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Influencer Fraud Costs Businesses Billions but Here’s What You Can Do to Avoid It

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By Erik Sherman

Hype isn’t a good reason to invest in marketing tools without thoroughly checking them out.

Influencers? Don’t trust ’em. Not the individual person, perhaps, but the concept as frequently presented. As a recent report notes, things are getting to the point that businesses lose a collective $1.5 billion a year in a combination of scams, users’ distrust, and invisible disengagement.

Not that it should come as a surprise. Rented followers is an old story at this point

Many influencers also have no idea what they’re talking about, as the late and apparently sometimes great Payless Shoes proved by inviting fashion influencers to a private showing, watch them go into raptures over the footwear, and then telling them the source.

“Shut up! Did I just pay too much?” one asked who said a pair of sneakers would be worth hundreds. Uh, yup.

The new study–really a meta-analysis by Roberto Cavazos, a professor at the University of Baltimore, on behalf of adtech company CHEQ AI Technologies–suggests that things in the influencer world are even more problematic. Here are a few of the issues he brings up:

  • Fake followers: There are scams aplenty in influencer marketing, like Potato, only without acknowledgment to prove a point and at much higher rates of occurence. Depending on the study, numbers of fake followers in influencer audiences range from 20% to 78%.
  • Sneaky tactics: People will grow their follower base by doing things like following others, waiting for them to follow back, and then unfollowing. If most of those others aren’t checking and unfollowing in return, it boosts the apparent figures without a real connection. The influencer is just another random person.
  • Attrition: Many people who use social networks lose interest or move on to other ones. A significant percentage–commonly 30%, according to figures Cavazos cites, but possibly going as high as 90% for many influencers–may no longer be there. The audience capacity keeps showing like the size of a theatre but many of the chairs are empty.
  • Audience distrust: This may be even more damning than the other items. Again, depending on the source of the stats, as few as 4% of people on the Internet trust what influencers say on social media and a majority of people think influencers are trying to scam their audiences.

I spoke with Lena Katz, a branded content strategist, who works with clients on content distribution strategies that often include an influencer component. She said all the problems are well known. “Fake engagement, being able to buy likes, is not new,” she said. It’s been going for years.” She thinks the audience disaffection has been growing over time. It’s bad news on the influencer front, at least how companies and agencies have approached it.

Katz suggested a few approaches she’s found to work. One is to partner with businesses or specialty tradespeople or solo practitioners who are influential in their own right among a customer base. Companies and people with actual revenue streams and not a dependence on Instagram posts. “It’s a reliable strategy for building influencer campaigns where you’re more likely to generate ROI,” she said, because the people going to that site or account are accustomed to actually doing business there. “The followers of their accounts are more likely to be real customers, not bot-inflated followers of ‘professional influencers’ that will never buy a product.”

Katz mentioned working with an apparel brand. Out of 50 “fashion influencers,” fewer than five were able to sell two items of clothing with a discount code. What did work? Having a wedding photographer do a fashion shoot then do giveaways. “It did 10 or 20 times better than any of the influencer posts,” Katz said.

Look for individuals or businesses with skills or products people seek out and where an influencer campaign might overlay well with what they do. “If you have a caffeine drink, [don’t get] a barista,” Katz said. Instead, look for “someone who would drink a caffeine drink to help them do their job better.” Who’s more believable? That barista or, perhaps, a bus or truck driver who has to stay alert on the road for hours at a time?

Companies can do well working with complementary firms or with corporate customers and doing cross-promotions. Katz did that with an e-commerce company that went from nothing to a multi-national business doing millions in annual turnover within three years.

Finally, consider social impact programming. “Pick a charity, something that aligns with your brand, someone that you would want to support,” Katz said. Support the charity with your own products or services.

And, in all cases, focus on tangible results, not engagement “because that can be faked.” Run promotions that require interaction, like people signing up with their email address for a giveaway. The more tangible the concept, the better a chance you’ll get something from it.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Erik Sherman

Sourced from Inc.

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Companies Accelerate Digital Innovation Inside and Out

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Sourced from The Wall Street Journal

Ecosystem partnerships and cross-functional teams can help spur innovation and enable agility at companies pursuing digital maturity.

Many digitally maturing companies are not only innovating more than their less-advanced counterparts, but they’re also innovating differently, according to “Accelerating Digital Innovation Inside and Out: Agile Teams, Ecosystems, and Ethics,” an annual report from MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte studying the effects of digital technologies on organizations.¹ This year’s research focuses on how digitally maturing organizations are drawing on the power of ecosystems, cross-functional teams, and other loosely coupled arrangements to increase innovation and agility.

The surveyed companies each fit into one of three digital maturity categories—early (24%), developing (44%), or maturing (32%)—with maturing companies innovating at far higher rates than less mature businesses in large part by fostering a culture of innovation and providing the resources to support it. Eighty-one percent of respondents from maturing companies cite innovation as an organizational strength, compared with 36% from developing outfits and only 10% from early-stage companies. They invest more in innovation, too, with executives and managers from 74% of maturing companies saying their organizations provide sufficient resources for innovation, versus 39% of developing companies and 15% of early-stagers.

Maturing companies also allocate time for their employees to innovate. Eighty-six percent of respondents from digitally maturing companies say that 10% or more of their time at work involves the opportunity to experiment or innovate. By contrast, more than 40% of early-stage respondents report that less than 10% of their time, or no time at all, involves experimenting or innovating.

Ecosystems a Fertile Source of Innovation

Digitally maturing enterprises are also far more likely to encourage innovation by forming external partnerships. Eighty percent of respondents at maturing companies say their organization is cultivating innovation this way; at developing organizations, that number drops to 59%, and, at early-stage organizations, it falls to 33%. This gap does not exist because less mature companies fail to recognize the importance of these bonds—nearly 80% of respondents across all maturity groups consider partnerships vital to their innovation efforts—but early-stage companies, in particular, are less willing to commit resources to innovation, which can be essential to scaling successful projects with external partners.

Digitally maturing companies also use wide-ranging, capability-building ecosystems to address both short- and long-term objectives. Working with platform companies, for instance, can enable organizations to team up with additional collaborators and jointly explore potential innovations. Ecosystems can also provide collective access to diverse customers, leading to a combined understanding of audience feedback and behavior that often plays a critical role in the innovation process.

Leveraging these partnerships to increase innovation, however, can also present difficulties. Nearly half (46%) of all respondents cite challenges related to creating a collaborative culture and aligning goals across an ecosystem, with results consistent regardless of maturity level. Companies may also struggle with employees and leaders who aren’t naturally inclined to collaborate with external partners.

Buying In to Cross-Functional Teams

While ecosystems are critical to externally focused innovation activities, 83% of digitally maturing companies depend upon cross-functional teams to advance innovation internally, compared with 71% of developing companies and 55% of early-stage outfits. Executives and managers at digitally maturing companies say these teams are more likely to have considerable autonomy regarding how to accomplish goals (69%, versus 53% and 38% at developing and early-stage companies, respectively), to be evaluated as a group (54%, versus 33% and 20%), and to have their senior leaders create a supportive environment for their teams (73%, versus 48% and 29%).

A cross-functional team, with people from multiple departments, might be accountable to a project manager or a corporate innovation executive rather than to their official line manager. Respondents point to enhanced access to resources—such as diverse perspectives, broader skill sets, and new ideas—as the most important benefit. At the same time, operating via cross-functional teams may pose new kinds of management challenges, with more than half of respondents citing problems with team alignment and an unsupportive culture.

Digitally maturing companies also embrace loosely coupled relationships, systems, and processes to support their digital innovation. They give greater autonomy to their cross-functional teams and individual units, which have the freedom to respond quickly to shifts in their market environment. Their interactions with external partners, governed more by relationships than by detailed contracts, enable cross-pollinated skill sets and mindsets. This, in turn, can allow novel solutions to arise more often and more quickly than in tightly controlled systems.

*****

In today’s rapidly changing marketplace, a company’s belief in the importance of innovation is an important enabler of digital maturity. Companies that want to advance digitally can take concrete steps to drive innovation further, developing an ecosystem-driven, cross-functional approach that can have a decisive effect on their progress toward full digital transformation.

Click here to see the accompanying infographic.

—by Gerald C. Kane, professor of information systems at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College; Doug Palmer, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP; David Kiron, executive editor, MIT Sloan Management Review; and Anh Nguyen Phillips and Natasha Buckley, senior managers, Deloitte Services LP

Editor’s note: This is the first story in a two-part series on the “Accelerating Digital Innovation Inside and Out: Agile Teams, Ecosystems, and Ethics” report.

 

 

Sourced from The Wall Street Journal

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Big Data: An Asset More Valuable Than Oil

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By Paul Matthews

In 2018, the world has been shaken by the usage of big data: the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which was related to the allegedly illegal buying and selling process of data points and data-related pieces from the British company, has put data science into the spotlight of the “mainstream business” world. After this scandal, in fact, data has surpassed oil as the most valuable asset on Earth. Let’s analyse why and, most importantly, how this has happened.

Data Points: A Commercially Powerful Numerical Value

For “data point”, we intend a numerical value which, when associated with a specific entity (i.e. a person, a company), combines preferences, comments and tastes (from a numerical perspective) in order for a software to automatically elaborate them. The power of data points stands in the fact that, when properly analysed, they could give thorough insights on a particular user’s preference on a specific topic. The “exploitation” of Facebook searches on the Brexit topic, for example, was elaborated using data points to provide highly tailored ads to the people who were either searching for “leave the UK” and related keywords. Although this may sound slightly political, it was actually confirmed by Cambridge Analytica itself last year after they (and Facebook) were fined for over $2 billion for buying and selling private pieces of information (data points).

Data Science: An Enterprise Niche Sector Going Mainstream

The possibility of creating tailored ads based on numerical values has intrigued business owners worldwide to the point in which they decided to open data science-related divisions in companies which weren’t exactly at an “enterprise” level. Data elaboration, acquisition, science and Python development professional figures have been recruited in small and medium companies worldwide massively, in the past 7 months. Despite a specific GDPR section strictly regulating data acquisition and processing, data scientists have definitely “gone mainstream” in the recent past.

From fintech to eCommerce, to pure lead generation, the usage of data science has become a constant in 2019.

Some Business Sectors Have Been Getting More Results Than Others…

As mentioned above, data processing and science have been used by a variety of businesses in the past months. Fintech and real estate have been the most successful ones, in terms of lead generation tailored onto data. Sectors like bridging loans, development finance and similar have seen a net 35% increase in organic investment in terms of hiring Python developers who were able to process such delicate data to prepare targeted, tailored and highly convertible ads for social media channels. Lead generation has become very dependant on data in the recent past.

To Conclude

The usage of data in 2019 has definitely become a mainstream procedure. In the nearest future, we can safely say that GDPR rules will become even more strict: with more specific regulations on the acquisition and storing, data is still far away from being fully regulated.

By Paul Matthews

Paul Matthews is a Manchester-based business and tech writer who writes in order to better inform business owners on how to run a successful business. You can usually find him at the local library or browsing Forbes’ latest pieces. Paul is currently consulting a bridging loans company in Manchester.

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Kraft Heinz Embarks On ‘A Culture Of Creativity’

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By Paul Talbot

From Oscar Meyer to Ore-Ida, Kraft Heinz has been the steward of leading brands for generations. I recently asked CEO Miguel Patricio to explain what’s changing at the firm and why.

Paul Talbot: What sort of changes will you bring to Kraft Heinz marketing?

Miguel Patricio: We have to build a culture of creativity. I will encourage people to take risks, not small ones around the margins, but meaningful ones.

The importance of building this culture cannot be overstated. It will allow Kraft Heinz to be ahead of its time, and to position itself as a leader in the consumer packaged goods industry. Creativity is crucial to understanding and anticipating the future. Take the example of new parents who grew up on Kraft Mac and Cheese. They have a nostalgia for this product, which is a powerful advantage for our company.

A culture of creativity understands their needs and their lives, but it also anticipates how Kraft Mac and Cheese will fit in the lives of their children as they grow to become teenagers, young adults and perhaps think about becoming parents themselves. Kraft Mac and Cheese is a link between these generations, but this does not mean it can remain static. For it to remain an important part of consumers’ lives, it has to evolve with every generation, with innovation that is effective and incremental.

Talbot: What strategic process is most effective in reinvigorating a brand that might be considered, in your words, ‘a little bit dusty?’

Patricio: I’d like to use the fact that many of our brands have been around for generations to our advantage. Nostalgia is powerful among all age groups, but in particular among younger generations. We have brands that stand the test of time and enjoy vast name recognition. Now it’s a matter of making them move.

I love the example of Planters Cheez Balls and Cheez Curls, two snacks that are synonymous with the ‘90s. We responded to die-hard fans and last year we brought them back, reinforced with a robust marketing strategy. The response was tremendous and underscored the strong value of the brands in our portfolio.

I’m also focused on premiumization. We win by demonstrating to consumers that our products are the highest quality, have the best taste, and offer the best fit in their busy lives. This approach works. I’ve seen it happen time and time again during my years in global marketing – and it’s happening now at Kraft Heinz.

Let me give you two other examples of success that show what happens when we invest behind our brands, drive innovation, and move into new retail categories. Heinz Tomato Ketchup recently reached an all-time high U.S. market share, topping 70%. And Philadelphia Cream Cheese has had consistent share growth since 2014, and currently holds 68% market share.

Talbot: When the quality of an organization’s marketing strategy is evaluated, what key factors should be taken into consideration?

Patricio: Key factors are uniqueness, meaningfulness, along with the potential to generate incremental sales and to increase household penetration. To do all this in our current moment of fragmented media is a difficult task, to say the least. We have to use all the tools at our disposal to cut through the clutter. We need to deliver moments of clarity about our products.

How do we do this? By building a culture of creativity.

Talbot: How should marketing strategy, which has a tendency to become unwieldy, be created and managed so it’s focused and effective?

Patricio: A long-term perspective is crucial. It guides daily spend, daily planning and innovation. It lets us find efficiencies in our marketing strategies. But most importantly, it helps us clarify which decisions are the right ones and what kind of bets we should make.

If a specific marketing strategy will provide short-term gain but doesn’t contribute substantially to our brands’ long-term plans, then it’s not worth doing. Let me also add that there are so many competing pressures for our marketing budget. At the core, however, our spend should be focused on reaching the consumer, not on all the other places that go into the marketing back-office.

Our goal is to spend our marketing dollars more effectively so that we can invest more into directly reaching consumers.

Talbot: Any other insights you’d like to share?

Patricio: I’ve been CEO for less than two months. It’s a thrilling and humbling opportunity to lead this world-class company into its next phase of growth, and to become the steward of our many iconic brands. I’m so energized by the opportunities here.

Every weekend, I can’t wait until Monday comes around! Often, I’m asked what has surprised me the most as I begin my time here as CEO. It’s the quality and talent of our people, which is why I’m so intent on building a culture of creativity. I want to celebrate and nurture this creative talent, and I want to send a clear message: it’s OK to take risks.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Paul Talbot

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

Minus strategy marketing staggers. I am a somewhat reformed ex-media business executive, with tours of duty at AOL, CBS Radio, and Nationwide Communications. I’m a fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Boston Red Sox, the Principality of Liechtenstein, fried clams, fog, and prices that end in the number 7.

Sourced from Forbes

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Four Reasons Why Influencer Marketing Will Thrive Without Instagram Likes

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By Jim Tobin

Instagram recently added new countries to its test in which it’s hiding the number of likes a given post gets from everyone except that post’s creator. Social networks are constantly testing new concepts, but the fact that this test has expanded indicates how seriously they are considering it, with the main goal being to take the social pressure off acquiring likes.

Some have worried that hiding likes from public view would hurt influencer marketing, as influencers are judged, at least in part, on their ability to get people to react to the content they produce. Here are four reasons why I believe influencer marketing will be just fine without the ability for the public to view how many likes their content receives:

1. Professional influencer marketers don’t look at public view counts.

All the social networks have APIs that let other software ingest the like count on the posts they are most interested in. With this ability, we can look at performance across a wide array of influencers and their posts very quickly and even make on-the-fly calculations in terms of engagement rates, cost per engagement and more. Only part-time influencer marketing folks are manually scrolling through accounts looking for the posts they care about.

2. The like isn’t going away.

Whether we should or not, humans feel a certain positive way when they get another like on their post. While hiding these numbers could certainly remove the pressure of “only having five likes” that we’ve all felt, getting those likes still feels good. Even more importantly, engagement on what we post is the fundamental signal to the Instagram algorithm of what we like to see more of. By the simple act of liking, we’re telling the algorithm who we want to see more often, whether we like video or not, and much more. Barring a seismic reinvention, the social networks can’t eliminate the “like” as the easiest way for us to give a nod back to our friends’ posts.

3. Engagement rate is relative.

While hiding public like counts will almost certainly decrease the total number of likes on the social network, influencers and content are compared against each other in terms of efficiency. So, if an average post once got 100 likes and that drops to 80 likes, the entire scale of what’s good shifts along with it.

4. We’ve moved beyond likes for measuring success.

Just a few years ago, we were reporting “engagements” back to clients as among the metrics showing the success of a given campaign. Today, however, we’re much more focused on measuring business results from influencer marketing programs. Many of our campaigns drive web traffic and measure that traffic all the way through to sales. For retail campaigns, we’re still often tracking sale lift against a benchmark period to measure success. Improvements in measuring influencer marketing are accelerating rapidly and the few left only measuring engagements are likely going to be left behind anyway.

Social networks will continue to make changes to their platforms. When I formed my company in 2007, there were no brand pages and no ways to run paid ads. You couldn’t even upload a video. Today there is another rumor that Instagram is running a test that will hide follower counts. As social networks make these adjustments in ways that favor quality content in front of people who care about it most, high-quality influencer marketing will have a place. After all, inspirational and aspirational content fosters brand discovery online and that is among the things people very much enjoy about social networks and the content we see there.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Jim Tobin

Jim Tobin is President of Carusele, a leading influencer marketing agency, and CEO of Ignite Social Media, the original social media agency.

Sourced from Forbes

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Surveillance at the Heart of Smart Cities

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By Jessica Burton

Today’s cities are living entities. They develop, grow and become more complex over time. Yet, many of their most pressing issues, such as the need for utility improvements and monitoring crime, remain the same. Like never before, city officials have the capabilities to implement analytics technology. But surveillance will be at the heart of smart cities.

These technologies will help with a myriad of everyday city demands, in addition to more intricate challenges pertaining to security, healthcare, mobility, energy and economic development.

We need accurate insights into cities like never before.

With more than half of the world’s population residing in cities, this need for smarter and more accurate insights into their everyday workings is monumental. City management officials could learn much from leaders like Cisco, Amazon and Google. These companies have made it their business to not just collect data, but  utilize it to improve livelihoods and communities.  As we look to their successes, it becomes increasingly evident that the answer to creating smarter cities lies largely in surveillance technology that captures data analytics.

With the rise in surveillance technology and predictive analytics, we can make smart cities smarter and effectively, increase their efficiency. The reality is, however, that connectivity is never a guarantee. Therefore, necessary data must be present, regardless of connectedness, to ensure real-time decisions can be made. Satisfactory amounts of local storage must exist to position the most perceptive data nearest to the point of compute. This speaks to the increasing importance of the edge, as well as embedded storage.

Growth in real-time data is causing a shift in digital storage needs.

The growth of real-time data though edge analytics is causing a shift in the type of digital storage cities need. Fast, uncompromised access to data is becoming ever more critical. With a recent study, Data Age 2025: The Digitization of the World from Edge to Core, estimating that 175 zettabytes of data will be generated by 2025, there has never been a greater volume of insights at our fingertips and cities must step up to develop ways to use this data for good. In many ways, cities are already doing this – from intelligent street lights optimizing routes based on traffic patterns to reduce emergency response time by 20 to 30 percent, to advanced surveillance cameras with analytics deployed to enhance security operations, leading to a reduction in crime by 30 to 40 percent. However, we can do so much more.

To be a true smart city today, cities will need an “edge tier” approach to store, filter and manage data closer to the sensors. To gain deeper insights, the data is then stored and analyzed for longer periods of time in the edge domain as well as in the cloud or backend. Edge analytics that capture and collect data on network video recorders (NVRs) make it possible to act in real-time. With this technology, cities can find missing persons, notify residents of nearby emergencies and send out traffic congestion warnings.

Data insights will provide many wide-ranging benefits to cities.

The opportunities data analysis and data-driven urban improvement present are both hugely exciting and impossible to ignore. Behavioral analytics, thermal cameras and AI engines in edge devices like NVRs are just a sampling of the technologies that have given us the ability to remain constantly connected on a vast network. By horizontally interrelating individual systems, we can now develop insights into various mechanisms. This includes patterns in electricity, water, sanitation, transportation, environmental monitoring and weather intelligence.

West Hollywood’s Innovation Division is an excellent example to look to.

Take for instance, West Hollywood’s Innovation Division, which recently received the American Planning Association (APA) Technology Division’s Smart Cities Award for the “WeHo Smart City” Strategic Plan. Its three-part plan consisted of strategies including:

  • Data-driven decision-making rolling out to departments citywide
  • Collaboration and experimentation designed to enable City Hall staff to work better together.
  • Automation of processes to improve public safety and manage the built environment through smart city sensors and smart building programs.

With data collected from predictive analytics based on Deep Learning activities in the back-end, in some cases for over a year, we can pre-identify trends to manage incidents in one sector that directly impact another.

Access to real-time data and surveillance tech is key.

Cities need data in the moment and on the go. This places  a larger demand on the edge to produce the predictive and reliable information required, often in real-time. In fact, reports (Seagate) predict that due to the infusion of data into our city workflows and personal streams of life, nearly 30 percent of the “Global Datasphere” — meaning the amount of data created, captured or replicated across the globe – will be in real-time by 2025.

That’s a lot of real-time data. So, how can a city implement surveillance technology to better secure a city and enable smarter analyses? The first step is identifying video storage solutions positioned at the center of a smart city’s surveillance application. These solutions enable recordings, data retention, predictive analytics and real-time alerts. The next step is to position data at the edge and provide ample time for cities to make sense of patterns. More than ever before, cities will need to come together to integrate their technologies and ultimately make their networks smarter. This is a challenge that will require broad cooperation across its systems. Surveillance storage technology is the foundation to this strategy, ensuring timely data access and availability from edge to cloud.

By Jessica Burton

Global Product Marketing Manager at Seagate Technology. Jessica Burton has over 10 years of experience in IT storage and is the Global Product Marketing Manager at Seagate Technology. Her previous experience includes expertise in enterprise storage at Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Sourced from readwrite

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Website marketing: The definitive guide

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By Castleford

What is website marketing?

Website marketing is the strategic promotion of a website to drive relevant traffic to the site. The goal is typically to attract people who may be interested in a company’s products or services. More traffic coming to a site means more opportunities to put your value proposition in front of potential customers.

The goal of most website marketing strategies is to rank highly in search engine results pages (SERPs) through the implementation of search engine optimisation (SEO) tactics, content marketing, social media engagement, and other digital and offline efforts.

In the majority of industries, pages that rank in the first SERP position get more than 50% of the traffic for their target keywords. There’s a steep drop-off for pages ranking in the second and third positions, and pages in positions 5-20 compete for less than 5% of traffic.

Properly managed, a website marketing strategy can help your business attract new customers and ultimately expand your business’s share of the market.

Your website is your best marketing tool

These days, your brand’s website is the primary channel in which users can learn about your brand and take actions that directly contribute to the growth of your business.

Getting a lot of shares and likes on social media is good – but only if it translates to desired actions. For example, posting funny memes to your brand’s Facebook page may be a good way to increase your social following. But the real goal is to get those users to your website where they will not only be less distracted by competing brands, but also have more ways to interact with your content and offerings.

How to promote your website

To the uninitiated, website promotion can seem like a daunting task.

With an estimated 1.6 billion registered websites in 2019 and more than 4 billion active internet users, standing out feels like an impossible task.

The good news is that there’s nothing impossible about it.

When you understand what your audience is looking for and how search engines identify quality websites, the internet is your oyster.

SEO

As the name implies, SEO is the set of methodologies used to make websites both accessible to search engines and appealing to readers.

Modern ranking algorithms like those used by Google are designed to sniff out dozens of signals that make websites useful and trustworthy.

Moz has done a great job summarising the critical needs of SEO:

Backlinks

Never forget that the web is a network, and movement between network nodes (websites) is crucial not only to digital marketing, but to the modern global economy as a whole.

So if you think about website traffic as a form of currency, it makes sense that you would want to receive it from reputable sources. Just as you wouldn’t want to take money from a shady lender, you don’t want traffic from irrelevant or disreputable sources.

Backlinks – which drive traffic from another site to your own – are extremely important promotional tools. Credible backlinks signal to search engines that your content is trustworthy and relevant.

Influencers

Influencers are connectors; they are people who have established reputations as knowledgeable experts, trendsetters and entertaining personalities. They have large audiences of social followers who enjoy the influencer’s content and actively participate in online conversations.

Brands partner with influencers to appeal to new audience segments and extend the reach of their messages. In 2019, influencer marketing spend is predicted to more than double 2017 figures, with 69% going toward B2C campaigns.

Email signatures

The average worker sends and receives 121 emails per day, so why not put those outgoing messages to work promoting your website?

Any email that comes from your brand’s domain name should include a link back to your website. That way, any reader who is interested in learning more about your offerings can easily get to your site without any extra steps.

Quality content

Some have said that content marketing is the only type of marketing left. And while there’s certainly room for disagreement there, it’s true that content marketing is more relevant than ever.

Content provides site visitors with immediate value in the form of new knowledge and insights. For many visitors, it’s the sole reason to view your site.

If you want people to stay on your site long enough to absorb your messages, you need highly engaging content.

We’ll talk more about that farther down.

Building an effective website marketing strategy

Marketing your website effectively requires a deep understanding of several disciplines, including analytics, modern mobile technology trends, human psychology, inbound and outbound methodologies, and more.

Conduct a site analysis

Everything you do to increase the amount of traffic coming to your site should be measured. It’s the only way to know how effective your strategies are and the only way you’ll be able to identify new opportunities to attract more visitors.

For example, if you implement a content marketing strategy, you’ll want to measure traffic coming to your blog articles, the number of click-throughs each one produces, the amount of time visitors spend reading the content and more.

Thankfully, Google Analytics is free and fairly intuitive to use, though certain types of site analysis are best left to professionals.

But there is more good news: By setting up a Google Analytics account for your website and running monthly reports, you’ll be ahead of 49% of B2B marketers.

Consider mobile optimisation

The internet is quickly becoming a mobile-first environment.

More people are conducting searches, reading content and doing business from their smartphones every day. In Q1 2019, mobile search accounted for 64% of organic traffic, up from 57% in 2018.

In fact, Google began to use the mobile version of webpages for indexing and ranking way back in 2018.

To rank highly, webpages must be able to load fast on mobile devices and display their content in a manner that is mobile friendly. That means image optimisation and dynamic site markup are essential for SEO moving forward.

Managed properly, search marketing can increase web traffic significantly without raising costs exponentially.

Map the user journey

How do users move through your website?

Do they find you organically through a blog post and then browse your product pages?

What about when they arrive from your social media page?

Asking these and similar questions will help you develop a user experience that encourages visitors to stay longer and read more.

You may want to consider developing multiple user journeys for distinct buyer personas. Your Google Analytics dashboard can show you where users are currently leaving your site so you can optimise those pages.

In addition to thinking of site utilisation as a journey your users take, consider other models, such as the marketing flywheel, that seek to build SEO momentum over time.

Develop email campaigns

Email marketing is one of the most popular and useful forms of web marketing currently available.

From small businesses to the enterprise, email lists are the lifeblood of sales. They can also help you pull in returning visitors with engaging content, special promotions and more.

Cold emails – messages sent to prospects with whom you have no prior relationship – require a personal touch, and a little humor, to fully engage your target audience. Your subject lines should be eye-catching and succinct. The best strategies use content to capture visitor emails, then reinforce that relationship with additional, more relevant content.

Leverage PPC

Pay-per-click ads can be an effective way to drive more traffic to your site, but they require a more substantial investment.

As the name implies, businesses only pay when someone clicks on the ad.

These days, PPC is most effective when used in tandem with another channel like content marketing, because visitors need more information than can fit in an ad before they make a purchase decision.

Types of website marketing services

Website marketing is a full time commitment.

Brands big and small often outsource some or all of their digital marketing efforts to agencies because they lack the internal resources to run effective multichannel campaigns.

Here are some examples of what might be shopped out:

SEO

Google and other search engines are constantly updating their algorithms. Specialist marketing agencies maintain an updated working knowledge of SEO best practices to ensure their clients comply with the latest standards and methodologies.

Content production and optimisation

It’s easy to hire someone to write a few hundred words of blog copy, but marketing agencies can do so much more. Agencies will conduct market and subject matter research, develop written and visual content, promote web content and update assets as needed.

Email marketing

Though many aspects of email marketing campaigns can be automated with the right technology, someone still needs to write and format engaging content. Agencies can help businesses develop and implement end-to-end email campaigns based around unique campaign objectives.

Managed PPC

Marketing agencies can help businesses create PPC campaigns with eye-catching headlines and text. Consultants can fully manage bidding strategies to maximise the reach and ROI of every campaign.

Content and website marketing

Content marketing and website marketing go hand in hand.

Once you’ve attracted readers through your promotional efforts, you need something for them to engage with. After all, if users come to your site only to find a few paragraphs of sales messages, they’re likely to bounce.

However, when relevant users come to your site and find useful information, they’ll not only stick around to read it, but they will also be more likely to take an action, such as signing up for a newsletter or contacting your sales team.

Content development and publication requires a scientific approach

The content you publish on your site needs to be highly relevant to your readers’ needs; it also needs to be visually interesting and easy to parse. Indeed, there are so many factors at play, and site owners need to take a scientific approach to content production and publication.

Considering 1.2% of all indexed pages are responsible for 68% of all website traffic, it should be clear why a scientific approach is necessary to attract people to your site.

The best content marketers consider many things when approaching every piece of content, including:

  • Target audience: Who will get the most use out of the content? What are their pain points? Where are they in the buying process? What content formats do they prefer? What social media marketing channels do they respond to?
  • Commercial goals: What conversion action should readers take? How can we measure the impact of our content?
  • Keywords: Does the content use language that users actually search for? Do pages competing for similar keywords offer greater depth and breadth of subject matter expertise?
  • Tone and branding: Does the content conform to the brand voice?
  • Visuals: Does the imagery and typography reflect the brand? Does it align with the written content?

In addition to these considerations, content marketers also think strategically about which platforms to publish content to, what social channels to promote that content on, the best time of day to publish content and much more.

Your website is probably the most important and powerful marketing tool you have. With plenty of care and strategic thinking, it can become your biggest source of business growth. Take what you’ve learned here and put it to good use. Let us know how it goes in the comments!

By Castleford

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What search and social ad teams can teach each other

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By Adam Edwards

While I’ve considered myself a digital marketer for a long time, there was a point in my career where I was a search marketer. When our agency launched social ad management, there was a huge learning curve for everyone, including me, because the formula for success was so different on social than search.

As we built services around multichannel advertising, one challenge was the meshing of these disciplines. With the help of a great team, we’ve mostly moved past that challenge. And what we’ve found is that the more each group understands the other, not only do they become happier, but also they drive better results in their own area of expertise.

Whether you’re working in-house or with an agency, when your teams understand their counterparts’ approaches, you can see better collaboration, redundancy and overall marketing performance. Here are some of the top lessons search folks can learn from social and vice versa.

What Search Talent Can Learn From Social

1. The impact of creative on performance

Well-written ad copy improves search ads, but its impact is often marginal. On social, creative is arguably the biggest determinant of success. Social ad messaging has to work harder to get someone to engage in that environment and also needs to be reconsidered much more routinely than search to be effective. When a search marketer feels like they’re out of ideas for ad messaging, it’s a virtual lock that their social ad friends can help.

2. How to set up automation for success

This has changed a ton recently, but search marketers are historically skeptical of automation. Smart money was on bidding manually (after years of missteps with Google auto-bidding) and traditional A/B testing for ads. Social platforms have almost always seen automated bidding outperform manual bids. Paid social managers know to be patient with automation, how to feed it the right amount of data and how to talk through the learning phase to stakeholders.

3. How to market without knowing intent

Granularity is so important with search. Blue shoes and red shoes merit complete separation so that you can match ads and destinations. That doesn’t exist on social. Social ad managers are often targeting audience profiles and not keywords, so they don’t know whether the person is going to want blue or red shoes. As search moves more toward audience-based targeting, search managers would be wise to learn from their social ad colleagues how to best appeal to an audience through aspirational creative.

4. Attribution discrepancies

Facebook tracks users across browsers and devices more effectively than Google or Microsoft Advertising, but many tracking platforms will favor search, simply because it tends to drive more “last-click” leads and sales. Social ad campaigns deliver more value from ad views, after which users are much more likely to visit in a new tab, on a later web session or on another device.

Search is about instant gratification — the user clicks, and they either convert or they do not. That typically leaves search marketers less equipped than social marketers in understanding and explaining attribution differences and why, just because there isn’t a purchase or conversion right off of an ad click, that doesn’t mean it’s ineffective.

What Social Talent Can Learn From Search

1. With setting bids, there’s more than meets the eye

So much of search has to do with setting bids and adjusting them over time. Search marketers are always revisiting bids and searching for new opportunities to find new pockets of opportunity to bid differently. Social marketers tend to take an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach. Social marketers should test out bid values and methods more frequently to determine where an ad is showing, how often it’s showing and what results it’s driving.

2. The possibilities available in limited options

Search has so many different ways in which you can improve (or screw up) performance. Control drives managers toward many thousands of segments in a developed search account, each with its own frequent adjustments. Because social advertising has fewer levers, that sometimes leads to fewer attempts to change them. Armed with the basics of social advertising, it’s amazing what opportunities a search manager might uncover when let loose on social strategy.

3. Launching the ads is just the beginning

Preparation and launch are key to social ad results. Choosing the correct campaign objective, researching audience segments, building the right creative and picking the right bid strategy are all essential. And once one launch is complete, often it’s right into prepping the next. If it has a tough first week, it’s harder to come back.

With paid search, the launch is the tip of the iceberg. The first week is really a lump of clay that will be molded over time with optimizations. Taking a moment to see if you can get more of the best performance from successful social launch, or to examine what is salvageable from a failed launch, can deliver huge results in the present and learnings for the future.

4. Performance needs to put up or shut up

When paid search is called a performance marketing channel, it really means a performance marketing channel. If the return on ad spend or lead cost doesn’t justify the budget, that budget will get cut. So, search managers have a very high sense of urgency about performance, and it drives what they communicate about and choose to optimize.

Because social ad managers are often operating at arm’s length from that type of scrutiny when promoting a new product line, creating awareness — or starting a conversation — and building a (healthy) urgency around proving return would serve them well.

Too often, our marketing teams can become siloed and territorial, which has an impact on everything from camaraderie to marketing performance. Taking time to integrate each team’s perspectives can not only unlock better performance and team communication, but also create a better workplace for your team and better marketing for your brand.

Feature Image Credit: GETTY 

By Adam Edwards

As founder/chief client officer of Metric Theory, Adam is responsible for 100+ paid search and Facebook ad professionals and 200+ clients.

View all articles by this author

Sourced from AdAge

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How to Know When Your Business Needs a Rebrand and How to Do It Properly

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By Nick Brown

If you’re one of many business owners and entrepreneurs out there who thinks that ’brand’ equals the company’s name and logo, we strongly encourage you to think again. In today’s business world, it’s not uncommon that people make mistakes such as this one. And while it’s true that brand is tightly connected to these instances (the company’s name and logo), the story doesn’t end there.

If you aim at successfully running your business, you need to realize just how important your brand is. We’re not very fond of strict definitions of terms, but if we had to sum up what ’brand’ actually encompasses, we’d have to roughly say that it involves (and revolves around) all the experiences that people have with your firm. You’ll notice that the keyword here is the term ’experience’. This means that you need to worry about how your company is being perceived by others. Your customers and prospects should ideally have a pretty good all-around experience with your firm, which usually means that your brand is doing alright.

But often, this is not the case. For various different reasons, it happens that companies stop being the customer’s favorite. Sometimes it’s the competition and in other cases, it’s bad marketing decisions that led to this situation. Whatever it may be the case, if you realize that your company is struggling on its way to the top, or things have suddenly started to go downhill for you, maybe you should consider rebranding. That’s why, in this article, we’re going to talk about these things more thoroughly. We’ll guide you through the process of recognizing if your company needs a rebrand, and if it does, how to do it the right way.

Distinguish Yourself From the Rest of the Peers and Competitors

One of the most crucial things you must do is to differentiate yourself from the competition. You can’t expect to retain old customers and gain new ones if people can’t really tell what your brand is exactly about and why is it so special.

In order to do this, a prudent thing to do would be to rebrand. This is especially important if you realize you have some generic logo or a name that doesn’t resonate in people’s heads. Customers like to see when businesses care about these things because it also shows that they care about them. So, if you’re using stock images in your marketing materials, it’s best advised to stop this practice. People recognize these generic images and this tells them that you’re not as involved as you should be in making sure they get the best experience when dealing with your product.

If You Suspect Your Brand Is Outdated – Rebrand ASAP

There’s a pretty simple rule in marketing: if you even suspect that your brand is outdated, you should rebrand immediately. Sometimes this is also advisable in situations when you’re not really suspecting anything, but if and when in doubt, make sure to breathe a new life into your existing brand.

Some of the clear signs that you possibly should consider rebranding is an outmoded font or flash-based website, for example. These things belong to the past. You might think that this is not as important, but since so many things happen online, it’s paramount that your company has a fresh, modern-looking website that’s going to visually match today’s marketing trends and criteria. You need to realize that your company’s website, logo, name, and the whole visual identity can be either a deal-maker or a deal-breaker.

Any Sign of Poor Reputation Requires Rebranding

On the other hand, if you start seeing that your business is slowly going down the drain and it’s getting a poor reputation, it’s essential to do something pronto. You can’t expect to live from old glory days, and you need to learn how to adjust accordingly. Don’t sell your business if you don’t have to since there are other ways you can try to save it.

Rebranding is clearly one of those things that, if done properly, can make your business rise again to its previous blissful days. Overcoming negative reputation is never easy, but if there’s a proper way to try, it’s making sure the customers start seeing you in a completely new light.

It’s Essential to Rebrand When Your Company Evolves

But it’s not crucial to rebrand just in case your company starts to struggle. On the contrary – even if it starts to grow rapidly, it’s of utmost importance to think about different strategies and ways to rebrand. Many people make the mistake of leaving everything as it is in a situation when the business starts making progress and becomes a success. But this is one of the errors you definitely need to avoid.

And in those situations when you’re trying to expand your business to other markets, it’s also of prime importance to make sure there aren’t any other companies or businesses with similar brand names, logos, and that their visual identity doesn’t match yours in any way. You clearly want to avoid people associating your brand with someone else’s, or mistaking you for someone else. If this happens, you could be looking at potential problems that revolve around patent disputes, or other legal issues. We’d strongly advise you to make sure that this doesn’t happen and to spare yourself from going to court over these matters.

A Huge Part of Successful Rebranding Is Having Clear Goals

This is something that applies to all companies, no matter if they’re in the process of rebranding or not: you need to have clear goals in mind. If you want to be successful, you have to know what is it exactly that you’re trying to accomplish. The way you approach your company’s mission and values is going to set the tone for the entire venture.

That’s why it’s so important to ask yourself and try to honestly answer the questions that revolve around the reasons why your company exists, what values does it promote, and what is it that you can offer that’s rather unique. Having clear answers to these questions will most definitely help you to rebrand successfully.

Consistency is Key – Make Sure to Rebrand Accordingly

Speaking of successful rebranding, you need to make sure to go through this process accordingly. This means that you have to pay attention to the way your brand has been perceived in the past. If you’re not rebranding because of the poor reputation, there’s no need to take the entirely different route. On the contrary, it’s better to stay on track and develop a strategy that’s going to work effectively with your existing brand.

Even if you have the luxury to start from scratch here, it’s better to be consistent. You don’t want people to have troubles recognizing your product or services – you only want to give them something that’s going to show that you care (for them, as well as your position in the marketplace). You want to attract customers with higher retention rates, but you also don’t want to lose any old customers in the process.

Pay Attention to Your Competitors

We’ve already indicated how important it is to set yourself apart from the competitors. One of the ways to properly rebrand has to involve doing your due diligence and researching what the competition does. Ideally, you want to create the brand that’s so powerful that everyone else looks at and mimics what you’re doing.

But the truth is, even if you’re a trailblazer and a trendsetter in this regard and other companies try to recreate your strategies and methods, you still have to watch closely what everyone else is doing. It’s ok to play that bushwhacker role in front of the consumers, but when the doors are closed, you simply have to know what your competition does. If you don’t do this, you might find yourself in the position of having to rebrand due to some other reasons, like the poor reputation that we’ve already talked about, for instance.

Be Open to Different Ideas From Your Team

Being a company leader or manager isn’t the easiest task. Often time you have to make all the big decisions concerning your company. But in some cases, this creates a certain problem: people who are in high positions within the company tend to neglect other people’s opinions. If you want to (continue to) have success, it’s strongly advised to have people who your trust on your team.

Other voices need to be heard and you can all profit from this. Not only can you hear some good new ideas about the proper way to rebrand, but you’ll also show everyone that their opinion matters. This is extremely important if you’re looking to create good office vibes and an environment that values good ideas.

Don’t Underestimate the Complexity of the Task

If you’re looking to rebrand the right way, don’t underestimate the complexity of the task. It may sound like it’s not that big of a deal – you just take care of your visual identity – but remember what we’ve said at the very beginning: your brand is much more than this. It’s not enough to have a new logo, name, or a company website that follows latest web-design trends. You have to pay attention to the whole user experience.

Many company owners don’t realize just how lengthy and serious this process is. You need to plan everything carefully and manage the entire endeavor from start to finish. If you neglect certain parts of this process, the whole thing can be deemed a failure. That’s why a well thought-out project plan is crucial here. As we said, don’t try to micromanage every step, but trust your team to make sound decisions.

Ensure to Timely Launch Your Rebrand

Another important thing you have to make sure is to launch your rebrand on time. This is also connected to closely watching the market. You need to see what your competitors do and, like it or not, follow their pace from time to time.

For example, if you realize that your competitors are preparing to do something big, you need to assess the situation properly. If you launch your rebrand before they make their big announcement, you can potentially find yourself in a bad situation, especially if their surprise outshines yours. Customers could completely forget the fact that you’ve rebranded, or think that it’s not a particularly big deal (compared to your competition).

On the other hand, if you wait too long to launch your rebrand, you’re putting the entire operation in jeopardy. It wouldn’t be the first time that a company has put valuable resources into rebranding without ever actually launching it. You need to do whatever it is in your power to avoid this scenario. On top of this, you also need to avoid any confusion – the potential customers and consumers should know exactly why you rebranded. There should be a clear logic behind the idea and they need to see the improvements right away.

The Bottom Line

Every company needs a rebrand from time to time – this is something that’s inevitable because of the simple fact that things change rapidly. You don’t want to have an outdated brand: this reflects poorly on the entire company. And once you gain that reputation, it can be pretty hard to make it go away. And one of the ways to make this negative reputation go away is exactly through rebranding.

In this article, we’ve talked about how to know when your business needs a rebrand, and how to do it properly. The most important thing to remember is that you need to take care of your customers at all times – that way you’re actually giving enough space to your company to potentially become a huge success. Constantly growing, evolving, further progressing, and expanding your business to other markets should be one of your top priorities, but just make sure you’re protected from patent infringement. You don’t want any legal issues to stop you from reaching your full business potential.

By Nick Brown

Nick is a blogger and a marketing expert currently engaged on projects for Media Gurus, an Australian business, and marketing resource. He is an aspiring street artist and does Audio/Video editing as a hobby.”

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Next Steps in Your Photography

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By ERIC KIM

I had a nice chat with my buddy Don Dillonthe other day, and this was one of the big takeaways:

Once you’re a good photographer with a substantial body of work, NOW WHAT?

Meaning — what are your next steps in your photography? Some simple ideas:

  1. Use Adobe Sparkto make a dynamic website/portfolio of your best work. Then share the link with friends and family and ask them: “How do the photos make you feel?” Then add testimonials to the page.
  2. Publish your photographs as an “e-magazine” (digital magazine) by using iBooks Author (video tutorial)
  3. Use Adobe InDesign to create a print book layout, and send the PDF file to a local printer, to make a ‘zine’ (magazine) of your work. Start by printing 20 copies, and distributing them to friends and family for free. Based on their feedback, try to sell them to your followers for $19.95 each afterwards.
  4. Start blogging about your photographic experiences and life experiences. To keep it simple, signup on wordpress.comand start blogging! The secret: your blog posts don’t need to be “good”. Just make them honest, fun, and share your works in progress.
  5. Get your photos printed: I recommend contacting my buddy Brian Milo at [email protected](read my interview with Brian on the art of printing). I personally like printing my photos 8×12 inches as an optimal size.
  6. Continue to build your following: Start an email newsletter via Mailchimp.com(what I use here) and keep your followers updated with your progress.
  7. The rolling stone never gathers moss: Keep on rolling. The purpose is for you to keep making photography FUN! (Don’s idea). As long as you’re having fun in photography, you’re doing all the right things!

SHOOT ON!
ERIC

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By ERIC KIM

Sourced from Eric Kim Photography

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