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How to connect with the next generation of influencers – designing for Gen Z

February 28, 2019 No Comments

Following in-depth research into the wants, needs and very unique habits of the UK’s Gen Z market, and successfully rebranding established brands to appeal to this hyper-connected audience, Andy Culbert from digital-first design agency MERó shares his five key take-outs of designing for Gen Z.

It’s all change again for the digital design industry working with brands that need to appeal to the two billion ‘Gen Z-ers’ worldwide – a generation of digital natives who could pinch and swipe before they learned to talk and who are now entering the workforce. For some brands, digital design that worked, even for Millenials, is now obsolete. Generation Z is demanding a different approach.

1. Create empowering, explorative design for a self-reliant generation

Our own research into this audience supports other industry findings that they have a strong level of self-direction. Having held the answer to almost any question in the palm of their hands from the day they were born, they’re able to find whatever they want without the help of intermediaries. Self-reliant and innovators – they’re fuelled by their experiences (good or bad) and able to affect change through the digital spaces they occupy.

Design is therefore ‘empowering’ for this audience; and design presented in such a way, as to encourage personal growth and the capacity to shape their surroundings, clearly resonates with them.

Because they’re innovative ‘unique-seekers’, Gen Z is also a cohort that pushes boundaries. This can be really exciting for designers. Imagery can be experimental, colours – confident and clashing – they even have their own colour, Gen Z yellow.

There’s scope to exploit the ‘unexpected’ through design; a concept we explored during a recent rebrand of online beauty destination, Beauty Bay. In the developmental phase, we found a bold, challenger proposition of ‘Breaking the Rules’ resonated most with the fearless and experimental Gen Z audience. The aim was to challenge the traditional idea of what a beauty brand should look like and seeing how far we could push the idea was all part of the fun.

Our experience with Gen Z on this project also proved that it’s not just about pictures – key words need to form part of the brand guidelines to peak their curiosity.

And another strong theory worked: if it demands your attention, it will do the same for Gen Z, cutting through their cluttered digital landscape.

But designing for Gen Z is not just about making things look appealing – it must be about how a brand allows them to live their lives with efficiency. Digital design that delivers a slick online experience is the only way to engender their loyalty. Design needs to be as digitally intuitive as they are. Similarly, design without function does not cut it with this audience.

Content needs to translate from online to offline and across all social channels. All content needs to be scalable, and, often overlooked, even ensuring fonts are available for digital and legible on mobile is a must. Ensure designs work in the smallest of digital spaces first then scale them upwards and outwards – not forgetting that creative often still needs to work offline.

2. A need for flexible branding

Gen Z want to align themselves with people, brands and causes that reflect their desired identities – that they self-control through social channels and online personas.

Sounds easy, but bear in mind that everything is fluid in the world of Gen Z. Research has shown that this generation is open-minded and diverse, but identity is dynamic. There is often no defined snapshot of a Gen Z ‘personality’, they don’t see themselves as occupying one over-riding defined role or trait.

Brand identities are of course created at a moment in time and are created to deliver consistency. But this means they (can) date easily – particularly when competing against the almost daily influx of fresh new brands designed more recently for a new generation’s needs – thus grabbing their attention. A brand created less than five years ago can feel very dated now. This doesn’t mean that all brands need to totally reinvent themselves and their identities, but it can mean branding needs to be refreshed more frequently.

Brand flexibility is now needed to stay ahead. Implementing a brand refresh, with a flexible system to stay current to the ever-changing Gen Z consumer, involves keeping a consistent brand identity, deep rooted in the brand’s values, but one that’s supported with a set of regularly updated brand guidelines that can flex with current trends and channels.

For example, this can be achieved by having a fixed primary brand colour palette, logo and typography style but creating seasonal / trend-led identity packs with a flexible palette of icons and colours to reflect ‘trends’. It’s a way of refreshing the brand in line with external influences while maintaining consistency and control. Branding can support campaign and imagery to greater affect; there is less disjoint when photography and visual assets need to move in another direction.

With a flexible identity system the whole brand can refresh without the need for a full rebrand.

3. Make it Sharable and Digestible

Gen Z has a perilously short attention span. In fact, if you’re a Gen Z, you’ve probably moved on to the next point already. The first cohort born into the digital age, Gen Z is accustomed to flitting between numerous screens. They’re more easily distracted than any of their predecessors. If brands thought grabbing audience attention was tough before – Gen Z has taken this to a whole new level.

The upshot of this is that Gen Z are quicker than any of their predecessors to decide if something is relevant to them. And they’re quick abandon brands that haven’t kept up with their pace.

To cater for their fast and flighty rules of engagement, the most effective approach is to design in their language. Short videos, image sequences, images with text overlays and quotes can help to cut through the noise. Legible typefaces that work across all media are a must to allow for ‘quick take outs’ and, as mentioned, vibrant, eye catching colour combinations that twist convention.

Stereotypical design elements and imagery doesn’t resonate with this audience – they’re looking for fluidity across both gender and age. And don’t make the design feel younger than the target audience as they won’t engage with it.

Both images and language used can help to create an ‘instant’ emotional connection, increasing engagement. Gen Z wants content that feels real, personal, casual and informative.

And of course, the holy grail is to make everything instantly sharable. By utilising bite-size, sharable content there’s an opportunity to mobilise an army of hyper-connected social media natives who can amplify your brand like never before.

4. Get them to prove what designs resonate

The digital age presents us with unrivalled opportunities to understand real-time consumer behaviour, both within a brand’s platform and social channels.

Not only does this mean designers no longer have to ‘hope’ that a design will resonate with a specific target audience when they put it live, based on assumption, it means it can be tested with real audiences and adapted as consumer behaviours change (and they will).

Understanding Gen Z’s nuances is crucial if you want to connect with them and deliver what they need at every touch point – whether that’s through your platform or Instagram. So ignore ongoing user testing at your peril. To be truly customer-centric in order to hit the sweet spot, the only way to really know if a design or feature will produce a positive reaction is to test it with real users in real time, then iterate based on these insights.

And don’t forget that what works for one brand competing for Gen Z’s attention might not necessarily work for another.

5. Use design to showcase a brand’s values

Introducing a new brand identity can revitalise a decades-old business but with this generation, more so than others, the new identity must still reflect the brand ethos. If a brand is trying to be something it’s not – Gen Z will soon see through this. Similarly, claims must have substance. Gen Z are quick to call out brands that aren’t authentic. And through social media they have an authoritative voice and means to do this.

The challenge for established brands implementing a brand update to appeal to younger audiences is how to remain true to core values, making the new brand part of the organisation’s DNA.

To succeed in this area of design, explore the business, its culture as well as audience in great detail. Any brand revamp needs to work from the inside out with internal teams living and breathing the brand to convey this outwards. Hold live the brand workshops with staff and internal departments to find out what the company’s vision is and how this needs to be evolved to connect with Gen Z.

Success with Gen Z will come from being original, innovative and authentic, rather than a question of ‘who shouts the loudest’. Cater for their needs with empowering and intelligent design, coupled with a slick online experience (that works how it’s supposed to) and it shouldn’t be too difficult engender their loyalty. For a short time at least.

By Andy Culbert

Sourced from Digital Doughnut

In News

How to Use Psychology In Marketing

February 27, 2019 No Comments

By Freddy Muriuki

Have you ever wondered how some marketing experts seem to have the magic bullet to drive many sales while you can barely get a single prospect to click any of your buttons?

They naturally appear to have the knack for convincing prospects to buy what they are selling and at whatever price.

It’s like they have a solution for every need the customer has, which causes people to flock to their businesses, whether offline or online.

How do these successful marketers do it, and what can you learn from it? Well, it’s nothing profound; extraordinary marketers have learned how to incorporate psychology into their marketing campaigns.

They know exactly how to get into the mind of their target customer. As a result, they create content and offer solutions their customers can’t resist.

Yap, psychology has a great role to play in marketing. And according to Maryville University, there’s a growing demand for workers with a background in psychology in fields such as market research ($62,560 per annum), surveying ($54,470) and human resources ($59,180) among other career choices.

In today’s post, I highlight a couple of ways you can use psychology to drive your marketing efforts forward. Read on to learn how you can appeal to the emotional and psychological needs of your prospects, and leave them craving for your products.

Relate To Your Prospect

As human beings, we love forming packs or groups. We also tend to view and treat kindred spirits more favorably, a phenomenon known as in-group favouritism.

In marketing, you can use this phenomenon in your favor. It all begins with segmenting your audience in smaller and more focused groups. After that, create relevant content and appeals that are specific to each group.

It is one of the reasons testimonials are a popular part of marketing material. They show the prospect other users like them found a solution in your products and services.

On top of that, have you noticed how marketers are fond of displaying social proof at any given opportunity? Also known as social herding, showing social proof makes the prospect feel like they are part of your community.

Users are more likely to engage with your brand and products if they see others (who are like them) doing it. Take dancing for instance. At the beginning of the dance, everybody is hesitant to take to the floor. But as soon as the first few people start dancing, everybody else wants to join.

It is psychology in action, and you can leverage this technique in your marketing campaigns by trying your best to relate with a prospect at a personal level.

See how almost every mobile app has an “Invite Friends” button? Many web apps and social media sites thrive on this “join your friends” mentality.

It goes something like, “if your friends are doing it, then it must be good.” So, you figure out that “if my friends are buying this product, then it must be good.”

Foot-in-the-Door Technique

Psychological studies show that people are more willing to agree to larger requests, if they previously agreed to a smaller request.If you’re in doubt, you can try this psychological trick on your friends. Say you want to borrow $500 bucks from your friend, asking for $500 bucks in whole outrightly will face some resistance.

But by borrowing $100 bucks first, and then after a couple of days asking for $400 bucks, you’ll realize better results. Try it and come back with results, guaranteed.

This is common especially with email marketers. It’s easier for a user to provide an email address as opposed to buying your products.

Now, instead of throwing products at the prospect’s face and hope something will stick, the smart marketer starts small by asking for the email address.

Afterwards, you can send targeted emails to the user to provide context. Later on, you can introduce the user to your sales funnel.

If a prospect takes time to subscribe, they are more likely to engage with your brand and products later on.

The opposite of this technique is often known as the door-in-the-face technique. Instead of starting small, you start with a large and outlandish request that the user, obviously, turns down.

After that, you make a smaller request that the user “magically” accepts. But this is not a magic show, it is psychology at work. So, start big or small but make your second offer the exact opposite.

Appeal to Emotions

Along with getting personal comes appealing to emotions. If you can trigger the right kind of emotions in your prospects, you can get them to do whatever you desire.

At every stage of your marketing campaign, seek to appeal to your customers’ emotions. So, instead of listing your product’s features, outline the benefits the prospects will enjoy from the said product.

If you had no idea, highlighting the benefits of your product appeals to emotions as opposed to listing the features. By all means, the “features section” is important, but add a “benefits section” as well.

Make the benefits prominent across your marketing collateral. This shows the user you understand their needs, and have just the solutions they need.

And since we are talking about emotions, another psychological trick to use in marketing involves introducing fear, uncertainty and despair. Oh yes, evoking these kinds of emotions in your prospects is legitimate, and a popular tool that many politicians use to great success.

You can show your prospect how opting for an alternative product will cause mayhem in their life. By any means, you want the user to take your product as the best option.

Fear is a powerful emotion and if you can harness it to turn your prospects against the competition, you’re golden.

Appealing to emotions can, in fact, help you to reposition your competition in your prospect’s mind.

Use Amazing Multimedia Content

Using multimedia content helps you to appeal to the customer’s senses. Whether you like it or not, people will judge your business depending on the quality of the marketing materials you use.In practice, get in the habit of using plenty of high-quality visuals on your website, blog posts, email, social media, ads and brochures among others.

Don’t bore your prospects to death with a ton of text! Combine images, videos and infographics among other multimedia content to jazz things up.

If you use audio content, strive to create a catchy story or jingle that prospects associate with your business. Many brands do this, and a good example is McDonalds.

The McDonalds’ “ba da ba ba ba” jingle was originally sang by Justin Timberlake, but it has grown more popular than Timberlake’s actual songs.

Don’t hold back and never skimp on your content. Go all out and create multimedia content that appeals to your customer’s senses. Your content (whether online or offline) must have that wow factor or your marketing campaign is doomed.

Reward Your Customers

There is a reason the opposite of generosity is stinginess, and nobody gyrates or gravitate to the latter. Generosity is a virtue, and stinginess is a vice you should let go off. Remember, there is a big difference between being frugal and stingy, but I digress.Rewarding your customers needn’t be challenging or expensive. For instance, you can create cheap gifts for your customers. You know, I’m talking about something like an order of t-shirts and key-holders for your customers. Or cookies, mint and anything else you can think about.

All because, let us admit is, we all love free stuff. This psychological need is the reason giveaways are incredibly powerful as marketing tools.

If you had no idea, you can use a single giveaway to grow your social media presence, boost engagement on your site, increase email subscriptions and drive relevant traffic to your products among other things.

Use generosity in your favor by rewarding your customers at all stages of the conversion funnel. For instance, mobile games are fond of this technique.By rewarding users at the end of each mission, mobile developers boost engagement and brand growth. You can reward your users for completing a particular action on your site.

Conclusion

Psychology and marketing go hand in hand in the offline or online worlds. By getting into the mind of your target audience, you can craft content and solutions they can’t pass up.

Going forward, strive to incorporate psychology into your marketing campaigns, from market research and product creation to promotion and beyond.

We hope this post points you in the right direction as far as using psychology in your marketing goes. Still, this is not an exhaustive list, which means we gratefully welcome your contribution because there is more to learn.

Which are your favorite psychological techniques in marketing? Let us know in the comments.

By Freddy Muriuki

Sourced from Business 2 Community

In News

10 tips for entrepreneurs

February 27, 2019 No Comments

By ASU’s W.P. Carey School of Business

“Entrepreneur” has caught on as a buzzword and an idealized career, it actually takes an awful lot of work. Some entrepreneurs are lifers, seemingly born with a silver patent in their mouth. For others, arriving at entrepreneurship is an accident, or at least is inadvertent.

Aaron Pool, owner of Gadzooks Enchiladas and Soups in Phoenix, could be considered one of the lifers. “Growing up, I found myself wanting to make the decision or create things with a certain quality. Some places may say, ‘That’s wrong, you need to do it this way,'” Pool says.

1. Find someone (or something) that will have your back

“You learn that you shouldn’t feel ashamed of having big, unique ideas as long as you have the support system, like W. P. Carey was for me,” Pool says. Four years after graduating from the W. P. Carey School of Business at ASU, Pool opened his first Gadzooks location. He now has a second.

“It’s not about being the smartest person in the room. It’s about pulling the best people together and helping them become successful in their own right. So, while I’m very proud to be the captain of the ship, does my name personally account for our success? I hope not. If that’s the case, I haven’t created a sustainable team.” – Christopher Myers, (B.S. finance ’06), founder, BodeTree LLC

2. Cut some things from your life

You’re not superhuman, no matter how much kombucha you drink. If you’re trying to launch a product or business, odds are it’s a side hustle. Odds also are that you can’t manage a career, a passion project, family commitments, and a bunch of other obligations. So identify your priorities accordingly.

3. Make sure your business model is solid

One of the biggest mistakes many entrepreneurs make is living in the “what if” of their product or business. Just because you dreamed it up doesn’t make it won’t live in reality. Make sure you have an airtight case for what you’re trying to do.

“When you can, with confidence and certainty, look at your financial picture and say, ‘OK, this is where we’ll be and this is what we have to do: we have to sell X, we have to deliver X, and then we have to collect, and this is when that’ll happen,’ it takes a lot of the fear out of it,” says Lea Parks, a 2015 W. P. Carey graduate who earned degrees in supply chain management and entrepreneurship.

“It takes a lot of the risk out of it. You actually have a plan.”

4. Ask for help

“Do your research and ask good questions of experts you trust. Some things might feel like good ideas, but the more you dig, the more you find out they’re not,” says Tim Haitaian, who was an audit associate at KPMG before co-founding Redshelf, which delivers and distributes e-books, e–textbooks, and other digital learning materials to publishers, institutions, and campus bookstores. He helped launch Redshelf in 2011, and today it serves more than 500 college campuses in the U.S. But Haitaian never could have reached his goals without a sounding board.

5. Develop routines

It’s easy to get caught up in the creation and ideation that play such a big part in entrepreneurship. But believe it or not, you’re probably better off thinking about your process and the product lifestyle than you are standing at a whiteboard waiting for the inspiration to strike. By giving yourself parameters, you allow creativity to flow in the natural course of things, and when it’s required, not just when you want to feel inspired.

6. Learn how to say no

“Don’t say no to all opportunities,” cautions Haitaian. “Say no to the ones that take you away from your primary goal.”

7. You can pay your bills and fund the company for at least six months

This seems obvious, but you’d be surprised how many aspiring entrepreneurs don’t think this far ahead. The reality is, no matter how good your idea is, you will almost certainly start with some lean times. From turning on the lights to a new space to paying contractors to not having more money coming in, if you can’t float yourself for a while, not only will your venture suffer, you might, too. Don’t sacrifice the basic needs of existence to create the next widget.

8. It’s a team effort

Entrepreneurs have a reputation for going it alone, but lasting success with any endeavor can only happen with the right team. “It’s not about being the smartest person in the room. It’s about pulling the best people together and helping them become successful in their own right,” says Myers, founder of BodeTree. “So, while I’m very proud to be the captain of the ship, does my name personally account for our success? I hope not. If that’s the case, I haven’t created a sustainable team.”

9. Learn to sell well

This one seems obvious, but if you can’t make the product, the pitch, your company, or yourself seem worth the investment, it won’t be.

10. Get over yourself

There was only one Steve Jobs. That doesn’t work for everybody. “Egos get in the way,” says Haitaian. “You’ll gain more respect, you’ll get further, by sacrificing your ego for the right decision than for trying to hold on to some essence of ‘I want to be the one with the right answer.'”

Feature Image: Entrepreneurs have a reputation for going it alone, but lasting success with any endeavor can only happen with the right team. Hoxton/Tom Merton

By ASU’s W.P. Carey School of Business

Sourced from Phoenix Business Journal

In News

3 Habits to Boost Creativity & Become a More Prolific Marketer

February 26, 2019 No Comments

By Caroline Forsey

Maya Angelou once said, “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”

Oftentimes, this couldn’t feel further from the truth. Imagine, for instance, the moment you finish your quarterly marketing campaign. You’re ecstatic — the campaign launched without a hitch, and you’ve already seen impressive conversion results.

But you’re also exhausted. You feel you’ve used up so much of your creative energy already — how will you ever come up with a new idea for the next quarter?

In these instances, it can feel like creativity is finite, and maybe even rare. But as marketers, we’re tasked with both the burden and the joy of using creativity to succeed in our roles every day.

Fortunately, there are tactics you can employ to begin building the right habits to become more prolific in your role. Henneke Duistermaat, writer and creator of Enchanting Marketing, created the following hand-drawn infographic to help boost creativity, improve focus, and minimize self-doubt to become a better, more creative marketer. Take a look.

Free Download: How to Use Photos in Marketing

By Caroline Forsey

Sourced from HubSpot

In News

10 B2B Lead Generation Strategies for 2019

February 26, 2019 No Comments

By Johanna Rivard

The beginning of the year always signals a reevaluation of old strategies and the hunt for newer ones to stay competitive in your industry. We’ll be ringing in 2019 no differently with a new set of B2B lead generation strategies you should watch out for.

The digital marketing landscape is constantly changing, which means B2B lead generation tactics are evolving as well. Other brands are getting better at converting their prospects while some are stuck doing their old ways, perhaps unsure how to spice things up.

61% percent of businesses are saying that lead generation is their biggest marketing challenge, as per HubSpot’s State of Inbound report.

There are many free lead generation tactics out there, but a few will help you maximize your ROI. Here are effective B2B lead generation strategies that will play up your game in 2019.

1. Gate Your Content Strategically

Not every marketer is confident whether or not they should gate their content. However, this is one of the most effective ways to attract and identify leads who care about your business.

When done right, gated content can increase leads and conversions. Case in point: Finance and trade website Trading Strategy Guides added almost 11,000 targeted subscribers to their email list in just one month by using a content locking script. Unbounce’s gated content stats reveal more campaigns with conversion rates that fall between 19 and 45%.

Putting out gated content is wise if you’ve already built a library of content that you are sure your audience is enjoying. This way, loyal readers won’t be bothered to give you their names and email addresses to read what you wrote.

2. Personalize More Touch Points

One-size-fits-all marketing is dead. Users are now craving for that human touch that allows them to cultivate deeper connection and more meaningful relationships with brands. In a Salesforce survey of 7,000 consumers, 57% of the respondents said they are willing to share their data in exchange for personalized offers, 53% for personalized product recommendations, and 52% for customized shopping experiences.

3. Produce Evergreen Content

Moment marketing is a great way to stay relevant or go viral for a certain period but sticking to evergreen topics in your niche is a sure way to get noticed no matter what stage your potential clients are in the sales funnel.

Evergreen content works hand in hand with your SEO strategy, allowing you to stay fresh on search engines. In a case study by Miles Anthony Smith, he presented a growth of 575% in organic traffic after adding evergreen content on his blog. It’s helpful, informative, and shareable—all the things people love about high-quality content. Plus, it never goes out of style.

4. Build Social Media Communities

Social media is no longer just an extra channel of publishing or promoting your content. This is your chance to engage with your audience. The average person has 7.6 active social media accounts and spends more than 2 hours a day on them. Take advantage of this.

You can start a Facebook group where you can have regular discussions on pressing issues relevant in your industry. Use hashtags on Twitter and Instagram to connect with like-minded individuals or specific causes or topics. LinkedIn is also a great platform to communicate with prospects and tell them more about your brand.

5. Launch an Incentive-Based Referral Program

Don’t take word-of-mouth marketing for granted—it’s still the primary factor behind almost 50% of buying decisions. More stats show that B2B companies with referrals reportedly have 70% higher conversion rates and a similar faster close time on sales.

Your satisfied clients are the best people who can market your business to others. Incentivize referrals! Make it more exciting for them by creating customized referral codes that entitle them to discounts. This also makes it easier for you to track where your leads are coming from, and which are converting.

6. Optimize Your Landing Pages and CTA

Did you know that a lot of landing pages contain more than one offer? If yours falls into this category, it’s time to rethink your CRO strategy. Marketing Experiments found that multiple offers in one page can decrease conversion rates by up to 266%. Focus on a single goal for each landing page and be clear with your messaging in your CTA to reduce distractions. Your primary goal is to convert your visitors into leads, so make sure your landing pages and CTAs are convincing. Make it an engaging, straightforward, and natural experience for them to type in their information on your forms.

7. Record the Actions of Your Website Visitors

An excellent way to diagnose why your website visitors aren’t converting is through analyzing their actions on your website. Tools like Hotjar or Mouseflow can allow you to record user sessions and plot heatmaps on most-clicked buttons on your site.

Many CRO experts swear by this step and maintain that it’s one of the fastest ways you can uncover the “whys” in your process:

Why are they not converting?
Why are they not filling up my forms?
Why do they like this webpage so much?

From here, you can rectify a situation or apply more of the same strategy to your other pages. This is helpful for A/B testing as well.

8. Encourage Online Reviews

A study by RevLocal found that 92% of consumers read online reviews when considering a product or service. If your website doesn’t have a testimonials page or a reviews feature, it could be hurting your chances to get contacted. Create opportunities for your clients and customers to add a review and post it on your website.

Reviews build consumer trust, improve your local search ranking, and ultimately improve conversions. The RevLocal study also found that consumers are likely to spend 31% more on businesses with stellar reviews.

9. Expand Your Online Presence

The persona of your brand is not limited to your website and social channels only. Branch out and appear on other sites to grow your credibility, such as guest blogging, getting interviewed, or answering questions on Quora.

Quora alone can help you gain thousands of leads if you answer the relevant questions in your industry. Developing your brand as subject-matter experts can increase brand awareness and also help first-time learners about your brand build trust faster.

10. Use Gmail Ads to Target Your Competitors’ Audience

Email is still the most popular lead generation channel—77% of B2B marketers use email marketing to drive leads, according to SuperOffice’s State of B2B Email Marketing report.

In B2B, there is a lot of value at drawing the attention of your competition’s customers. Gmail ads allow you to target your Google Ads campaign to people who have received emails from your competitor. Sounds sneaky? It is, but it’s effective. It gives you direct access to people who are already familiar with the nature of your service.

Use this opportunity to show what sets you apart from the competitor. Use familiar language, optimize your email marketing layout, and give them an offer they can’t refuse.

The Takeaway

In the world of digital marketing, you can expect each year to get even more competitive than the last. However, that’s a good thing—your business gets pushed to aim higher and get more creative regarding devising tactics or building tools that work best for you.

Nailing your lead generation strategies is the foundation of all your other moves along the sales cycle. Be smart and creative in getting your visitors to engage and convert.

The post 10 B2B Lead Generation Strategies for 2019 appeared first on PureB2B.com.

By Johanna Rivard

Sourced from Marketing Inside Group

In News

Return on Investment: Is ROI the Right Measure of Agency Success?

February 26, 2019 No Comments

By Ryan Yaeger

Marketing and advertising agencies have been a part of the marketplace for more than two centuries, helping product manufacturers and service providers connect with those in need of what they have to offer. Agencies like ours exist symbiotically with business – when our efforts do well in promoting a business, the business succeeds. “We succeed when you succeed” is more than a throwaway slogan – it’s the truth of agency work, and words we live and die by.

Retaining a client or sticking with an agency often comes down to deciding how beneficial the relationship is for both parties. But how can a client really measure the success of their marketing agency? What is the right way to tell whether or not the investment is worth it? While many would say that it simply boils down to the ROI – return on investment – the reality is that the answer isn’t always quite so clear cut.

First Things First – Marketing Is an Investment, Not an Expense

Before we dive in, it’s important to first dispel the notion that anything you spend on promoting your brand, your business and what you have to offer the market is a cost. Most organizations understand that marketing is an investment – something you put money into for the betterment of your organization and the growth of your business – and not an expense. It’s why they call it “return on investment” and not “return on expense,” after all.

Promoting your brand and your products or services is how new customers learn about you and what you offer, and how existing and previous customers keep you in mind for future needs. Being at the top of mind within consumers’ minds is a must. If they need something you offer and don’t think of you first – or at least know of you and what you can provide – you’ve at least put yourself at a disadvantage if you haven’t outright lost a potential sale.

Marketing helps you succeed, and marketing agencies offer experience in the best ways to find that success for your business. They deliver knowledge and expertise with different types of advertising and creative staff capable of concepting and delivering a unique and fresh idea for you and your organization. You wouldn’t ask just anyone to help you put an addition on your house or repair your car – you’d want an expert. When it comes to promoting brands and business, investing in a marketing and advertising agency that works on your behalf is an investment in your organization’s growth and development.

A Partnership for Measurable Success

Now, to really gauge how successful any given marketing or advertising efforts are, it often comes down to the numbers – but which numbers? The definition of success can vary, depending on the specific goals of the client. Do you want to increase product sales? Drive more queries to the website? Get more foot traffic at your storefront or make the phone ring more often?

Credit: iStock

The goal of the campaign has to be well understood before you start, and agencies and clients need to trust one another and provide transparency in the process. A client needs to be able and willing to share information like customer inquiry and sales data with the agency – this allows the agency team to track what campaigns or strategies are working and to what extent. On the other side, agencies need to be transparent about the costs for different services and deliver the trackable data available from campaigns run on digital or third-party networks.

To succeed, clients and agencies need to work as partners, sharing data, collaborating on ideas and cooperating on measuring results. For campaigns to be fairly evaluated, clients need to know what was done and agencies need to know how it impacted business. Together, each approach can be assessed, improved and refined, making each new campaign better than the last and helping to grow business.

Where Things Fall Apart

If you ask five companies or five agencies why their last relationship with the other failed, you’ll probably get five different stories. Maybe the agency cost too much or they weren’t transparent enough, or perhaps the client failed to pay bills on time or never provided any concrete input on a project. At the end of the day, though, many client and agency relationships fail for the same reason as personal relationships – a lack of communication and understanding.

Working with an agency offers many benefits for a client. Agencies have staff that are experienced and knowledgeable in the marketing world and in a range of advertising strategies, creative development approaches, content and copywriting, digital and traditional media and much more. Having an agency puts all this at the fingertips of a client, allowing them to adapt and grow in any channel without having to hire an in-house staff to cover all the different avenues.

But the partnership works both ways. Clients need to know that their agency can react to their requests and are able to deliver results on time and on budget. At the same time, clients need to respect that agencies have costs of doing business, and when a client requests a project, there will be a price attached to that work. That can include a range of different fees, as well, depending on the type of campaign – research and concepting, printing costs, media purchasing and placement, creative or technical development, project management and more.

But What About ROI?

That all said, measuring the success of your campaign won’t always boil down to a clear-cut gain in profits. The typical calculation for an ROI holds that an organization’s gross profit during a given campaign minus the marketing investment divided by the total of that investment and then all multiplied by 100 should result in a campaign’s ROI percentage. Or, in more clear terms:

However, that doesn’t tell the whole story. While that math works great for a campaign that’s directly tied to increased sales of products or services, it doesn’t work when the campaign has a less tangible goal. Is your goal to increase awareness in the marketplace or expand your reach into a new territory? You can’t necessarily measure that in increased revenue. Instead, that may be better gauged by surveying people in the area, tracking visits to your website from that area or using a new phone number that’s local to the region and counting call volumes.The standard calculation of ROI also doesn’t factor in things like residual customer values. For example, if a campaign brings 10 new customers to you, and two of them go on to make regular annual or quarterly purchases, that grows not only a company’s immediate sales, but develops long-term returning customer value. Similarly, growth in search engine rankings or increased website traffic doesn’t necessarily show an immediate gain, but instead sets a foundation for long-term growth and value by improving visibility and market awareness.

Credit: iStock

A Different ‘R’ for ROI

At the end of the day, perhaps it’s not so much a “return” on investment that should be the target term in “ROI,” but instead “results.” What success is can take many different forms depending on a campaign’s goals, so for a client to gauge the merits of an agency partnership on financial gains alone isn’t always the appropriate measure. Instead, look at what the agency delivers for investment and decide if that meets or exceeds the goals of a given marketing effort.

Growing an email list or placing a billboard doesn’t necessarily tie immediately to a financial growth. However, both offer long-term benefits. Having more customers on an email list increases the reach of digital marketing campaigns, allowing for more current or prospective customers to be reached with future incentives and promotional materials. Increasing awareness of your brand in the community doesn’t mean they will need your product or service immediately, but it does make them aware of who you are and what you offer when they do need you. Marketing isn’t just financial gains alone – sometimes it’s playing the long game and investing on efforts today that make campaigns in the future more successful.

If both the client and agency agree on what a campaign is setting out to do and what success looks like for any given effort, it’s easy to determine if a campaign is delivering ROI – results on investment. Success isn’t always measured by the same yardstick. By deciding what success looks like, clients and agencies can thrive together.

This article was originally posted on the J. Fitzgerald Group blog.

By Ryan Yaeger

Sourced from Business 2 Community

In News

Using Behavioural Intelligence to Improve Your Site’s User Experience

February 25, 2019 No Comments

By Tom Shapiro

Imagine you’re at an industry conference. It’s happy hour, so you grab a drink and turn to the attendee next to you. What do you do next? You don’t just throw a business card at them and walk away. If you do, you’re a lousy networker.

If you’re a good networker, you start a conversation.

If you’re a great networker, you take that conversation to the next level by adjusting the conversation based on their body language. If they lean in when you talk about search engine optimization but check their watch when you talk about paid search, well … then you talk more about SEO.

So the question is this: why aren’t more companies doing this with their website visitors?

Editor’s Note: This is the third and final part in a three-part series on why your audience clicks. Read the whole series here.

The Importance of Digital Body Language

Most companies just throw their digital business card at their site visitors, meaning they rely solely on web analytics such as Google Analytics to understand site performance — but web analytics only tells half the story.

Here’s an example: one of our clients thought they had a popular knowledge hub based on the data they were seeing in Google Analytics. But can you guess what happened when we applied behavioural analytics? Nothing. The hub was an abject failure!

It received a lot of page views (which thrilled our client), but the digital body language on the page made it clear that site visitors were not finding what they wanted or clicking on what was offered. They weren’t even scrolling far enough to see the majority of what was in the knowledge hub.

What our client thought was a wild success was really doing more harm than good. Instead of converting, users left with a bad taste in their mouth never to return.

If this client had only looked at Google Analytics, they would have continued to think the knowledge hub was a success and never would’ve made any changes. It took behavioral analysis to peek under the hood and discover just how bad of an experience the hub was for everyone arriving on the page.

How Behavioural Analysis Is Conducted

Behaviour Mapping

FullStory, MouseFlow, Decibel, Inspectlet and Hotjar are all applications that provide behavioural analytics for websites. Behavioural mapping includes everything from click and heat mapping to attention and scroll mapping. These tools are instrumental in finding out if your site is effective. By seeing where on the site people look, click, spend time and scroll, you gain a deeper understanding of what is and isn’t working.

For example, you may find that none of your site visitors scroll more than 50 percent down your page. If your most important messaging is at the bottom of the page, your visitors never see it. With this newfound knowledge, you can adjust your site accordingly.

Or, let’s say click mapping shows your users are clicking the same spot over and over and over again, but there’s nothing there to click. With this data, you realize your visitors are “rage clicking” — clicking a spot repeatedly thinking it’s a link when it’s not. Now you know you need to adjust your design.

Video Recordings

Some behavioural intelligence programs take mapping a step further by providing actual video recordings of site visitors. There’s no webcam involved (that’d be creepy), just a recording of their screen, cursor movements, navigation patterns, and the elements that get the most attention. Essentially, you get a live view of their digital body language.

This type of qualitative data is highly useful in providing insights the aggregate data may not reveal. Filtering the videos by campaign or traffic source or by the type of visitor (new vs. returning, etc.) can help you uncover new opportunities to improve the site experience for your visitors.

Form Analytics

Let’s say you’re collecting leads via a form on your site. Or at least, you’re trying to collect leads. But you’re not getting the volume you’re looking for.

When you look at Google Analytics, all you see is that your users aren’t clicking “submit.” You assume they’re not touching the form at all.

When you fire up the form analytics, however, you see something different: most visitors are filling out their first name and email but hesitating when you ask for their last name or their phone number or zip code. Now you know the form itself is the problem — not the arrangement of the page.

Behaviour-Based CTAs

A similar function can apply to behaviour-based CTAs. If you have a form at the bottom of the page but behavioural analysis shows your users never scroll that far, you might decide to add a behaviourally-triggered CTA — a CTA that pops up after a user takes a certain action such as when they start to leave your site.

We added one such CTA in our blog, requesting that visitors subscribe to our newsletter. The site visitor needs to scroll down 70 percent of a post before it’s triggered. Amazingly, we experienced a 300 percent jump in opt-in rate. Pretty sweet!

Polls and Surveys

If you thought we were done, think again. There’s still more that behavioural intelligence can do, like uncovering contextually relevant audience insights through polls and surveys. Let’s say you have a page that’s promoting a certain service. Insert a poll on the page that lets them indicate what they are trying to achieve. Or inquire about what brought them to the page. Or simply ask if they’re finding what they’re looking for. Apply conditional logic to the survey, and you’ll be able to customize the survey questions based on their initial responses, helping you uncover deeper insights.

Next Step, Excellent User Experiences

All of this awesome data helps you do three major things: 1) understand your audience better, 2) engage with them on a deeper level and 3) deliver a better user experience.

By Tom Shapiro

Feature Image Credit: Tim Gouw

Sourced from CMS WiRE

In News

Online Businesses That Come With Maximum Flexibility

February 25, 2019 No Comments

By Ryan Kh

Aside from the fact that starting an online business is something you do when you have a great solution to offer people and also is something, you’re passionate about, you also start an online business because you want to have the ability to work on your own schedule and not be limited in how much you can earn.

However, not all online businesses will offer you that freedom and flexibility that you desire, so if that’s what you’re looking for, then in this post we’re going to share with you some of the online businesses that offer the most flexibility.

Freelancing:

Freelancing is probably one of the easiest ways to start an online business – especially if you want to start making money as quickly as possible. The great thing about freelancing is that you can start with very little to no money and build a successful business very quickly. Whether you’re working as a freelance copywriter, graphic designer, or even as a freelance tax consultant, as long as you’re able to provide a service and solution that solves a real problem people have, then you’re going to find freelancing to be a very rewarding business where you have lots of flexibility around the schedule you work, the money you make, and the clients you work with.

Coaching:

If you’re a people person, then a career as a coach is something that’s very flexible and rewarding, but it’s definitely something that you have to be passionate about. The great thing about coaching is that you can do it with very little technical setup and money and because you can work with clients online then you can work on a completely flexible schedule. If you decide to go down the coaching route, then you can choose to work as a business coach, a health coach, a fitness coach, or even a parenting coach.

Blogging:

If you’re someone who loves to write and would like to turn this into a business by writing about things, you’re passionate about, then blogging is a great way to make this happen. As well as being totally flexible and enjoyable, you can make great money as a blogger as long as you’re putting out consistent and good content. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing about software development companies like Praxent or if you’re writing about fashion, the content needs to be of value to people.

Affiliate Marketing:

Affiliate marketing is definitely an extremely flexible business that you can start because it’s very hands off. Although it definitely takes some work to build up in order to start making money from affiliate marketing, it’s worthwhile, so if you’re looking for something that you can work around your other commitments, then affiliate marketing is a good option. One of the best things about affiliate marketing is that you’re going to be making money by recommending other people’s products and services, so there’s really no content that you have to create, and since many of these products and services are subscription based, you can make money on repeat from something you’ve recommended previously.

By Ryan Kh

Sourced from Catalyst for Business

In News

Samsung has high hopes for the Galaxy S10, foldable, and 5G phones this year

February 25, 2019 No Comments

By Chris Smith

Samsung on Thursday announced the results for the December quarter as well as the 2018 fiscal year, marking the second straight year of record annual results. However, the numbers for the fourth quarter were less than stellar, with Samsung posting drops of 10% (revenue) and 29% (profit) compared to the same period last year. Smartphone sales weren’t great for the company during the December quarter, but that’s hardly a surprise considering that Samsung’s 2018 flagship failed to deliver any excitements. The Korean giant, however, hopes that phones like the upcoming Galaxy S10 series, as well as foldable and 5G devices to help it turn things around.

Samsung posted earnings for 59.27 trillion won ($53.4 billion) during the period and 10.8 trillion won ($9.7 billion) profits for the December quarter. For 2019, Samsung expects overall annual earnings to decline.

Aside from the smartphone business, which suffered during the December quarter, weaker NAND and DRAM sales also took a hit during the period, indirectly affected by slower overall smartphone sales. Samsung wasn’t the only company who sold fewer phones than anticipated last year.

Slow smartphone sales will continue to affect the performance of other Samsung divisions, like the mobile display division that manufactures screens for Samsung’s phones, but also for plenty of competitors, Apple included. Demand for OLED screens and memory products should improve in the second half of the year.

Demand for smartphones and tablets will continue to decline in the first quarter of 2019, but Samsung hopes the Galaxy S10, which is mentioned by name in the press release, to prop up sales during the coming months.

Also, Samsung plans to boost smartphone sales this year by launching “launching differentiated products and bolstering target marketing strategies.” That’s even though the demand for phones isn’t expected to increase this year compared to 2019. Samsung does say that average selling prices (ASP) are expected to rise “due to a trend toward adopting high-end features such as large screens, higher memory capacity, and multi-cameras.”

Samsung also said it’s expected to lead the market by launching foldable and 5G devices this year, but Samsung didn’t provide any commercial names for the upcoming products. The Galaxy F, which is what we call the first Samsung foldable phone, will also launch at the February 20th Unpacked event, rumors say. At least one 5G version of the Galaxy S10 should hit stores in Korea and the US in the coming months, according to various reports.

Feature Image Credit: Zach Epstein, BGR

By Chris Smith

Sourced from BGR

In News

5 Ways Marketers Can Prioritize Creativity In 2019

February 25, 2019 No Comments

By Kristin Burnham

Data has been ruling the roost for years. It’s no wonder why, either: Data has made personalization easy and effective, enabled informed decision-making based on concrete intelligence, clarified the customer journey, and led to a better understanding of ROI.

But now that having data and a single customer view are table stakes, a keen focus on both the data and creativity is what will help brand marketers standout among the competition.

Here are five ways you can breathe new creative life into your marketing organization.

1. Teach Creativity
Sometimes the best way to infuse creativity into an organization is by bringing in outside perspectives, said Becky Wang, author of “Creativity and Data Marketing” and co-founder of marketing consultancy Crossbeat. She suggested tapping a brand, design, or innovation agency to workshop inductive reasoning skills, which focus on making broad generalizations from specific observations—in other words, drawing conclusions from data.

“Part of it is just shaking up the culture because I think people learn by models—they have to be shown how to think about things differently,” Wang said. “People think that when you look at data, it will give you the answer because that’s what they want when they look at it. At best, data gives you direction.”

2. Test New Ideas
One step that high-performing marketing and advertising organizations take that others don’t do enough of is testing new ideas, said Nate Shetterley, global group director of data and design at marketing consultancy Fjord. If you’re optimizing around one individual, segment, or persona, for example, add an alternative to understand how people are moving.

“When you have a message that’s working, sub in message B, C, or D to test something new,” he said. “This looks like a complex version of A/B testing, but that’s where you have an opportunity to bring in a more creative approach.”

Testing new ideas can also stem from adopting an alternative mindset, Wang added. For example, think about what it would be like if you started the business you’re in today. This exercise could be as simple as running Facebook ads or market surveys that direct to a website that polls users about a potential product, she said.

“Data shows you the success or failure of something you’ve been doing, and it’s easy to get stuck in this loop,” Wang explained. “Think about what could happen if you did things differently, and then experiment with that. If you just imagined what it would be like if you created your business again today, you would probably notice that there was a plethora of decisions that didn’t come from the data.”

3. Resurrect The Human Element
The danger of going all in on data with no creativity counterbalance is that it strips the humanity out of marketing and advertising, said Adobe’s executive creative director, Steve Gustavson. If you ask someone how she feels about a product, for example, she will likely tell you a different story than what the data said if you’re just viewing her online consumption behaviors.

“I think what can get lost is that there are human beings in the process making the decisions of what’s said, how it’s said, and what gets built,” Gustavson said. “Once you strip the humanity out of that, suddenly nothing you do will be long-lasting. You need to figure out how to blend [data and creativity] to get a fully rounded view of the customer. Quantitative data can only tell you a piece of that.”

Marketers tend to fall into this trap when they focus on optimizing an algorithm to get the best answer, Shetterley added. When you tinker with numbers and tools to achieve the highest percentage, you extract yourself far away from the humans on the other side.

“When you’re focused on what it means to be more human, you’re more empathetic and ethical because in the end, you’re dealing with human beings and not just optimizing an algorithm,” he said. “That analytical approach blended with the human end keeps us on track.”

4. Teach Marketers Data Science
Consider the word “model.” To a data scientist, it could refer to an analytical model. In design, it’s a conceptual model or prototype. To the general public, it’s someone famous on a catwalk. That’s why it’s important for marketers to speak the language of a data scientist, Shetterley said.

Fjord created an internal program called “Data for Designers,” which taught the basics around how data scientists viewed the world in order to bridge the gap between how data-minded professionals and creative marketers think. The result was better collaboration, understanding, and burgeoning creativity.

“It’s almost like meeting someone from another country: You learn a little of their language so you can understand each other a bit better, which lends itself to working together more productively,” Shetterley said.

5. Teach Data Scientists Marketing
The flip side of that is equally important, Gustavson and Shetterley agreed. Gustavson suggested that organizations consider bringing more creativity into non creative disciplines such as data science.

And there are already organizations that are doing this. For example, the counterpart to Fjord’s “Data for Designers” program is an internal curriculum that teaches visual design to engineers, Shetterley said. Its goal is to surface more creativity and improve their ability to tell stories with data.

“What’s important is that some how we meet in the middle,” Gustavson said, emphasizing the importance of upskilling both creatives and data scientists.

This article is part of our series about 2019 trends, predictions, and new opportunities. Click here for more.

By Kristin Burnham

Sourced from CMO