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Marketing Terms & Digital Advertising Acronyms You Should Know

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Sourced from Ad Espresso

When it comes to digital advertising and marketing terms, acronyms like UGC, GDN, ROAS, RTB, SOV, and even TrV are commonly tossed around when discussing campaigns.

If you’re not familiar with them, you’re not alone.

Although shorthand ways of describing concepts are nothing new, the ever-expanding laundry list of industry abbreviated terms can confuse even the most seasoned and savvy of digital marketing professionals.

The world of Web marketing and paid ads is littered with technical jargon, catchphrases, and abbreviations. And anything that can be turned into a catchy acronym often is.

While some online marketing terms have become more widely known as marketing has gone mainstream, many acronyms remain unknown outside the industry — and some are even mystery to many people inside it.

Here’s our compilation of acronyms you should know and what they all mean:

General Marketing Terms

  • B2B: Business to Business

One business making a commercial transaction with another business, from wholesale product purchases to providing services.

  • B2C: Business to Consumer

The traditional business model of businesses selling directly to consumers, including local retail business, ecommerce, online banking, insurance, residential real estate, and many other products and services.

  • CX: Customer Experience

One of two commonly used marketing terms (the other being “consumer experience”) used to describe every interaction people have with a company throughout the buying process that influences a prospect or customer’s perception of the brand.

  • CTA: Call to Action

CTA Marketing Terms

 

A hyperlink, button or image that drives the reader to take action on content or ads by downloading, calling, registering or attending an event.

 

  • DMA: Designated Market Area

A geographic location representing a neighborhood, city, county, state, region or country you choose to target.

  • IAB: Interactive Advertising Bureau

IAB Marketing Terms

A trade organization that sets the industry standard for digital advertising, including ad specifications, best practices and business standards for anything digital advertising related.

  • KPI: Key Performance Indicators

KPIs Marketing Terms

 

Metric used across all industries to evaluate the success of various marketing strategies and campaign goals by tracking and measuring progress in areas brand awareness, lead generation, bounce rate, and sales conversions

 

  • MAP: Marketing Automation Platform

A technology that assists marketers in converting prospects to customers by removing high-touch, manually repetitive processes with automated solutions. The email campaign service MailChimp and marketing automation software Marketo are examples of MAPs.

  • NPS: Net Promoter Score

A survey-based customer satisfaction metric that measures (on a scale of 0 to 10) how likely people are to recommend your brand or company to others.

  • ROI: Return On Investment

A ratio between the net profit earned from campaigns and the cost of investing in marketing and advertising.

  • SMB: Small and Medium Sized Businesses

Businesses with between 5 million and 200 million in annual revenues. Also refers to businesses with 100 or fewer employees (small) and from 100 to 999 employees (medium-sized).

  • SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time-Bound

The process of providing criteria for clear defining marketing or advertising goals or establishing objectives and outlining the action steps required to achieve them.

Digital Advertising & Marketing Terms

  • BM: (Facebook) Business Manager

Facebook Business Manager Marketing Terms

 

A free integrated tool used on Facebook to manage ad accounts and pages from a single location

 

  • CAN-SPAM: Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing

A U.S. law passed in 2003 that prohibits businesses from sending targeted emails without permission. (Marketers must include an unsubscribe option in all emails and they should not add names to it without the express permission of the recipient.)

  • CPC: Cost Per Click

CPC Marketing Terms

An online advertising revenue model through which advertisers are charged by the publisher (typically a website owner or a network of websites) for each time a user clicks on their advertisement.

  • CPL: Cost Per Lead

All of the costs associated with generating a lead, including advertising dollars spent, collateral creation, web hosting fees and various other costs.

  • CPM: Cost Per Mille

A method publishers use to assign a cost to advertise on their platform by charging per 1000 advertisement impressions (M is the Roman numeral for 1000) through which advertisers are charged for every time their ad is seen, not how many times it’s clicked.

  • CR: Conversion Rate

The number of people who take action on an advertisement, divided by the number that could have. For example, if your email campaign reaches 100 prospects and 25 of them respond, your conversion rate would be 25%.

  • CRO: Conversion Rate Optimization

A system for increasing the percentage of visitors or prospects that convert into customers or take any desired action on websites, landing pages, social media and CTAs. A/B split testing is commonly used to determine which version of an ad or web page (version A or version B) is more successful in optimizing conversion rates.

  • CTR: Click Through Rate

A performance indicator that measures the percentage of prospects or visitors who take the next action on an advertisement, web page or email. For example, in the case of a landing page, the CTR would be the total number of people who visit the page divided by the number who click and move on to the next step.

  • DSP: Demand Side Platform

A technology that allows advertisers to efficiently purchase display ad inventory across Real Time Bidding (RTB) networks like Google.

  • eCP(x): Effective Cost Per (fill in the blank)

Average spend based on total budget and results. The “e” can be applied to all cost models (such as CPM, CPL, or CPA). With any digital advertising campaign, you may have several placements, cost models, and budgets in place, and knowing your average spend is important to determine the effectiveness of your campaign.

  • GA: Google Analytics

Google Analytics Marketing Terms

This is a data-driven Google tool that is used by marketers to track, analyze and report website, app, and ad traffic to better understand their audience, reach, activity and metrics.

  • GDN: Google Display Network

Google’s network of over 2 million websites and apps that show display ads on their web pages, reaching over 90% of people on the internet, where businesses target consumers and other businesses on the display network using strategic topical keywords , placement on specific webpages and remarketing.

  • PPC: Pay Per Click

A digital advertising method through which publishers charge advertisers for each action (click) they take on ads. See also CPC.

  • PR: Page Rank

An algorithm used by Google to rank web pages in their search engine results using a numerical weight based on a number of different, confidential and proprietary criteria.

  • QS: Quality Score

Google Ads Quality Score Marketing Terms

 

A metric used by Google, Facebook, Yahoo! and Bing that determines both the rank and cost per click of digital ads.

 

  • ROAS – Return On Ad Spend

A PPC marketing metric that demonstrates the profit made as compared to the amount of money spent on the ads. Similar to ROI.

  • RON: Run of Network

A low-cost, high-reach form of online advertising delivery through which advertisers generally have no control over ad placement in return for lower rates and a broader reach on random pages of any site that is part of an ad network. Because of their low CPM, RON ads often used for testing using age or gender targeting analysis.

  • ROS: Run of Site

A form of online advertising that delivers and rotates digital ads on a specific website that advertisers use to maximize their budget without sacrificing exposure.

  • RTB: Real Time Bidding

A method of purchasing unsold ad inventory by CPM through an auction like — the now-ceased Facebook Exchange (FBX) — where the highest bid takes inventory priority.

  • SEO: Search Engine Optimization

SEO Marketing Terms

A technical and creative marketing discipline focused on growing visibility and improve rankings in organic (non-paid) results to increase awareness and drive traffic. It is based on algorithmic variables on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

  • SEM: Search Engine Marketing

The promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) primarily through PPC (pay-per-click) advertising.

  • SERP: Search Engine Results Pages

The pages displayed by search engines in response to a keyword query made by a user.

  • SM: Social Media

Platforms that allow users to post personal and/or business text, image and video content and socially interact.
Examples include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Snapchat and LinkedIn.

  • SMM: Social Media Marketing

The discipline of using social media platforms to promote businesses through organic and paid campaigns.

  • SOV: Share of Voice

A calculation based on a percentage your ad is seen versus other advertisers. For example, if there are four advertisers rotating ads evenly on a page, each advertiser would have a 25 percent share of voice. If that same page has just one advertiser, that advertiser would have 100 percent share of voice.

  • SSP: Supply Side Platform

An automated technology also called sell-side platforms or yield optimization platforms, that allow publishers to maximize the prices at which they sell ad impressions.

  • TrV: TrueView

YouTube Marketing Terms

 

Video advertising sold by Google and run through YouTube, which includes in-stream, discovery and bumper ads.

 

  • UGC: User-generated content

Content created by users of a blog, social media network or online system or service.

  • VTR: View Through Rate

A metric used to report a ratio of the number of completed views of a skippable video ad, based on the number of impressions it received

Website Marketing Terms

  • BR: Bounce Rate

Bounce Rate Marketing Terms

A bounce rate refers to the action a user takes when they land on a page of your website, and leave to go to another site (i.e. bouncing off of your page).

It can also refer to emails that don’t reach an inbox.

  • CMS: Content Management System

An application that consolidates and facilitates the creation, editing, management, and distribution of content. Generally used to refer to a website; WordPress is an example of a popular CMS.

  • IBL: Inbound Link

A hyperlink leading back to your website from a third-party site.

  • DNS: Domain Name System

A protocol that translates website URLs (which use alphabetic characters) into IP addresses (that use numeric characters).

  • GDD: Growth Driven Design

The design or development of a website in intentional increments through making continuous data-driven adjustments.

  • HTML: Hypertext Markup Language

A set of codes that are used by programmers use to create web pages and tell web browsers how to display them. Each individual code is called an element, or a tag, which is used to make up the structure and content of websites.

  • RSS – Really Simple Syndication

RSS Marketing Terms

A way for users to keep track of updates to multiple websites (news sites, blogs, and others) in a single place and in an easily-viewable format, as opposed to having to manually check every single site individually.

  • UI: User Interface

A series of screens, pages, and visual elements and other conduits — either graphical or voice-controlled — that enable people to interact with a website, app, product or service.

  • UV: Unique Visitor

The number of individuals visiting a page on a website during a set period of time.

  • UX: User Experience

How a user interacts and engages with a website, app or platform (where they click, tap, swipe and visit), which can be shaped by testing different page designs, layouts, CTAs, colors, and content to improve conversion rates.

  • XML: Extensible Markup Language

XML Marketing Terms

A language used to define a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. For example, an XML sitemap is designed to help search engine crawler robots to easily find all of the pages for a given website.

Conclusion

Well, that’s it: a primer on acronyms for some of the more important digital marketing terms.

From basic marketing terms to more specialized ad network-specific lingo, this list will help to build your vocabulary and navigate the increasingly complicated digital marketing and advertising industry.

New acronyms regularly pop up, so continually work to learn emerging marketing terms to help you better understand every aspect of your promotional efforts.

 

 

Sourced from Ad Espresso

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The Hands-Off Method of Online Marketing That’s Both Fast and Easy

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You don’t have to do all the work yourself when it comes to marketing your passive income site. That’s where affiliate marketing comes in.

The following excerpt is from Nightingale-Conant’s book The Power of Passive Income: Make Money Work For You. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Apple Books | IndieBound

Affiliate marketing is one of the fastest and easiest online passive income businesses to get started in. Depending on the path you choose, the investment to get up and running can be minimal. It all depends on your preferred marketing model and how much you need to outsource as opposed to doing it yourself. And the best part is, you can do this with any kind of site you set up, whether it’s a blog, general interest site, or ecommerce store. Once you get your foundation in place, your main ongoing costs are associated with advertising and promoting the products you sell, and you get to choose how much or how little you’d like to put into the process.

Affiliate marketing is essentially a way for you to earn cash for promoting and selling items or services without ever having to be responsible for the product, shipping, or fulfilment of the order. You strike a deal with a business, company, or individual to promote their products, and in return, when an item is sold through your affiliate account, you get a commission—a certain percentage or dollar amount for that sale. It’s a win-win situation for you and the business: They get free advertising and customers they might not have otherwise reached, and you’re compensated for the work you’ve put in. The commission they pay you is essentially part of their marketing budget. For some companies, it’s their exclusive form of marketing.

Let’s explore how this works.

Personalized affiliate links and cookies

There are two ways an affiliate program will track the prospects you send them:

1. Personalized affiliate links. If your affiliate program uses links to track sales, you’ll be given a login and a link associated with your account, which you’ll send to customers so the purchase can be traced back to you.

2. Cookies. Some programs use cookies instead of personalized links. Cookies are tiny pieces of data the internet uses to track someone’s online habits. It’s a way to see where a customer came from and what they bought.

Different programs have different duration policies. Some companies will pay you for life any time a prospect you have sent them buys something; others pay only on the initial sale. Some programs have specified time ranges — 30, 60 or 90 days — during which they’ll pay you on purchases made by the prospect you sent them.

As with anything, there are a few drawbacks. You have to be willing to invest your time, energy, and patience into making it work for you. Small sales here and there are great, but if you want to make this your main source of online passive income, you have to be able to land a lot of sales to make a significant amount of money. You need to think about your efforts as building a business. Two considerations in that vein are creating systems that are set up to get consistent new lead acquisition and choosing higher-margin offers (same amount of work, more money).

For this to be sustainable as a long-term income stream, you need to create promotions that lead to consistent sales. This will take commitment, time, and dedication but will be easier for those of you who have some experience with search engine optimization (SEO) or paid traffic generation.

Finally, you really need to choose your affiliates wisely. If the merchant’s site isn’t up to par, slow, buggy, full of errors, and not geared toward making the sale, you’ll lose out as well. Take a look around the site and ask yourself, “Would I feel comfortable buying from here?” If the answer is no, you may want to reconsider becoming an affiliate for that business.

Types of affiliate offers

Most offers you’ll be exposed to can be lumped into three categories: products, services, and stores.

Products

There are two types of online products you can be an affiliate for: physical and digital. The marketing strategies you will employ won’t really change either way, but they do each come with their own sets of pros and cons.

Physical products

Pros: Not all consumers buy digital products, but pretty much all consumers buy physical products. If you choose a product that’s in demand, made by a trusted brand, and sold through a credible online store, the selling is really already done for you.

Cons: The biggest cons to physical products are the shipping cost and the fact that it takes some time for the product to arrive. Also, there are certain products that consumers want to be able to touch and experience before they buy. That can sometimes hamper an online purchase.

Digital products

Pros: One of the biggest advantages of a digital product is instant gratification. The consumer can immediately dig in and enjoy the product they purchased while they’re excited about it. If you’re in tune with your prospects’ problems and have a digital product that gives them the solution to that problem, conversions can be really high. No shipping costs are another plus.

Cons: Digital products are often swimming among a lot of competition that you need to stand out from. Also, you’re at the mercy of the retailer when it comes to making sure the product downloads properly. Sometimes digital products are so complicated they overwhelm the consumer, which can hinder additional sales from that prospect.

Services

There are many services people pay for online that have affiliate programs. Some examples are:

  • Financial services like tax preparation
  • Social media and digital marketing services
  • Professional services (hosting, payment processing, etc.)
  • Travel-related services like Hotels.com and Travelocity

Storewide programs

There are tons of stores that will give you commissions on the entire purchase made by a consumer you send to their site. This is great because it gives you the flexibility to market just one product they sell and still get credit for anything else your prospect adds to their cart, or you can just promote the entire store in general.

Feature Image credit: RamCreativ | Getty Images 

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Sourced from Entrepreneur

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Website Speed is Up and Cart Abandonment is Down After SEO Ranking Factor Change

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By Peter Roesler

Google report lists improvement in global web ecosystem after algorithm update in 2018.

As PC and mobile devices increase in power and internet speeds increased, websites have adapted to meet the needs of consumers. This adaptation meant building sites with better visuals and more impressive features while getting them to run faster. There is evidence that making these changes have made things better from websites. A recent report from Google suggests consumers and retailers benefited from the increasing speed of the internet.

Google likes to move the web in specific directions that it thinks are beneficial for everyone. Because of Google’s massive market share in web search, their ranking factors decide how most websites are built. For example, Google made HTTPS encryption and mobile-friendly design into ranking factors, which encouraged almost every website to follow suit.

Some people would consider Google’s action to be an abuse of their market position, but the results have been mainly positive. To prove this, Google looked at what happened on the web in the year since they added speed as a ranking factor. Their results note several ways that websites and their visitors have benefited from the results.

According to the results from Google, even the sites that made the least amount change in their overall speed saw modest gains as a result. For the slowest one-third of traffic, the user-centric performance metrics improved by 15 percent to 20 percent in 2018. This improvement is exceptionally significant as there was no improvement in 2017.

Google also notes that the entire web ecosystem improved, though there are other factors involved besides Google’s algorithm, such as infrastructure improvements. Whatever the reason, more than 95 percent of countries showed improved speeds, when measured on a per country basis.

Improving the online experience for visitors by increasing the speed can have tangible benefits when it comes to sales. Slow loading pages are often abandoned by consumers who expect content to load with a few seconds. Due to the speed improvements, Google observed a 20 percent reduction in abandonment rate for navigations initiated from Search. Site owners can now measure the same abandonment rate for their site by using the Network Error Logging API available in Chrome.

While Google’s algorithm change isn’t the only reason for increasing website speeds in 2018, but there is evidence to suggest that the ranking factor did influence the decisions of web developers. Google reports that developers ran over a billion PageSpeed Insights audits during 2018, which was used to identify performance optimization opportunities for over 200 million unique URLs.

If you want to improve the speed of your website, Google has a three-step approach for developers. First, they recommend using PageSpeed Insights, which provides page analysis and optimization recommendations. There’s also the Google Chrome User Experience Report, which gives user experience metrics on how real-world Chrome users experience popular destinations on the web to help you benchmark your site. And Google also has documentation on performance on Web Fundamentals.

For more recent news that can help you improve your online marketing, read this article on Google’s latest algorithm update.

By Peter Roesler

President, Web Marketing Pros@webmarketing007

Sourced from Inc.

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The Forbidden Truth Regarding Marketing Consultant Revealed by an Expert

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Sourced from Thrive Global

Marketing consultant must be in a position to take care of any issues or problems that may come up during your advertising campaign quickly and efficiently.

Marketing consultant must be in a position to take care of any issues or problems that may come up during your advertising campaign quickly and efficiently. You want to discuss with a professional marketing and advertising consultant who can help you find your own strengths and weaknesses and help you position yourself in the industry. An excellent marketing and advertising consultant must be a specialist in many different advertising and marketing practices and strategies. An advertising consultant is a person who truly understands that marketing is vital to business success and penetration. He is the person who can helps a company decide how to best engage existing clients. A growth promoting consultant may be a great idea for your company.

Online marketing is a multifaceted game and societal media is part of the entire game. The Marketing Process An advertising consultant will use a step-by-step procedure to help create a productive advertising plan. Plenty of search engine marketing requires the utilization of relevant keyword phrases as well as the usage of relevant backlinks.

To get the most out of your associations with copywriters and consultants, you want to understand what they both do best-and when you require each. You should first assess the consultant’s experience so as to guarantee superior support. Now, an individual cannot just assume he or she is able to turn into a Multi Level Marketing consultant. It is essential that as a Multi Level Marketing specialist, you will have the ability to advise people or other network companies on how they’ll have the ability to meet success and how much time it will take.

Marketing consultants provide valuable insight into your company. Moreover, your advertising consultant personally designs an approach to fix your problems. An advertising consultant looks at the present business model and after that, using analytical tools, considers the industry potential and develops a strategy to attain larger goals. He can help your business create marketing plans and marketing strategies. Business advertising consultants are usually talented enough to think of a business plan which will attract attention and will guarantee potential clients. They can be a great service to your business. When hiring business advertising consultants, make sure to assess your candidates thoroughly to make sure you’re choosing the very best person for the job.

In the event the consultant isn’t asking questions, there is an enormous chance he isn’t understanding your problem. He will also discuss how your marketing ideas will affect your business and which parts of the plan you should fine-tune. So before you employ any sort of SEO consultant ask for a completely free site audit. A search engine optimization consultant will look after the entire course of action. If you’re going to employ a professional search engine optimisation consultant, make sure you check his credentials carefully. The very good search engine marketing consultants will also let you know what you have to ask a search engine optimization company so you will not to be fooled into paying too much. Timing A superior local search engine optimisation consultant will always complete his job punctually and won’t extend the time limits to provide you your preferred service.

By [email protected]

Sourced from Thrive Global

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Why Accenture Bought a Digital Ad Agency

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By Adam Lashinsky

This article first appeared in Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the top tech news. To get it delivered daily to your in-box, sign up here.

Never has the notion of swimming outside one’s lane been so exciting.

Accenture, the spawn of Arthur Andersen turned consultant turned marketing guru, is buying Droga5, a buzzy advertising agency. Odd fit? Maybe. But consultants increasingly have been veering into the business of marketing. Clients that need IT strategies need marketing strategies that happen to be IT strategies these days.

Incidentally, the seller of nearly half of Droga5 is Endeavor, formerly known as WME and before that William Morris Endeavor. The point is that Endeavor at its core is a master lane switcher, a TV talent agency that bought a sports agency (IMG) and a stake in an ad business, too. Endeavor is staked by private-equity firm Silver Lake and has been rumored to be plotting an IPO. It bought the Droga5 stake for a reported $115 million in 2013. Selling out now for far more than that—terms weren’t divulged, but Droga5 is said to cooking with gas—would help pay down Endeavor’s debt before an offering.

The biggest metamorphosis expert in the land, of course, is Amazon, the cloud software enterprise that also sells books and a few million other things. It was the elephant in the room all week at Fortune’s Brainstorm Health conference in San Diego. Morgan Stanley investment banker Cheri Mowrey noted that Amazon (amzn, +0.13%) has been out slyly sucking up information throughout the healthcare industry and already has shown a bit of its strategy with the purchase of online pharmacy PillPack. Haven, the secretive joint venture Amazon has formed with J.P. Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway, isn’t a for-profit company—and it is scaring the daylights out of healthcare services companies anyway.

On a final note, please check out this wonderful piece in the Financial Times by onetime journalist and current Suecophile Michael Moritz. It’s about a Swedish newspaper group that has thrived not by splashing into someone else’s lane, but by getting smart about its own digital business while prudently continuing to print newspapers.

Feature Image Credit: A conversation about where the smart money is and how investors should bet on the newest tech in the health care space at Fortune’s Brainstorm Health 2019.

Stuart Isett for Fortune

By Adam Lashinsky

Sourced from FORTUNE

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Try These Offline Marketing Strategies for Your Small Business

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By Emily Wilson
As a small business, you have to do everything in your power to get ahead. You are, after all, facing conglomerates, multinational corporations, they are all vying for the attention of your customers. That’s why you need to utilize your strengths. You have flexibility, you can focus on one point more easily, and you have more control, and fewer bureaucratic issues. So, with all that being said, today we will focus on the marketing aspect of this issue.Namely, large corporations have greater resources to expend on marketing. What they lack, as we’ve said, is flexibility. This is where you come in. Sure, SEO, setting up social media, these are all useful strategies that can help to reach out to more customers. However, you should not forget about offline marketing (or, regular marketing). It seems this avenue of advertisement has fallen out of favor with people, and now it’s up to you to bring them back. In a way, it’s good they are not as popular as before since that means you have less competition on that front. But, without further ado, let’s get to the best offline marketing strategies for your small business.

Conferences and seminars

One of the best ways you can get yourself out there is by attending conferences, seminars, and trade shows. There are a couple of added benefits besides marketing with these, making them a great choice.

First, you get the amazing opportunity to network. Know that networking gets your name out there, it helps you meet the right people, move in the right circles, it helps you become part of a certain business community. It allows you to meet potential business partners, great suppliers, and big clients. So, there may come a time where somebody sends some extra work your way, just because they liked you and they already have too much on their plate. Or they may get you out of a bind if you get in trouble.

Another great benefit of conferences and seminars is, of course, you actually improving your skills and building your knowledge base. No matter if you yourself go to these events, or if you send one of your employees, the results will be the same.

Offer free stuff

Everybody likes free stuff, it’s part of human nature. So, if you’re a new business, or if you have a new line of products or services to offer, perhaps handing out some freebies may get you some attention. Here is what you should do. First, choose a high-traffic, popular location. Then, see if there are any licenses and paperwork you need to get in order to set up an event there. Once you get that out of the way, think of an interesting booth design, and just set up shop at your desired location. Once you’re there, hand out free stuff.

Hand out products that you make, be it small cups of coffee, plastic cups of artisanal beer (remember the licensing stuff), the clothing you make… If you offer services, like tax and financial advice for example, offer free five-minute one on one session right then and there. On the other hand, if you truly can’t offer your goods or services in this manner, maybe just offer free stuff with your company logo on them. T-shirts, coffee cups, muffins that have your logo on the wrapper…

Old-school offline marketing

It seems marketing is completely online now, and everything we considered real marketing is gone. Of course, that is not exactly true, it just seems that way since we all seem to live our lives exclusively online. Trust us, the days of banners, signs, TV-adverts, business cards, they are still here. They are just…underrepresented. Don’t neglect regular kinds of marketing, they offer line of advertising that is still very valid.

So, hand out things like business cards, or get a sign made. If you can afford it, get a commercial running on TV, or take out an ad in the paper. Contact the pros at Bannamesh, and get quality banners and signs made, it’s important to get your name out there in every way you can.

Guerrilla marketing

Finally, we have guerrilla marketing on our list. Now, guerrilla marketing is a very special and specific kind of marketing. Namely, it’s like guerrilla warfare – fast, efficient, unique, and cheap. By cheap, we mean you have a limited amount of resources, and you want to create the greatest amount of impact you can. What makes guerrilla marketing special is that you don’t really need money, what you do need is an imagination.

So, for example, guerrilla marketing encompasses street art, offline and online scavenger hunts, piquing people’s curiosity… There are many unique ideas and styles, one of them being stealth marketing. This is a special “product placement” all around your area. Stickers, graffiti, placement of your company logo in certain (legal) areas that may attract the attention of people.

Conclusion

And there you have it folks, a couple of ways you can boost the marketing efforts of your small business. Just because everybody switched to online marketing doesn’t mean you have to limit yourself to only that avenue of advertising. Utilize other aspects, learn how to network, attend conferences and seminars, visit trade shows, met the right people. Try your luck with guerrilla marketing, hand out free stuff and attract attention, and dip your toes into old, pre-internet era advertisement.

Rebecca Paddon

By Emily Wilson

About the Author

Emily is a business psychologist with a passion for marketing. Researching, exploring and writing are her favorite things to do. Besides that, she loves animals, music and traveling.”

Sourced from adotas

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Three Ingredients For A Successful Inbound Marketing Program

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By  Remy Bernstein

Many digital marketing agencies and software vendors like to tell a similar story when it comes to inbound marketing.

Apparently, inbound marketing is incredibly easy, generates results instantly and is a good strategic investment for any organization of any size, operating within any industry.

Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but none of these statements are true.

While my revelation may seem obvious, everywhere I look, I still see people buying into the false notion that inbound is this cheap and easy miracle strategy. They think you can slap together a blog, build a landing page, gate a white paper or case study, and then sit back and wait for the leads to pour in.

Sure, some people might stumble across your site or even download a resource or two, but I promise you’ll never see a meaningful or sustained ROI on your program with this kind of light-touch approach.

The truth is that inbound, like anything else that actually works, requires a significant amount of resources — in terms of budget and internal bandwidth — to do it right. However, when executed properly, the ends more than justify the means.

Here are three commonly overlooked components that any inbound marketing strategy should have to be successful.

1. Great Content

While this should, in theory, be a no-brainer, it seems a lot of companies still believe that quantity is more important than quality. This may have been true back in the early days of search engine optimization (SEO); however, it has never been true of the inbound model.

Regular publishing is important, but the idea here is that your content doesn’t just boost your organic visibility on search engines; it’s actually being read and influencing your target audience’s decision making process.

In order to make a real impact, your content needs to be:

• High-quality: Pieces should be well-written, easy to understand, genuinely helpful and relevant to your audience, and they should represent an original point of view.

• Diverse: You need a range of collateral types to engage your audience at different points throughout the funnel. That means generating how-tos, topical updates, press releases, case studies, thought leadership pieces, white papers and more.

• Dynamic: Getting someone’s attention on search or social is only half the battle; you need to hold onto it as well. Your content should strike a balance between beauty and substance. Utilize dynamic media types like digital stories, infographics and video to break through the noise and communicate your ideas more effectively.

2. A Comprehensive Distribution Strategy

The second piece of your inbound strategy is distribution. There’s not much use in generating loads of beautiful content unless it gets in front of your target audience.

The most obvious (and inexpensive) outlets are search engines and social media. Your SEO and social strategies will certainly play a major role in driving organic traffic to your site.

That said, if you want to reach new audiences and generate exponential growth over time, you need to be more aggressive — and precise.

Identify the platforms that are most relevant to your base — LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. — and invest in paid advertising campaigns. It’s an added expense, but the targeting options and data insights facilitate a high degree of accuracy, giving you more control over the ROI.

Additionally, you’ll want to start contributing to well-established trade publications in order to tap into their captive base (on-site, social followers and email subscribers, etc.) and boost the visibility of your brand. Many of these publications offer paid placements, but contributor slots can often be earned if you put in the proper legwork and build your credibility as an author.

3. Robust Down-Funnel Infrastructure

So, now you’re creating great content and distributing it through all the right channels, but how does this translate to new revenue for your business?

This is probably the biggest sticking point for most ROI-negative inbound programs: What do you do with all that website traffic once it arrives at your doorstep?

First, you need to invest in some sort of automated infrastructure. There are all sorts of processes you can automate: lead scoring, nurturing, even qualification.

Ultimately, how much automation you need depends on several different factors, including the size of your business, the amount of traffic being driven to your site and the capacity of your sales operation.

Of course, automation is all well and good, but at some point, your sales team will actually have to step in and take over.

In order to ensure this handoff goes smoothly and that your marketing efforts are fueling your sales apparatus rather than stifling it, these two departments must work in close collaboration with one another.

Is marketing delivering an appropriate volume of leads given your sales capacity? Does the automated qualification align with the sales team’s qualification criteria? Is the sales team aware of and/or on board with the messaging your inbound program is disseminating?

It’s great to see an uptick in key metrics like site traffic, conversions, etc., but, ultimately, the success of any marketing initiative boils down to how much revenue it brings in. When you align your sales and marketing processes, everyone benefits. When you don’t, the whole system breaks down.

All this is to say that if you’re considering investing in a small-scale or fragmented marketing program, I would save your money. Inbound is a go-big-or-go-home strategy.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By  Remy Bernstein

COO of NYC-based digital agency and media company L&T. Directs client strategy and project delivery.

Sourced from Forbes

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The Slow Death of Inbound Marketing

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By Tobin Lehman    

Economists talk about markets being oversaturated when too many product or concept variations are competing in the same space. Over-saturation leads to products being devalued.

That’s what’s happening to inbound marketing. The buzzword has been on the forefront of the digital space for the past decade, and now it seems to have crossed a critical threshold into decline.

Inbound marketing is really just hyper-effective SEO combined with conversion optimization techniques to drive leads. It’s not a revolution, it’s simply good branding. And it’s mostly thanks to Hubspot.

Marketing agencies, like the children behind the Pied Piper, fell in line, and pushed this “inbound” craze for far longer than it should have been pushed.

But, if it hasn’t already, it’s all about to slowly fade into the sunset for your organization. Why are the tides changing? Here are our observations.

Everyone’s on Board

One of the most important factors in the decline of inbound is that everyone is on board now. It’s hard to find an industry where inbound isn’t being implemented. Just when we think we’ve found an industry, there is a leader in the space who seems to be 12-18 months ahead of the curve and dominating the space.

So the simple truth is that “inbound,” in some form or another (even if just via good SEO practices), is now the cost of entry for many businesses that use digital marketing. When companies start marketing, then, this fact requires them to build above existing marketing. They might try using paid media or other “outbound” means to gain attention. So, “inbound” as a strategy is DOA.

Fake News and Content Overload

This point is more of a cultural note. Thanks to a growing and seething distrust of media in our culture, we now have the new oxymoron of “fake news”. Couple this mentality with the sheer volume of articles and content produced online, and many people just want to turn the whole thing off.

In business terms, there is just too much competition in the market for attention. Attention is really the asset we are after, and it’s in decreasing supply.

For instance: how much attention do you give to news sites? If you’re smart, not much, as you see that no matter what’s really happening in the world, those sites still produce (or, better, manufacture) content for your viewing attention – whether it has value or not.

What are we to do? Well, there is a subset of content that is still really relevant, and that’s content that’s based on expertise. True expertise will always be in high demand and low supply. Consequently, companies that can produce content that is rich in expertise will win the day and cut through the clutter.

Life After Inbound Marketing

I don’t think that inbound marketing will really ever die. As a concept, it’s valid, and it’s truly one of the best campaign types for organic growth. Instead, here is what I think will happen as we move into the next iteration of it.

  1. Hubspot has already admitted by their own actions (the inclusion of Hubspot Ads) that organic SEO can’t be the only source of traffic. Paid will be a larger part of the traffic mixture, as digital attention becomes harder to acquire via organic means.
  2. This includes paid social media marketing. As organic reach continues to fade, social media will become more complex and serve almost as an internet OS in itself for most Americans.
  3. Marketing technology has blurred the line between macro and micro user tracking, allowing for increased personalization.
  4. Along the same lines, AI is beginning to learn how to create content. My bet is that we’ll see an epic explosion of content creation by bots and AI, which will start producing content at volumes and specifications that were previously impossible. This event will be the death blow to the entire inbound market. It’s coming (in fact, it’s almost here).

Yet, as all of these developments take place, some fundamentals will always remain true. People will need to be sold on good messaging and positioning. Sales teams will still need to be competitive and intelligent in how they approach prospects.

Life after inbound will be full of similar challenges, but it’ll be set in a vastly different landscape and managed via a different toolbox.

What Should We Do Now?

In preparation, it’s best to think about sticking to our guns. Develop the sales team to use the best tools in the industry to do their work well. Then equip the marketing team with budgets to try experimental channels of attention. Where can we gain attention of the market in big and small ways to get the edge over pure paid or organic traffic online?

There is a world of opportunity out there, we just need to turn our eyes to the horizon and move forward.

Feature Image Credit: Campaign_Creators / Pixabay

By Tobin Lehman    

Sourced from Business 2 Community

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Creative, quick-fire and sassy conversations – a new way to drive sales for Happy Socks

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From one-to-many to one-to-one

“The immediacy of digital communications means we have to be really short, snappy and engaging in what we say to customers. We only have seconds to grab and hold their attention.” says Marc Verschueren, Online Marketing Director at Happy Socks.

Happy Socks is not alone in facing this challenge, and companies in today’s digital era must forge personal connections in tight timeframes, if they want to drive customer engagement.

To achieve this, brands in almost every sector are moving beyond one-to-many marketing strategies and expanding their one-to-one capabilities. Customers don’t want to be spoken to en masse, any more. When they interact with a brand, they want that same level of personal commitment back.

“We’re a very creative company and we try to spread happiness. Messenger offers so many opportunities to engage in a fun way”

Technology is developing quickly and giving brands the tools to design one-to-one customer experiences that are informal, conversational, realistic and highly effective. These technologies can be adapted to individual needs and deployed faster than many think.

Bringing the brand personality to life

Happy Socks recently took a closer look at Messenger, and how it could use the platform to speak directly to individual customers and show off its fun-loving and slightly zany personality.

Lots of customers were using Messenger to ask questions, and Verschueren wondered whether Happy Socks could make the customer experience more sophisticated and use the platform to strike up engaging, two-way conversations.

The path to purchase for Happy Socks’ customers is short, because its products are relatively inexpensive. This means the brand must make the most of every customer interaction to drive sales.

A lot of sales are campaign driven and Happy Socks initially used Messenger in one of its first campaigns of the year.

Verschueren explains: “This year we started with a New Year’s Resolution Campaign, so for people that wanted to eat more healthily, we presented them the different fruit or vegetable socks that we have. If someone else wanted to be more active and sporty, we showed them our athletics socks. We started with a relatively simple bot and a straightforward Messenger flow.”

The bot engaged with customers, found out about their resolutions and budgets, and then suggested appropriate products.

The informality of Messenger allows Happy Socks to really express its brand personality

Test, learn, improve, repeat

Happy Socks went from campaign concept to delivery within five weeks. In that time it designed the customer flow and developed the required wording, tone of voice and creatives. It aligned the campaign to existing business and marketing strategies and benchmarked performance against detailed KPIs.

The speed of implementation minimised the time and resource Happy Socks had to use in testing Messenger and assessing its impact on customer experience and commercial results. Verschueren says the return on advertising spend was immediate and commensurate to that achieved by Happy Socks’ regular Facebook adverts.

His team are now building on that initial success and using the rich customer data generated by Messenger to sharpen future campaigns. They can measure the flow of customers and identify exactly where they engage, how they engage, and when they drop off.

This high-resolution picture pinpoints where tweaks are needed to optimise the overall flow. It also means companies can analyse the impact of each change, validate their strategy at every step, and quickly expand on successful activity.

“We’re very metric-driven,” says Verschueren. “Whatever we do, we look at the metrics and how can we improve on them. What’s working and what’s not? If something is performing well we try to iterate on that strategy and build out from there.”

The perfect fit

Happy Socks has discovered the informality of Messenger allows it to really express its brand personality, to provide a wittier and more tongue-in-cheek experience, and to engage with customers in highly personalised, one-to-one conversations.

The platform also lets Happy Socks speak to its customers at any point in their purchase journey, and it is exploring what types of conversation are most effective at each stage.

Drawing to a close, Verschueren comments: “We’re a very creative company and we try to spread happiness. Messenger offers so many opportunities to suggest products, engage in a fun way, and show off the lighter side of our brand. I think it’s a great opportunity.”

The Reuters editorial and news staff had no role in the production of this content. It was created by Reuters Plus, part of the commercial advertising group. To work with Reuters Plus, contact us here.

Sourced from Reuters

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Are terms like ‘millennial’ actually useful?

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Terms like millennial, Gen Z and Gen X are frequently bandied about, but are these demographic groupings actually meaningful to marketers?

Just 7% of marketers believe terms like Gen X, Gen Z and millennial are a very effective means of segmentation, according to an exclusive Marketing Week. In fact, 55% say such demographic groupings are not very effective or not effective at all.

Vodafone head of youth and mass segments Daniel Lambrou explains he would not use such terms to define behaviours or people.

“I wouldn’t use them as part of my marketing strategy, but I would use the generic terms in conversation if I’m trying to articulate a particular point about an age group,” he states.

Similarly, MoneySuperMarket’s head of customer insight, Jonathan Wood, disagrees with “stereotyping” people into a certain group based on the year they were born.

“Attitudes, needs, behaviours and motivations – not to mention life stages – are all very diverse and so, for us, it does not make sense to group people into a collective, just because they happen to be born within a few years of each other,” he adds.

Marketing and insight director at Digital Cinema Media (DCM) Zoe Jones explains that her team avoids what she sees as overly broad labels such as Gen Z or millennial. When researching the 16- to 34-year-old audience, her team was careful to acknowledge the significant differences between someone born in 1984 and 2002.

“There were some interesting differences within the 16 to 34 audience when we looked specifically at the younger end of the spectrum – those aged 16 to 24,” says Jones.

“Social video becomes more ‘binge-watching’ than just something spontaneous; live TV at a broad, non-programme-specific level, is more frequently associated as ‘low attention’; and perceptions of YouTube were more positive.”

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Sourced from MW Marketing Week

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