As summer looms so too does a deluge of ‘summer ready’ and ‘beach body’ ads targeted at women. But Boots’ latest ad from Ogilvy has turned the trope on its head.
Part of a wider commitment from the retailer to focus on body confidence in its marketing, Boots has launched an integrated summer campaign it hopes will “give women the confidence to be whoever they want to be.”
Based on its own insight that 76% of women in the UK have avoided summer activities – like going to the beach or attending music festival – because they feel self-conscious, the TV spot at the heart of ‘Summer Ready’ follows the story of two women embarking on a summer trip.
As they head into shop in Boots, they see a Protein World-esque ad which asks, ‘Are you summer ready?’. The pair are shown laughing it off, before heading to their destination. Boots products feature in the ad as the duo get ready to head to the beach.
The spot is set to a custom version of the Diana Ross classic, ‘I’m Coming Out’.
Helen Normoyle, marketing director for Boots UK and Ireland, said that amid a shift in the conversation around confidence the brand “had a role to play” in ensuring the discussion wasn’t about shape or size but about women having the confidence to be whoever they want to be.
“The statistic [we uncovered] is really shocking and as the brand that stands for championing everyone’s right to feel good, we wanted to take action.”
She added: “That’s why we’re celebrating women who aren’t driven by a need to be someone else’s definition of ‘summer ready’. In doing so, we hope to inspire the rest of the nation to stop worrying about what others think and just start feeling great about themselves.”
The TV ad marks the beginning of a summer-long campaign with activations set to take place throughout the season which will run across ATL TV, print, PR & influencer marketing, loyalty and more.
The play from Boots builds on other commitments it has made to championing body confidence, including its sponsorship of all the national women’s football teams in the UK.
“This is not just about summer. Our partnership with women’s football has given us the opportunity to talk to our customers in new ways, supporting a much bigger social conversation to help improve the confidence and wellbeing of others,” explained. Normoyle.
Boots Health & Beauty print magazine has been leading the charge on this too, having banned image re-touching from its their cover seven years ago.
Boots has been heavily focusing on beauty in its marketing. Its 2018 Christmas ad from Ogilvy married its brand purpose with its beauty proposition, telling the story of a mother and daughter to showcase how giving the gift of beauty can make someone feel.
Earlier this year, it announced it was upping investment in its beauty proposition, overhauling its bricks-and-mortar stores and bringing fresh brands into the fold as it looks to keep is grip on the burgeoning market.
Whether you’re trying to drive traffic or conversions, your campaigns need to start with strategic keyword research. Which tools should you rely on to give you the best keywords?
We asked ourselves the same question—and after researching dozens of tools, we settled on 17 keyword research tools that can give you good insight, regardless of your budget.
Why We Consider These the Best Keyword Research Tools
The best keyword research tools give you enough data to make good decisions—things like search volume, keyword difficulty, and click rate. They should also suggest keywords to help you find good variants and related keywords.
Beyond that, the keyword research tool that’s best is the one that’s best for you. It’s within your budget, has related tools that help you with all your SEO needs, or supports the type of projects you do most.
To help you find your best tool, we’ve taken all our favorites and ranked them according to price and features.
Here they are: the 17 best keyword research tools every SEO needs.
Ahrefs Keyword Explorer
Paid | $$$
Ahref’s Keyword Explorer is one of the best keyword research tools on the market. Their database contains more than 33 billion keywords, updated with fresh data every month, so you get up-to-date search volume numbers, as well as the advanced metrics you need to make smart decisions: keyword difficulty, return rate, clicks per search, % of clicks, and more.
Finding the right keywords for your project is easy with this tool. You can generate keyword ideas in one of 4 ways:
Phrase match
Having same terms
Also rank for
Search suggestions
Rank Tracker from SEO PowerSuite
Paid | $$$
Rank Tracker is part of SEO PowerSuite’s collection of tools. It gives you accurate ranking data to track your SEO campaigns, and 18 keyword-suggestion tools to help you find the best keyword variants.
With this tool, you get all the keyword data you need:
KEI (keyword efficiency index)
Competition
Search volume
And more
As part of this tool, you’ll also get ranking reports, scheduled tasks, and search safety features such as proxy rotation, human emulation, and user agents.
Moz Keyword Explorer
Free to Paid | $$$
You can get 10 free queries per month with Moz’s Keyword Explorer. But to find your best keywords, you’ll want to upgrade to their paid version.
This tool is easy to use and gives you the data you need:
Search volume
Keyword difficulty
Organic click-through rate
Priority
It also gives you a score, telling you how valuable this keyword would be for your campaign.
SEMrush
Paid | $$
SEMrush gives you all the information you need on the keywords you’re researching. The overview gives you data on organic vs. paid search, CPC distribution, and search trends.
Their Keyword Magic Tool was recently named the Best Digital Tool in PubCon’s 2019 Interactive Marketing Awards. It gives you the keywords you need to build your most profitable campaign.
LongTailPro
Paid | $
With LongTailPro, you enter the seed keyword and get hundreds of long-tail suggestions—less competitive keywords that you have a real chance of ranking for. You can also run keyword and competitor analysis, identify the keyword difficulty of your keywords, and track your rankings.
KWFinder by Mangools
Paid | $
KWFinder gives you many of the same features you get with the top-of-the-line keyword research tools, but at a price that fits into any budget. You’ll get:
Keyword difficulty
The keywords your competitors are missing
Search volume for variant keywords
Local keywords
You also get the full SEO suite of tools, including SERP analysis, rank tracking, backlink analysis, and website analysis.
(NOTE: Need a helping hand with your digital marketing efforts? Or maybe you just want proven, actionable marketing tools, tactics, and templates to implement in your business? Check out the latest deal from DigitalMarketer, and you will be on your way to helping your business grow.)
SpyFu
Paid | $
For competitor research, SpyFu is your go-to tool. With this one, you get every resource you need to spy on your competitor’s Adwords and SEO campaigns:
Adwords competitor keywords
Competitor Adwords campaign and ad test history
And SpyFu’s Adwords advisor
In case you’re uncomfortable with spying on your competitors, be aware, it’s a useful (and common) approach to SEO strategy. If you know what your competitors are doing, you can learn what’s working for them, which means you can boost traffic and generate leads with less guesswork. The key, of course, is to use your powers for good, not evil.
Jaaxy
Paid | $
Developed by affiliate marketers for affiliate marketers, Jaaxy helps you manage all aspects of keyword, website, competition, and market research. Data is pulled from Google, Bing, and Yahoo, giving you 99.7% search engine coverage.
We’re not sure you need to be an affiliate marketer to get value from this tool. Keyword research is keyword research, after all.
Market Samurai
Paid | $
Market Samurai is a simple, intuitive keyword research tool that fits into any budget. Simply type in your seed keyword and click “Generate.” You’ll get a list of keywords that have high traffic, high profit potential, and suitable phrase match competition.
We like this tool because once you have your keywords chosen, it will help you do competitive research, publish high-quality content that drives traffic, and monetize your traffic. An all-in-one package at a reasonable price.
Keyword Snatcher
Paid | $
Keyword Snatcher generates thousands of keywords for your campaigns by pulling data from Google, Yahoo, Bing, Amazon, eBay, and YouTube. Users love how easy it is, and they appreciate having such a comprehensive list of keywords to target in their content.
With this tool, you’re just getting keyword suggestions. There’s no data about search volume or keyword difficulty. But for a comprehensive list of keywords you could be targeting in your content, this is the tool of choice.
SERPStat
Paid | $
With SERPstat, you can find long-tail keywords and keyword variations while exploring trends and keyword suggestions. You’ll also get performance indicators, such as search volume, cost-per-click, and competition level. All plans give you access to 230 Google and 9 Yandex databases.
Ubersuggest
Free
Getting started with Ubersuggest is easy. Just type in a domain or seed keyword to get started. You’ll get a domain overview, top SEO pages, keyword suggestions, content ideas, and backlink data—similar to a paid tool, but completely free. This one is definitely worth checking out.
(NOTE: Need a helping hand with your digital marketing efforts? Or maybe you just want proven, actionable marketing tools, tactics, and templates to implement in your business? Check out the latest deal from DigitalMarketer, and you will be on your way to helping your business grow.)
Answer the Public
Free
As part of your keyword research, you need to figure out what people are asking when searching for your keyword. Answer the Public doesn’t just list the questions people are typing into search engines, it organizes them by the type of question.
The results will give you a good understanding of the search intent related to your keyword, and the information you need to include on your pages to rank well for that intent.
FAQfox
Free
Like Answer the Public, FAQfox helps you get a better handle on user intent, so it’s easier to find your best keywords. This tool does that by identifying your customers’ core wants and needs, so you can choose the keywords that are most likely to resonate with them.
Google Keyword Planner
Free
Google’s Keyword Planner is the original keyword research tool. It helps you discover new keywords, figure out how often keywords are searched, and how those searches have changed over time. That helps you identify the keywords that are most likely to give you the best traffic and conversions.
Seed Keywords
Free
Seed Keywords helps you find keyword ideas when you’re just starting a campaign, trying to figure out which search terms to optimize for. It lets you create a scenario, such as “When looking for the best pizza in your town, what do you search for?” Seed Keywords then gives you a link you can send to your friends, so you can get their input.
The concept is simple: to discover what real people are searching for, ask real people.
Soovle
Free
Soovle pulls data from a wide range of search engines to tell you what people are searching for related to your keyword. Just type it into the search bar, and “Soovle it.” The results aren’t pretty, but for free research, it’s a good option.
Back to You
Effective SEO depends on strategic keyword research. The best tools are often the most expensive, but as you can see, there are plenty of keyword research tools available for every budget and need.
Whether you’re trying to understand what your market is searching for, find the keywords that are the easiest to rank for, or identify your most profitable keywords, there’s a tool that’s right for you.
(NOTE: Need a helping hand with your digital marketing efforts? Or maybe you just want proven, actionable marketing tools, tactics, and templates to implement in your business? Check out the latest deal from DigitalMarketer, and you will be on your way to helping your business grow.)
(Reuters) – British companies spent more on marketing in the opening quarter of 2019 despite uncertainty around Brexit, but their budgets for the rest of the year could be the most subdued since after the financial crisis, a survey showed.
The IPA Bellwether survey, conducted by IHS Markit, showed on Wednesday that 21.6 percent of marketing executives raised their budgets during the quarter, while just under 12.8 percent of executives who took part in the survey cut their marketing budgets.
“This sharp increase following Q4 2018’s flatlining signals that UK marketing budgets have received a much-needed kiss of life in an economy gripped by Brexit uncertainty,” IPA Director General Paul Bainsfair said.
Bainsfair, however, added that the forecast for the year ahead was uncertain given the seemingly endless negotiations around Britain’s exit from the European Union.
The report showed that cautious undertones were still apparent in budget plans for the current financial year, with panelists providing only modest growth expectations in available marketing spend.
Brexit was postponed by a late-night agreement in Brussels last week that gave Prime Minister Theresa May until Oct. 31 to persuade parliament to approve the terms of the country’s departure.
“A return to growth in marketing budgets during the opening quarter of 2019 may come as a surprise given that the uncertainty that shrouds the UK political and economic climate has only built further,” said Joe Hayes, economist at IHS Markit.
A six-year run of marketing spending growth at British companies ended in the final quarter of 2018 as uncertainty over Brexit led companies to clamp down on costs.
While Brexit uncertainty continued to prompt belt tightening and a delay in decision-making, some companies pushed resources into their brands in the first quarter, the report showed.
The survey found that the best performing category was internet with its net balance seen at a growth of 17.2 percent in the quarter.
The rise in marketing spend was supported by demand for big ticket advertising campaigns such as those on TV and radio. The survey also flagged that marketing executives expect further growth in traditional media advertising through the year.
Around 300 UK marketing professionals, primarily from Britain’s top 1,000 companies and across all key business sectors, were interviewed for the survey.
When starting a business, rule number one is to know who your customer is. Knowing your customer is the foundation for any successful venture because it will influence your content, marketing, product development—basically every aspect of the company. Yet, deciding on a niche isn’t always easy. The initial temptation is to go broad so that you’re not excluding potential customers. Unfortunately, that approach leads to what used to be dubbed “spray and pray” marketing—a term describing how irrelevant messages get sent to generic audiences in the hope that something will stick. The result when you try to sell to everyone is that you sell to no one. A more solid approach is niche marketing which refers to a strategy that focuses on a unique target audience.
Here are five steps that any business owner or entrepreneur can use to find that perfect niche.
1. Do some soul-searching
If you don’t really care about the work you’ll be doing you definitely won’t be successful. Being an entrepreneur has a lot of ups and downs and the only way to get through those periods is to have a passion for the work itself. Your niche should arise naturally from your goals, interests, and values. The best ideas for a niche market will come from your own experience.
Ask yourself questions like:
What special skills have I developed?
What would I love to do even if I wasn’t getting paid for it?
What do I enjoy doing so much that I lose all track of time when I’m doing it?
Is there a pain point I’ve been encountering that I’d like to solve for myself and others?
If I had all the time and money in the world and I knew I couldn’t fail, what would I be doing?
Once you have a preliminary idea for a niche, survey that target market to uncover their pain points. Take a look at sites like Facebook, Twitter, Redditt and Quora to see what dialogue people are having. What questions are they asking and what problems are they experiencing? Facebook is especially useful because you can join groups where your target market is present and be a part of their conversations. Offer to help people with their issues and start testing your product or service that way. Create a Meetup group so you can get ideas by personally interacting with your target audience. Surveys are another option to better understand your niche. Tools like SurveyMonkey or Survey Gizmo make it easy to create custom surveys without all the complexity.
3. Research the competition
No matter what niche market you are pursuing, you should definitely investigate your potential competitors. Is there even a market for your niche? Start entering keywords into Google that your target audience would use and see what appears. Is there an opportunity for you to stand out in the crowd? How will you plan to differentiate yourself? If you find a keyword that has substantial traffic but little competition and paid advertising, that might be an excellent chance for you to insert yourself into that market. Also, take a look at your competitor’s content and see how valuable it is. You might be able to uncover an opportunity to deliver a superior product.
4. Assess potential profitability
Now it’s time to determine whether you can profit from your niche market! After doing a Google keyword search, the next step is to explore Google AdWords Keyword Planner. Search for those same keywords and see if any terms result in at least 10,000 searches per month. If you find keywords with substantial search volume, that’s usually a good indicator of a potentially profitable niche. Google Trends is also a useful tool to dig into trending topics. Another idea is to search for those same terms on Amazon and see what pops up. Finally, Clickbank is a helpful resource. This online retailer boasts a library of over 6 million unique products created by passionate entrepreneurs. Doing research there will give you some indication of whether there is a potentially profitable niche market. Ideally, you have narrowed your selection down to a niche that has both a need and a market where people will pay for your product or service.
5. Test your idea
The last step is to validate your idea. Initially, you can reach out to your network of friends and acquaintances to see if they would be interested in your new product or service. You can contact them via email and Facebook asking if they’d like to make a purchase and point them to your PayPal account for payment (even before you have a product to sell). If you end up with a bunch of sales, that’s a great validation of your niche market. Setting up a crowdfunding campaign on sites like Indigogo or Kickstarter is another way to validate your product and also collect money upfront to fund the business. If you’d like to go a step further, you don’t necessarily need to create a full website. Tools like Leadpages make it easy to set up a simple landing page promoting your idea and you can use paid advertising to drive traffic to that page. Even if you don’t seem to gain traction, it could still be a viable niche. You might need to refine your messaging or find a better offer. You can also set up some A/B tests to determine if using a different landing page template delivers better results.
Once you’ve followed the previous steps, just go for it! You can do all the research in the world but until you finally get out there, you’re not going to know how your niche is going to respond to your offering. Remember to remain flexible and continue to make adjustments along the way. Stick with it, and eventually, you will crack the code that will open the door to that ideal niche market.
I’m a business and life coach who helps people escape their 9-5 jobs, so they can find fulfillment working for themselves. As the founder of Corporate Escape Artist, I made the leap to entrepreneurship after a successful 25-year corporate marketing career and have never looked back. Prior to Corporate Escape Artist, I held executive leadership roles in small tech firms as well as Fortune 500 companies like AMD, Dell, and Sony. I have an MBA from the Thunderbird School of Global Management and am a Certified Professional Coach (CPC) and Energy Leadership Index Master Practitioner (ELI-MP). In addition to Forbes.com, I also contribute to Thrive Global and enjoy inspiring others through my weekly Facebook Live show and my blog on CorporateEscapeArtist.com.
Diversifying attention is the only way to build a real long term business.
So many people only focus on the platform that’s getting the most reach and ignore the rest.
People make this mistake all the time. How many artists and bands on MySpace ignored Facebook, and then disappeared when MySpace became irrelevant? How many Vine stars dominated that platform, but “fell off” when attention shifted? How many influencers with a lot of Instagram followers will become irrelevant when attention shifts away from Instagram?
Because I promise it’s going to happen one day.
That’s why I talk so much about tasting and exploring other platforms. It’s why I’m on virtually every platform – Snapchat, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Podcasts, written word (on my blog), and more.
That’s why I’ve won and built big followings everywhere in a world where so many influencers rise and fall.
In this article, I’m going to articulate a concept I call the “79 / 21 rule” to build a long term business by not putting all your eggs in one basket.
If You’re Not Diversifying Your Social Media Strategy, You’re Vulnerable
First of all, even getting to a point where you’ve built an engaged following is super difficult – so I’m pumped if you’re there already.
But I’m also scared for you.
I’m honestly more worried about those who are starting to win on platforms like LinkedIn or Instagram because that’s when they start to get complacent. They start to put “what’s working” on a pedestal and start romanticizing it — just like bigger businesses put channels like billboards or television commercials on a pedestal even though they don’t work nearly as well anymore.
It’s happening right now with people who are winning with AdWords and landing page optimization (as the world becomes more mobile and brand-focused). It happened with MySpace stars. And it’ll happen with Instagram influencers.
It’s human nature.
Most people who are on social spend 100% of their time on the hottest platform, and only put in about 70% effort into it.
I spend about 80% of my time on the hottest platform, go as hard as I possibly can on it, and spend 20% of my time getting a feel for everything else.
I call it the 79 / 21 rule, just to be a little different
Here’s the best articulation of how I think about it:
Right now, my 79-80% is spent on Instagram because it’s the most popular. I’m going the hardest on it.
And I spend 20-21% of my time on platforms like LinkedIn, Snapchat, Tik Tok, YouTube, and other stuff. Within that 20%, there are some platforms that get higher priority – LinkedIn is something I’m very, very bullish on right now so I’m spending a lot of time on it. Tik Tok is something I’m really excited about too.
The “79 / 21” rule is about diversifying attention. It’s not just about social media.
Before Facebook and AdWords existed, my “80%” was spent on email marketing. My “20%” was print, radio, direct mail, and AdWords.
Once AdWords really took off, that became my 80% and email went in my 20% along with platforms like YouTube that were up-and-coming.
When YouTube popped, that became my 80%, and up-and-coming platforms like Twitter went in my 20%.
When Twitter blew up, that went in my 80%.
See where I’m going here?
“If Instagram or LinkedIn become irrelevant, something else is going to take its place. Can’t I just focus on the new platform after that happens?”
You don’t have to be the first mover to win on a platform, but it really, really helps.
I got a million followers on Twitter early because I was one of the most active people on there up front — so I got featured on the “suggested users” list and many people who signed up for Twitter followed me.
As attention shifts away from the main platform, it’ll go to the platforms in your “20%.” And those who are active on the secondary platforms will siphon most of the attention first.
“But I have a t-shirt company that targets kids. Do I really need to be active on LinkedIn?”
I would reverse engineer the audience.
LinkedIn’s organic reach is so incredible right now that it’s my top priority within my “20%.” It’ll go away in a year. Before that happens, it would be really smart for you to take advantage of it.
If you’re making t-shirts, what kind of premium product can you make for business people? How could you take your product and create content around it contextual to a business-world?
For example, if I’m selling sneakers, the post I’m putting up on LinkedIn might be something like “hey, want to look fresh in the office?” On Instagram, it’d have a totally different context.
“Instagram is basically copying Snapchat, and it has more reach. Why do I need to be on both?”
Because you have to be very careful when you say something is “dead” or “irrelevant.”
People said Twitter’s dead, then it started getting more important.
Several years ago, people never thought you could create content on LinkedIn, then things started changing in the last year or so.
When DJ Khaled posted those snaps from his jet ski, that started the process of Snapchat getting more and more traction. There could literally be another moment like that tomorrow, or a new feature that Snapchat releases that puts Snapchat back on the map ahead Instagram in my “80%.”
Startups that have a great marketing plan and product are leaps and bounds ahead of many starting a business. One of the first questions that’s posed is whether the company is going to take on the marketing themselves or outsource their marketing to an agency. The fact is that both of these options have their merit as well as disadvantages. Taking on your marketing as a start-up founder allows you to control each aspect of the marketing campaign, but this can be risky since many start-up founders might not be too well-versed in marketing.
Outsourcing your startup marketing can be risky as well as not all marketing companies are created equal. With a small budget, one marketing company that doesn’t deliver then cash flow can be limited without any return.
Self-Education
Self-education in the marketing realm is challenging but very possible. There are training programs for nearly every part of online marketing like PPC, Google Adwords, and affiliate marketing. If you want to learn Adwords or PPC, then you should review which classes/certifications garner the best results. After you have self-educated, it is important to remember that your training was not industry specific. For this reason, it is essential to try a few different approaches to things like content marketing, SEO and, PPC.
Finding the tactics with the most substantial ROI might take a few months to find the optimal process. The education can also be offered to your staff as this will help them understand the marketing strategy in a more profound way. Many of these classes can be written off come tax time so do not look at this education as money spent, but rather an investment in the company as well as its people.
Become an Industry Thought Leader
The founder of a start-up generally gets quite a few responses when outreaching to industry publications. For this reason, you should spearhead becoming a thought leader in your industry. This doesn’t mean that you always have to write articles, but it can mean being a part of a podcast or agreeing to be interviewed. The companies of thought leaders in an industry tend to get leads just because of the highly revered name of the founder. As the founder, you should take it as a personal mission to become widely known throughout an industry.
Other opportunities to establish yourself in an industry is that of conferences. At specific conventions, there are openings to speak about something specific which can do a multitude of good for the speaker. This presentation can be shared as well as a substantial increase in sales can be achieved after the presentation. As we all know conferences are a hotbed of deals being made so giving a great presentation could seal a massive deal for your startup.
Build Your Team
Building a great team can be difficult, but it has numerous advantages. This team will have no learning curve when it comes to the brand that you want to build as this can be instilled in them with training and reminders. An in-house team will also be directly accountable, while a contractor can push responsibility onto their employees. This team in-house is an investment; but with the conversions the marketing team can bring in can be an excellent basis for the beginning of a start-up.
How to build the perfect team:
• Find a great content strategist who can keep your content calendar exciting and informative.
• A social media coordinator isn’t always needed, but someone who writes excellent social media copy is. This can be a contract or piece-by-piece position. A copywriter you have on board can do a month’s worth of tweets using Hootsuite within a few hours. Automating all of the posts should be done carefully as this post points out what could go wrong.
• Talented writers are a must in an online marketing campaign, so find a few contractors while having a writer or two in-house for rush assignments.
• A person who specializes in other types of content like video or infographics can be quite valuable. Content shouldn’t just be in written form so diversify your team with a person who specializes in these content mediums.
Take Advantage of Free Marketing
Social media can market every business regardless of size or industry. The fact social media is also free makes it necessary to create social media accounts for your start-up. This can be a great place to engage with those who might be potential customers. Creating a buzz via social media for a start-up can be invaluable. Name recognition is something all start-ups strive for during their infancy. Social media profiles are often some of the first Google results for a company. Engaging with others in your industry can be an excellent way for the company to network as well as possibly drum up some new business.
Other free marketing opportunities are things like directories as well as forums. These are not as effective as social media, but without cost, there is no real risk. Subreddits are a great place to get real feedback about products or ideas. Even though this isn’t marketing it can be used as a test group as many people on Reddit are there to help and educate.
Taking on marketing, in-house and personally, as a founder of a start-up can be quite a responsibility. Build the best team possible to market as well as establish yourself individually in the industry and watch the leads/sales stream in. Marketing in-house isn’t always an option, but it should at least be considered.
Global digital advertising revenues are on the up, growing 17% in 2018 to reach $251 billion (or 45% of global advertising revenues).
This rise is expected to continue, with digital advertising predicted to represent 50% of total advertising spend across the world this year.
While immediate investment is something of a certainty, what trends are set to impact the digital ad industry as we head further into the year and beyond?
We have only just scratched the surface of what artificial intelligence can do for the advertising industry. So far, this has largely extended to improving ad relevancy, optimising spend, or enhancing personalisation.
One good example of AI being utilised in this way is Toyota’s 2017 ad campaign for its Mirai vehicle. The campaign made use of natural language processing in order to create advertising copy tailored to thousands of potential buyers and their specific needs.
According to AdWeek, Saatchi LA did this by training IBM’s Watson AI marketing engine with fifty scripts of relevant copy based on location, behavioural insights, and occupation data. Watson was then able to deliver thousands of pieces of copy (explaining the car’s features and how they are relevant to the user), with each one sounding as if they were written by a human. The campaign ran solely on Facebook, allowing Toyota to make use of the platform’s complex behavioural data and targeting capabilities.
This intersection of creativity and data (whereby the AI is used to enhance human input) is where many experts see the technology’s big potential. It is far removed from stereotypical assumptions about AI.
In Econsultancy’s report, Marek Wrobel, Head of Media Futures at Havas, notes: “The best results happen when AI works with human insight, and in our industry, this will mean we’ll have more time to spend on creativity rather than, for example, reporting or optimisation.”
Conversational technology
It is the norm for brands to target users with advertising on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. However, chatbots have also enabled brands to talk to users in text-based conversations, and to create an informal and less disruptive style of communication.
Could the next step be a big shift to messaging services like WhatsApp?
In 2018, Facebook’s WhatsApp messaging service introduced a business version of its app. This means that businesses can now share their company details within a profile, as well as handle customer service enquiries and interactions. This is a different proposition to WhatsApp allowing intrusive ads onto its platform. However, the social messaging platform hasn’t been quite so firm in its stance against this either. In late 2018, it was reported that WhatsApp was to launch ads in its Status feature, marking its first real foray into monetisation.
Whether or not WhatsApp expands on ads, experts predict that we will see brands of all kinds start to seriously consider the app from a marketing perspective. Peter Buckley, Communications Planner at Facebook, explains: “If you think about how you communicate with your friends and family, it’s most often messaging. Yet businesses are a little bit slow on the uptake with messaging – communications are most often via call centres or email.”
In future then, we can expect to see a shift to messaging platforms, in order for businesses to enhance both customer service as well as marketing.
Connected technology
Advertisers must think differently in the context of a connected world. This is one of the biggest takeaways from Econsultancy’s report.
This is because technology such as smartwatches, cars, and household appliances (like fridges or thermostats) have opened up a wealth of valuable new data and potential insight for advertisers to draw upon. Of course, some brands are already making use of this data. Take Siemens, for example, which has partnered with Finish dishwasher tablets. Siemens’ ‘Home Connect’ technology updates the owner’s Amazon shopping basket when their supply of dishwasher tablets is running low.
In a more simplistic sense, the connected world also just means the opportunity for a larger amount of screens – i.e. on our car dashboard or freezer door. This means that advertisers will need to think beyond connected TV’s and smartphones (and standard 16:9 ads).
That being said, advertisers must also think differently in terms of how they approach advertising on connected devices. Providing something of value for consumers is key, and a necessity if brands want to ensure real results (rather than apathy towards an ad-saturated world).
The word “automation” conjures up the image of robots on an assembly line – an impersonal process with little human input. With marketing automation, this image couldn’t be further from the truth. Used correctly, marketing automation software can create a far more personal experience for your customers and leads.
However, just as marketing automation can add a valuable human feel to your marketing communications, so it can also suffer from human error. Inappropriately managed or applied, this software will not provide the ROI you expect from it.
So how can we make sure our investment in marketing automation is fruitful? Below, I’ll share six examples of fatal errors regarding marketing automation that I’ve seen businesses make, along with recommendations about how to avoid these pitfalls.
1. Too much, too soon
Marketing automation is a brilliant tool for nurturing your existing customer base; what it can’t do is to produce customers out of thin air. Businesses that are just starting up can be tempted by the potential of a sophisticated marketing automation solution, but in reality such a solution needs a big enough customer audience in order to be effective.
Similarly, start-ups can go overboard by choosing marketing automation software with more functionality than they require at this early stage – wasting investment on features that will go unused. Or the software might even be too comprehensive for the size of target market.
Honda’s Andrew Pattison has some straightforward advice for startups looking to invest in marketing automation: “Start small, really nail something, and then scale it.”
Action:
Ensure your business has enough prospect data to make the solution worthwhile. If traffic is low, the investment would be better spent driving more users. Some say that only 20-25% of your total marketing budget should go on marketing automation.
Start with a smaller, scalable solution, based on a solid understanding of the features you really need. Ideally, it should be able to grow with your number of contacts.
2. Ignoring the customer journey
In the build-up to conversion, there is a series of unique interactions between a customer and your business. It is a mistake to assume that a conversion funnel from another business will work the same way for your customers.
Failing to engage in customer journey mapping could lead to investment in the wrong marketing automation solution. If you don’t understand the crucial touchpoints for your customers, you can’t ensure that this particular solution will offer the right tools for you to reach them.
In contrast, once you have gained an understanding of the customer journey, marketing automation “allows you to nurture your leads through the entire buying process, delivering highly-targeted, personalized messages that address their specific barriers to purchase.” (Hubspot)
Action:
Monitor customer interactions with your business, identifying the pain points that could be addressed by your marketing automation strategy.
Iteratively test different funnels and work out which marketing automation solution can be adapted for you. Perhaps you could implement a more targeted email strategy, or reach out to customers via social media.
3. Poor utilisation of customer data
Far too often, an effective marketing automation solution is rendered useless by the customer data it relies on. Mismanagement of your CRM system and a lack of customer segmentation result in the wrong messages getting through to the wrong people, threatening your overall inbound marketing strategy.
Businesses frequently overlook the need to clean up customer data held in their CRM. With around 15% of email addresses on marketing lists invalid, that’s a lot of inefficient noise. The impact of your marketing automation is dependent on the quality of data being fed into it.
Once you’re confident that your CRM data is up to date, the next crucial step is to segment it effectively. Marketing automation can achieve an impressively individualised method of nurturing your customers, but it can only do this if your audience segmentation is well defined.
Action:
Ensure your CRM data is relevant and up to date. This Uberflip guide has some excellent tips for refreshing your database.
Consider complementing your CRM with a data management platform (DMP) that can help you achieve even more accurate audience segmentation.
4. Alienating the customer
At its best, marketing automation should create an interesting, informative, personal experience for your customers. However, if mismanaged, there is still a risk of alienating people with irrelevant campaigns, excessive numbers of emails, or even the wrong mode of address.
Communication via marketing automation should make customers feel that you are giving them more choice and agency – not that you see them as one more faceless consumer. For example, florist Bloom & Wild has received praise for emailing customers the opportunity to opt out of Mother’s Day communications. Demonstrating this sensitivity could have a powerful positive impact on the value of their brand.
Nonetheless, using marketing automation to personalise the content your customer sees goes far beyond email communication. It can include the ads you show them or even a modified version of your website. You have the tools to shape a customer’s experience around who they are as an individual.
Action:
Make sure your marketing automation complements your inbound marketing strategy; use the software to nurture existing customers based on the knowledge you have.
Utilise other external data sources to enhance the data you already possess about your customers.
5. Insufficient integration
If your marketing automation solution is not sufficiently integrated with your other digital tools and systems, then it will not react at the right moments – and the chance of a valuable interaction with the customer will be lost.
Certain user activity – for example, making an in-app purchase or downloading an eBook – should trigger a sequence of messages. These will ensure the user knows you value their interaction with your business and are there to support them to get the most out of it.
Action:
Try using data management software to help you integrate your marketing automation with your other systems.
6. Focusing on the wrong metrics
When you’re evaluating the success of your marketing automation, it’s easy to get distracted by one high-performing metric – forgetting that this is just one part of a bigger story.
Perhaps your open rate for one email campaign is 40% versus 10% for another. Based on that metric alone, it looks like the first campaign was more successful. But what about click-through rates? If that 40% opened the email but didn’t follow the link inside, whereas half of the 10% did, suddenly the second campaign looks more productive.
Considering how multiple metrics work together will give you a much more accurate picture of the impact of your marketing automation. Take a holistic approach. This will help prevent a waste of budget on ineffective strategies.
Action:
Make the most of web analytics tools to test your KPIs and ensure your marketing automation solution is keeping pace.
Conclusion
In the right hands, marketing automation will allow your business to grow while still providing a personal experience for customers. Choosing software with the appropriate level of functionality for your business – and then using these tools to their full potential – is crucial.
Keep your customers in mind at all times. Who are they, what are they buying, what content do they demand? This data needs to be measured, managed, and used to shape your automation strategy. Furthermore, checking that your systems are integrated and communicating with each other will ensure that the high-quality content you’ve produced is actually reaching the right people at the right time.
Providing you invest in the right software for your business needs, marketing automation will be a great asset to your company – allowing you to connect with more customers in more profound ways. But you must take time to understand the software’s functionality, integrate it with your existing systems, and ensure that it is delivering a message that will drive engagement and action.
Oren Greenberg is a growth marketer and the founder of the Kurve consultancy in London, UK. He helps startups and corporate innovations projects scale using digital channels. He has written for leading marketing blogs and has been featured in the international press.
Danyl Mclauchlan stares into the abyss that is Google and wonders if we are about to experience the birth of a new, even more terrifying capitalism.
I feel it most when I’m at the supermarket. I’m standing there looking at jellymeat but at the same time, I’m aware of being embedded in a web of data and analytics. I’m watched by the store’s security system but doubt any human will ever see the footage. I wonder if my presence – my choices, expressions, conversations – is quantised, aggregated into behavioural datasets, auctioned on prediction markets to vendors and consumer research companies, used to optimise product design, packaging and store layout. I sense that my thoughts and feelings are not my own, that they’re mediated by a vast accumulation of psychology and machine learning. I never knew what to call this feeling: it was just a vague sense of powerlessness; a background paranoia. Shoshana Zuboff calls it surveillance capitalism.
Zuboff is a professor emerita of social psychology at Harvard Business School, one of the first tenured women on the faculty. Her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power is huge, both in the sense that it’s important; vital; essential; all the superlatives, and also just literally very long, a little over 700 pages. It’s a work of history, telling the story of the tech industry over the last two decades, from the collapse of the dotcom bubble to Silicon Valley’s resurgence and global ascendancy. It’s a work of undercover journalism: she interviewed over 50 tech industry sector data scientists, almost all of them under conditions of confidentiality and anonymity. It’s a work of economic and political and social analysis. Somewhat inexplicably there is also a lot of poetry by WH Auden.
Zuboff begins her story at Google in 2002. The tech bubble had burst. Google had investors but no business model; great search technology but poor revenue streams. There was Google AdWords which displayed advertising adjacent to search results based on keywords. If you typed in, say, ‘pizza Auckland’ and an Auckland based pizza company had paid to link to that result, then you saw their ad. But not many people clicked on the links. Many users of Google and Facebook, and the countless free apps and other ubiquitous forms of surveillance capitalism mistakenly believe that this is still the deal: that you get a free service or product for in exchange for exposure to advertising. This is definitely what we’re supposed to think.
Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, were sceptical of online advertising: it corrupted the purity of the algorithm, and besides, there just wasn’t much money in it. AdWords wasn’t a cool place to work. All of that changed when Google’s investors got nervous because the tech industry was collapsing around them, and at the same time, the ad department figured out how to monetise search histories.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
Prior to 2002, Google didn’t do anything with your history: it was just surplus data – “digital exhaust” – cached on a server someplace. But while each individual search was near worthless, if they looked at your history in its totality, built up behavioural profiles, binned them with other users, cross-referenced them with metadata, and performed other forms of analysis designed and honed by some of the smartest statisticians and computer scientists on the planet, you could build astonishingly complete pictures of almost everyone who used Google search. And – here’s what’s really crucial – before posting an ad or a link you could make a prediction about whether people would make a purchase subsequent to it being displayed.
If you’re a pizza company and you sell advertising to a newspaper, TV station or billboard company, you’re making a bet that some subset of the audience – probably a microscopic one – will see it and then go out and buy your product, hoping that this will lead to higher profits than the cost of the ad. What Google sells is so much better. They sell the probability that your ad will have value targeted at each individual customer. They can post a link to one person in Auckland located at a precise geographic location searching for pizza on their phone, and they can estimate a 95% probability that it will lead to a purchase, based on everything Google knows about them, which is effectively everything. Now, Google asks, who wants to buy that ad and how much will you bid for it?
Google stopped being a search company in late 2002. After all, it’s just not a very profitable thing to be. Now the search engine is merely one of many tools in a vast supply chain, a global extraction architecture designed to harvest as much information as possible about as many people as possible and to make their predictions about our future behaviour as accurate as possible. They give us Gmail so they can read our mail; Google Maps so they can see where we go, and how we get there; they give away Chrome so they can see everything we do on the internet, especially everything we buy; YouTube records what we watch; licenses for Android, the smartphone operating system are free so they can read all our other messages, track all of the media we consume, listen to our conversations.
The behavioural predictions they build from all this data and analytics are the holy grail of marketing, and because they’re such valuable products Google can sell them to the highest bidder in one of the trillions of simultaneous auctions they run on their futures market. Instead of trading shares, or currency or financial products, Google and their imitators trade predictions about individual behaviour and options to modify that behaviour. This is their real business: their world-changing elaboration of free market capitalism.
It’s a cliche to say of media and tech platforms that the users aren’t the customers – they’re the product. But Zuboff argues that this cliche is no longer true, and it’s the reason tech platforms are so different from the free service or content models adopted by previous iterations of media. Now we – the users – are the raw material. We’re like seabeds being dredged for minerals or forests chopped down for logs, without any awareness that this is happening and no legal or political framework to protect us.
Google’s most aggressive and successful competitor is Facebook. Facebook’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg, a former Google sales executive is credited with duplicating the futures market model. Because Google and Facebook are now two of the most successful companies in the history of capitalism, their model is being widely adopted, metastasising to every other industry: finance, health, insurance, recruitment, retail. Supermarkets. And the behaviour modification is not always commercial. It can be a link or a video or a news story encouraging support for a conspiracy theory, or a policy, political candidate or content designed to alter your mood, typically to make you more angry, anxious or depressed and therefore more vulnerable to future manipulation. Advertising was the beginning of the surveillance project, Zuboff warns, not the end.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announces Timeline (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images).
Back in the 1850s, Karl Marx was still working out his critique of industrial capitalism and he developed a famous model of how to understand complex societies and historical change: the theory of the base and the superstructure. Zuboff is not a Marxist in a political sense – she’s a professor at Harvard Business, after all. She describes herself as a ‘rational capitalist’. but she uses some of the framework and concepts of orthodox Marxism, including the base-superstructure model.
The superstructure is everything we notice when we look at society: all our political systems, our beliefs, our values, our culture, our art, our language, our institutions. This is what is easily seen and what we think is important. But beneath all of this, Marx claimed, is the base: the deep economic and social relations defining the true nature of power in society: it fixes the possibilities and limits of everything that happens in the superstructure. The base is unseen, either because it is deliberately opaque, or because we just take it for granted, or we’re too distracted by events in the superstructure. And when things in the base change, everything up in the superstructure changes – but it’s hard to see why.
Zuboff argues that behavioural futures are a new form of capital, comparable to shares, property, currency, or financial derivatives. But also profoundly different. Just as the development of industrial capital – mines, factories, machines – drove the industrial revolution and caused the rapid and radical transformation of the world, the emergence of surveillance capital is transforming our society and our lives, but it is complex and fast and hard to see. It’s happening in the base, in other words: it constitutes a change in our social and economic relations.
The nature of that change is the appropriation of our lives. There’s this assumption – in liberal democracies, at least – that our experiences and thoughts and choices are our own. We can trade our labour for money or agree to watch TV in exchange for viewing ads. But the choices and experiences and thoughts belong to us. Surveillance capitalism nullifies that assumption. It appropriates and monetises as much of our lived experience as it can, asserting its ownership then auctioning it off, and it does so in a way that is both aggressive and covert.
This is changing our politics, especially the politics around privacy, because privacy is now inimical to corporate profit. And of course, it’s changing the internet which was supposed to be this democratising, distributed network where we all talk to each other and find out about the world. But the way the information flows is increasingly asymmetric: instead of talking to each other with data routing back and forth, the data flows from us, captured by the sensors in our home, or car, or office, or on our person, to them. And it has to be this way because surveillance capitalism isn’t a company or a group of companies. It’s not a technology and it’s not a platform, although it touches all of these things. At heart, it is an economic logic that asserts that our lives are someone else’s commodity.
Google: the most powerful search engine in the world. (Photo: Getty)
It’s impossible not to compare The Age of Surveillance Capitalism with Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. They’re both monumental, deep studies of contemporary capitalism. Zuboff’s book is a lot more accessible than Piketty’s, and it’s a lot closer to the sociology literature, Marx especially. Meanwhile, Piketty is scathingly anti-Marxist (I think this has something to do with being an intellectual in France.)
This gives Zuboff a wider perspective. It feels like she’s seeing a lot more and explaining a lot more. But it also means the book is steeped in the apocalyptic rhetoric that’s so ubiquitous in Marxist discourse. There’s no such thing as a moderately serious problem in Marxist analysis: everything is existential. Google and Facebook can’t just be bad actors doing bad things: they’re erasing our humanity and destroying the possibility of the future.
So it’s very disconcerting when Zuboff switches from problems to proposed solutions: she doesn’t want a revolution or to drown the streets of Palo Alto in blood. She wants a more attenuated version of capitalism; sanctuary spaces; more robust privacy. But even the chances of these very modest policy changes feels low. Google, she notes, is one of the most lavish, aggressive and litigious political lobbyists on the planet. She doesn’t spend a lot of time on solutions.
More and more people seem to use the phrase ‘late capitalism’ to describe the savage absurdity of our present moment in history. It’s an ultimately optimistic term. It looks at the world and assumes, very reasonably, that things cannot go on like this: that capitalism itself is in a decadent phase, that it will soon collapse under the weight of its internal contradictions to be replaced with something new and better, although no one knows quite what that is.
Zuboff’s book feels like a harsh and bitter laugh directly in the face of that notion. It tells us to look deeper, past the fashionable scorn for the tech bros of Silicon Valley, and pay attention to what they’re really doing. It shows us that present-day capitalism is horrifyingly robust; that it is being reinvented and renewed by some of the smartest and most ruthless people in the world at a scale, velocity and complexity the rest of us struggle to comprehend.
Maybe it is all just an illusion. Maybe the hour really is late, and capitalism itself will just melt into air. But maybe all these modern manifestations of capitalism – information capitalism, financial capitalism, surveillance capitalism – are different aspects of the same creature, a logic we cannot yet see in its totality. Maybe something vast and unseen is still unfolding itself, gradually awakening; opening its eyes in the automated trading floors and server farms and data warehouses of the world. Maybe the last few centuries of history were merely a transitional phase, a prelude – Precapitalism. Maybe the age of Actual Capitalism has only just begun?
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The fight for the future at the new frontier of power by Shoshana Zuboff (Allen & Unwin, $55) is available at Unity Books.
SUMMARY: Some guidance on effective content marketing from a long-time practitioner.
Sarah Bottorff understands how content marketing can help build a brand. She should do as she’s done it for several SaaS companies, including her current company, FastSpring where she is VP for Marketing.
For example, Bottorff was previously brought in to build out a marketing team at AppFolio for a new legal product offering. AppFolio had built their company through a strong focus on content marketing. Bottorff took those learnings and applied them to their new legal practice management solution, MyCase, making it the number two legal practice management software at the time.
That was just the start. Bottorff took her content marketing skills to Smokeball, another company offering cloud-based legal practice management software. When she joined them, Smokeball was a sales-driven company. It didn’t do content marketing, opting instead to send a monthly email to its database.
Bottorff was able to show execs how content marketing that provided thought leadership would add real value around using their software better. It helped the firm’s customers to focus their efforts on being great attorneys, not great business software people.
With FastSpring, she has brought that same mindset of using content marketing to help customers be even better at what they do. In this case, FastSpring provides SaaS-based digital commerce solutions to small to mid-sized companies selling digital software (e.g., subscription software, payment, and billing, back office capabilities, etc.). Through content marketing, FastSpring helps customers improve how their customers sell their software.
It’s fair to say that Bottorff understands the value that content marketing can bring to a company – if you make your customers successful, you will be successful.
So what is the advice she gives?
Tips for great content marketing
The first thing is to build a strong team with dedicated roles and responsibilities, saya Bottorff. Content marketing is a shared responsibility, but without clearly defined roles and responsibilities, a content marketing program will not thrive.
The most important role is the owner of the content program. The owner identifies drivers and pain points. They do this by working with the product team to understand what they are developing and why, as well as talking to customers to understand pain points and gaps. Interviews are a huge component of any content marketing program. With all this information in hand, the content owner develops a comprehensive program.
Another important element of a solid content program is SEO. As Bottorff points out, it’s fine to create content, but you need the right people to find it. Then there’s design, and by design, Bottorff doesn’t just mean how the content looks, but how easily digestible it is and how it’s displayed. Then, of course, there’s the quality writing and the topics that lend great thought leadership that people want to consume.
As to where content marketing fits within the company, Bottorff argues that it should be integrated and work across the company – in product planning and the roadmap, customer success and the sales team. Every team has a role to play in what content to develop. The key to building successful relationships across these teams is reciprocity. For example, Bottorff says the product team works with the content marketing team because the new features they develop will get exposure. For sales, it is about ensuring they get the resources and assets they need.
Building a content library
When it comes to building the content library, Bottorff takes a slightly different perspective. Yes, you need to define the customer journey and build content to support that journey. But for Bottorff’s company, which is a pay-per-performance business, employees are incentivised to help their customers optimize their websites and their businesses.
What her team does is develop content that enables companies to get to the next level of their business. So they offer advice on optimizing their websites, including improving their content, and how to leverage different content assets, like webinars or videos.
Bottorff says FastSpring has similar challenges to their customers, so they have a good handle on the concepts and can put more resources into developing thought leadership content that their customers need.
For example, FastSpring sends prospects personalized videos where a Sales/Support person speaks to the prospect on screen, shows them their website and makes suggestions to improve it. They then show how if you plugged in FastSpring APIs, you could improve the experience in different ways. These are just informative enough to make the prospect see the value and want to know more.
Bottorff likens the videos to a cooking show where you can see the final product to help you understand the value of the effort you need to put into making it.
My take
Bottorff makes the point that content marketing is all about the experience and that you need to provide content in an easily digestible manner. Content must be useful and that requires you to understand your market well, not only in terms of what content to provide, but also how to provide it and where.
