detective when it comes to spotting influencers. “For some people, it’s a kick to be featured on an Instagram page with one million followers, but when it comes down to sales, audience loyalty and engagement is way more important,” he says. “For example, partnering with Logan Paul is awesome for us, because he has such a strong relationship with his audiences, so when he wears our jersey on his podcast, we know people are going to watch the entire video and think highly of it.” Interestingly, 48 percent of marketers who answered an Influencer Marketing Hub listed audience loyalty as the most valuable factor when considering an influencer. But there is a powerful lesson here for anyone looking to work with an influencer: While impressive followings may be persuasive, it doesn’t reflect loyalty. According to Kelly, “Jersey Champs was built on partnering with actual influencers with loyal audiences who look up to them, not just personalities with large but unattached followers.”

3. Don’t settle on a single post.

Once you’re confident with your choice of influencer, Kelly recommends doing everything you can to maximize the transaction. “When we start talking to an influencer, we’re shooting off ideas of what we can do with them,” he details. “Custom jerseys, exclusive giveaways [and] fun ways of creating content. It’s not just about getting a single post on their feed. We want them to want to promote our brand and see value in it for them, too. That’s why we’ll design a custom jersey for them to help them ‘prime’ their audience so that they’re more engaged. It’s all about hype.”

Another big part of extracting value from influencers is accessing their audiences for paid ads. As part of the transaction, Kelly will often try to negotiate access to their Facebook-ad audiences, so he can supplement the influencer’s promotions with paid ads promoting Jersey Champs. As he concludes, “It ties back to the original point [about being hyper-specific]. A big part of marketing is getting in front of the right audiences, and if your influencer has done that already, you need to leverage that in many ways, not just a single post.”

Feature Image credit: Sean Kelly | Instagram

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Growth at 24Slides

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

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5 Questions to Ask Before Your Brand Takes On the Industry Challenger

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Startups take risks, something all organizations should do

Today, large CPG brands are feeling even greater pressure in an expanding world of new go-to market strategies. Subscription services, ecommerce “anti-brands” and sustainability-driven challengers are changing the paradigm of how people shop and consume.

Brands like Hims have linked a suite of products to address top-of-mind men’s issues such as hair loss, erectile dysfunction and anxiety. The online subscription model offers a discreet (no face-to-face medical consults) and holistic solution for guys that otherwise might not seek help through normal channels.

Truman’s combines both a subscription and sustainability model to deliver mix it yourself nontoxic cleaning supplies to your door. The reusable spray bottles and small refill cylinders make shipping and storage easy.

These are two of many current startup examples. They challenge key assumptions of how products are formulated, how they work and how they’re delivered to consumers. To win against these anti-brands, marketers need to learn to take risks like a startup.

For many startups, the irony is that they are risking everything including savings, homes and the investment of close associates and family. This is not simply a professional risk from which to rebound from, but also a risk to current life and future.

So how do they find the resolve to take risks? By understanding the risk, defining the potential return, outlining the strategies to mitigate and communicating all of this clearly to internal and external stakeholders.

To win against these anti-brands, marketers need to learn to take risks like a startup.

Here are five fundamental questions that need to be answered to help you get ahead of the conversation, assess risk and build a solid case to leverage with internal/external stakeholders while putting your own mind at ease.

How certain are you that the consumer wants the product?

If you think you’ve identified a clear missing need in the marketplace, have you done the simple task of talking to potential consumers about a product that solves this need? As simple as that sounds, many teams haven’t, and a series of short conversations can not only help you confirm that need but may help you sharpen your product offering.

Can you link your innovation efforts to a parallel success in a different category?

Perhaps your product is a new enough proposition that it is difficult for consumers to understand. Can you identify something in a different category where the leap has been made and reapply some of the thinking? For instance, protein first hit shelves in the snack bar category for consumers that were using bars as a no-prep source of protein for fitness routines. Recently, marketers saw the behavior of these products being incorporated into less rigorous lifestyles and began to bring protein into juices, cereals and even coffee creamers. It was a logical reapplication to adjacent breakfast choices.

What needs to be true for product success (quality, efficacy, flavor, credentialing, price point, etc.)?

Every category has a shopper decision tree, which is the sequence of choices a shopper works through to find the product for them before they choose and buy. Identify this for your product. Once the key “Who am I?” “What am I?” questions are answered, what is the differentiating aspect of your product that communicates why it’s right for that consumer.

For some food categories this is nutritional credentialing, for others it’s simply a flavor choice. Be clear on what that is for your product before you start to create the packaging or develop supporting communication. This will also be a key part of your customer sales story.

What is the minimum level of confirmation you need to launch?

If your launch is national, does it start with test markets in partnership with a key retailer? If not, what is the minimum data set you need for launch confirmation? This can be as narrow as multi-city qualitative with 40–60 consumers if your confidence in the product is high, or as expansive as a full quantitative with thousands of respondents. A research professional can help you understand the right level of clarity and the costs involved.

How quickly can you course-correct based on market response?

This is something most large CPG companies don’t like to think about but that almost all entrepreneurial enterprises expect to do. Quick adjustments based on real market response and customer feedback is crucial. Not only are you honing your proposition in the real environment where it lives, but you are building a stronger relationship with your customer by working together for success. Plan for a measure and adjust milestone after launch, price point, support and even design if necessary. Perhaps you won’t need it, but if you don’t, the conversation is a happy one to have both internally and externally.

In the end, willingness to risk is very personal and tolerance for risk within organizations is a difficult thing to change. Assessing your proposition carefully by using the questions above is a good start to building a strong plan for launch, support and (if needed) adjustment.

Feature Image Credit: Tolerance for risk within organizations is a difficult thing to change. Getty Images

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Chris Lowery is president and CEO of Chase Design Group.

Sourced from ADWEEK

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Is the banner ad still relevant?

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By (CMO)

The banner ad is 25 years old. Should marketers celebrate or commiserate?

Twenty-five years after its inception, is there still room for the humble banner ad?

Soon after the advert of the Internet and websites came the banner ad, a digital advertising phenomenon which has grown to become so common, it’s arguably background noise for most people today.

Back in the day, the banner ad and all 300 of its pixels was the be-all-end-all of Internet advertising. Now, technologies like artificial intelligence, programmatic and augmented reality have triggered a whole new way of advertising and led us to automatically adjusting, mobile-enabled ads that are highly personalised, dynamic, and targeted.

Yet, while the banner ad has evolved, the method of measuring it has not – much to marketers’ annoyance. The clickthrough rate (CTR) remains the main way these ads are measured. And by all reports, CTRs are abysmal – less than 0.6 per cent by nearly every report out there.

These dwindling results, along with declining consumer attention and growing use of ad blockers by a fatigued consumers, all means the banner ad has suffered from ever-decreasing CTR while being ignored for its rightful place in overall brand building.

CMO asked several industry experts if the banner ad still has a place in a marketing strategy, or if we should all continue tweaking the settings on our ad blockers.

CEO of IAB Australia, Gai Le Roy, said approximately one-fifth of the digital display market in Australia is still represented by what we would consider traditional old school ad formats, such as banners.

“And while they has been over taken by new formats including video and content/in-feed formats, they still have a role to play in the market,” she told CMO. “The beauty of the media market is that older ad formats, while representing a smaller slice of the market, don’t go away. But we get a broader range of offerings that marketers can use to get their messages to consumers.

“Luckily, as Internet speeds have increased, websites have been able to take heavier ad files than was possible in the early days and this has enabled creative to improve substantially since the first banner ad.”

However, what frustrates Le Roy is banners still often being measured using the wrong metrics. “It frustrates me that even though we have shown time and time again that there is no correlation between clickthrough and impact, the click through metric is still persists,” she continued.

“Our new research study, The Digital Brand Effect, illustrates banners with the right creative, frequency and targeting still have a role in today’s media environment.”

Digivizer CEO, Emma Lo Russo, said success in digital marketing lies in how relevant the content is to the audience and the context they are seeing it in. She claimed traditional banner advertising can still work from a brand perspective, but needs a multi-platform, multi-unit play to drive traffic or action.

“You need to think about who sees what in the journey from not knowing you, to buying from you, to referring you,” she said.

Criteo A/NZ commercial director, Colin Barnard, agreed the banner ad remains a central tool in modern marketing.

“Digital ads have radically evolved since 1994 and so too have the way people respond and interact with ads. Today’s consumers demand more from brands, with 55 per cent of Australians turning off when they see ads they’re not interested in, according to recent Criteo data,” he said.

“The core objectives of banner ads from brand awareness to sales conversion haven’t shifted a whole lot, however, the way we achieve these objectives has, due to a greater focus on creative design and implementation with the introduction of modern technologies like AI and machine learning.”

For Barnard, modern technologies, like AI, have morphed the traditional banner ad into a hyper-targeted tool to create highly personalised customer experiences. But again, he warned against measuring its worth via CTR.

“When it comes to measuring performance digital marketing, one danger is to only count the effectiveness of banners by their clickthrough rate,” Barnard said. “The end result can be somewhat unimaginative creative that incites action like lots of price and ‘click here’ messaging. If the average clickthrough rate is 0.5 per cent, that means 99.5 per cent of people who see these ads don’t click on that particular creative.

“There is an opportunity to increase brand messaging without overly affecting CTR so the 99.5 per cent still see a great representation of the brand even if they aren’t ready to click at that particular moment.”

For lower funnel banner ads, Barnard would like to see other metrics used in a comparative way between different campaigns to better gauge what the 99.5 per cent think. He saw surveys, A/B testing to push creative to the max, whilst not impacting performance, and post-view metrics, as some examples.

“The current situation shows the limitation of machine learning and performance metrics. There are still too many dull ads that underutilise the amazing canvas we have,” Barnard said. “For instance, machine learning-driven creative can result in very poor ads.”

To compensate, Criteo has machine learning-driven content but still has humans crafting templates and even overlaying video, MP4/HTML5 rich motion imagery to bring dynamism to ads, he added.

Head of sales at WeThinkMedia, Jane Stucci, said the banner ad still has relevance as part of a broader marketing plan.

“As digital tech continues to evolve it does create the opportunity now 25 years later to personalise your brand’s creative or message to a highly targeted audience, particularly with the use of dynamic creative allowing you to target the right audience with the right message at the right time on any device.

“As for measurement, is anything perfect or correct? The industry is moving in the right direction by questioning the traditional click through rate as the only measure of success with alternative metrics such as viewability.”

So there you have it: The humble banner ad still arguably has a role to play in both branding and sales. But like most marketing, it’s only as good as your wider omnichannel strategy.

By (CMO)

Sourced from CMO FROM IDG

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Ad revenues remain a bright spot for Amazon as profits falls flat

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By Rebecca Stewart

Amazon‘s profits might have fallen for the first time in two years, but its advertising revenue outshone its overall sales growth in the most recent quarter – showing brands are taking it seriously as a challenger to the Google-Facebook duopoly.

During its most recent earnings call on Thursday (24 October), the e-commerce giant revealed that sales were up, but profit had slumped year-on-year for the first time since mid-2017.

The business reported a third-quarter profit of $2.1bn, a drop of 28% on the previous year, which was put down to investments in shipping and warehouses to help its core retail business maintain its edge.

Over the past three months, the businesses has garnered $70bn in revenues; up from 24% on on the same quarter last year.

Advertising revenue growth was a bright spot in the company’s results, with ‘other revenue’ (which principally refers to Amazon’s ad business) hitting $3bn over the three months to the end of September, up 45% on the same quarter last year.

Driving ‘relevancy’ and looking beyond search

The firm’s chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky said it was “very happy” with its ad sales progress and that it was now focused on helping brands deliver more targeted ads within the Amazon ecosystem.

“We continue to focus on advancing advertising experiences there, [making them] helpful for customers and helping them to see new products. We want to empower our businesses to find attracting and engage these customers and it’s increasingly popular with vendor sellers and third-party advertisers,” he added.

“It’s still early and what we’re focused on really at this point is relevancy, making sure that the ads are relevant to our customers, helpful to our customers, and to do that, we use machine learning and that’s helping us to drive better, better and better relevancy.”

Earlier this month it was reported that Amazon was eating into Google’s search dominance, with eMarketer forecasting that Amazon’s share is expected to grow to 15.9% by 2021, with Google’s expected to contract to 70.5%.

However, Dave Fildes, Amazon’s director of investor relations said that increased adoption among brands was pushing the company to expand its video and OTT offerings.

Pointing to the ad-supported movie streaming service it recently launched on IMDb and live sporting deals, Fildes said it planned to ad more inventory to the latter and across its Fire TV apps via Amazon Publisher Services integrations.

“[We’re also looking at] streamlining access for third-party apps and really just making it easier for advertisers to manage their campaigns and provide better results,” he continued.

Aaron Goldman, chief marketing officer, at self-service ad platform 4C Insights highlighted how quickly Amazon is ramping up its ad platform.

“It has the unique ability to close the loop from purchase intent to sales and allow brands use that data for ad targeting and measurement,” he explained, saying clients using 4C’s platform had upped their spend by 250% in the past year.

Feature Image Credit: Advertising revenue growth was a bright spot in the company’s results / Amazon

By Rebecca Stewart

Sourced from The Drum

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