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Advertising Fraud Falls Flat When Faced With Transparency: How Can Blockchain Help?

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By  Darryn Pollock

The expansion of the digital realm has been fuelled by digital advertising, but increasing numbers of internet users are the reason this fuel exists. As the global audience has moved behind their computer screens, brands, companies, and services have followed, using digital aids to hone their engagement.

The problem is even though advertising online can be far more niche and focused, it can also be falsified and fraudulent. Those companies looking to advertise digitally are paying for certain levels of engagement, seeking numbers which they pay dearly for.

However, being online means that there is a multitude of ways in which these numbers can be falsified and fraudulently submitted. Ad farms, pixel stuffing, botnets, ad stacking are all tools of the advertising fraudsters who are looking to exploit a system lacking in transparency.

That is a keyword in the fight against advertising fraud – transparency. At first, brands and companies rushed to be online when it was apparent that is where the audience was, but as they have become savvier and assured in the space, their demands have become more calculated.

Hitting the numbers desired, and paid for, is one thing, but companies are also looking for proof and assurance that those numbers are being hit, and not fraudulently so. However, the standards of online advertising transparency are grossly inadequate as it stands.

Ad fraud is costing an estimated $3 million to $5 million per day from advertisers who are forced to believe and accept what the publishers are telling them is happening on their sites.

Because there is this desire for transparency in the online advertising ecosystem, one has to look at what blockchain technology can offer regarding addressing these issues. There are already overly-ambitious projects wanting to cut out the entire intermediatory ecosystem of the advertising space, but this is hardly plausible.

However, there is no doubt that at some level, blockchain and its transparency can help aid in reducing the high level of digital fraud taking place all the time in advertising.

Fighting a battle

The advertising revenue fraud that exists currently is of a large magnitude, but also something that is well documented. Google recently cracked down on a multi-million dollar ad fraud scheme that was utilising over 125 android apps.

Google uses several filters and machine learning models. It also collaborates with advertisers, agencies, publishers, ad tech companies, research institutions, law enforcement, and other third-party organisations to locate potential threats. However, even with all this effort, the crux of the matter is the lack of transparency.

It is the relationship between publishers and brand/companies that need to be addressed at the grassroots level, not the problems that come after this then need to be fixed, as is Google’s directive currently.

“A lack of standards and requirements around reporting has led to a speculated $120 billion of media spending under review due to trust and transparency issues,” explains Anda Gansca, CEO and co-founder of analytics platform Knotch.

The information that brands get back from publishers is often misconstrued or intentionally fraudulent, leaving the companies with no other choice but to accept the number provided by said publishers.

There are many problems associated with these relationships in online advertising, especially when one starts to take into consideration the agencies that play their role in between the parties too, but the issue of transparency is reaching a crescendo.

“Three main conditions contribute to a waste in advertising spend,” Daniel Trahtemberg, Founder and CEO of Zinc, a blockchain advertising protocol company, explains. “First is lack of a reliable and trusted settlement layer between all the businesses involved – advertisers, agencies, exchanges, networks, publishers, and so on – so there’s no single source of truth for any of the players to rely upon.”

“Second is a lack of user data control, privacy and accuracy. Also, third: fraudsters leverage the flaws mentioned above to turn a profit, exponentially increasing their impact.”

A blockchain catalyst?

As the system stands, brands and companies know they need to be online to get to their audience, and they can only do this by engaging with publishers who have the right market for them on their sites. All this leaves the power in the hands of the publishers and allows them to call the shots.

Fraud, and falsifying numbers when in the pound seats, is easy. Moreover, this is why transparency is the key to change this dynamic. “Dialogue and education are necessary, but we are also in desperate need of concrete steps that brands can take to take the reins of the content marketing funnel and make the internet a better place,” Gansca adds.

“There is an energy around transparency, around honesty and the true best interest of all parties this year that I have never felt before. Marketers are ready and excited to move toward a controlled balance between the digital buyer and seller,” said Gansca.

So, can blockchain be the answer for this required transparency? Many blockchain companies have taken wild swings at restructuring the whole advertising revenue space, but this honestly cannot work just on the back of blockchain alone.

“The digital advertising ecosystem is comprised of a bunch of technologically specialised businesses that have developed solutions over time. A lot of new companies operating in the digital advertising industry are aiming to “cut out the middleman”, which I think is completely opposed to the decentralised vision of a blockchain ecosystem,” Trahtemberg said concerning the overly-ambitious ICOs and startups aiming for this ecosystem.

“Any application that proposes a solution that is aiming to be the one stop shop for all advertising needs: from the buying of the ads to communicating with the user, including the user’s demand for free content. They’re essentially telling you they are aiming to be a bigger monopoly than Google and Facebook combined – as they will be the single supplier of everything to do with online advertising.”

This approach that blockchain can disrupt and recreate an existing system is far too overhyped, and most of the time, entirely false in the current climate. Trahtemberg explains the system itself does not need to change, but an additional layer of the blockchain, with its transparent nature, could assist greatly.

“I do not think that we need a new model of digital advertising – as all the related services are not going to be solved magically by using blockchain,” Trahtemberg said.

“Advertisers will continue to need support from agencies to manage their budgets, generate ad units and creatives; demand side platforms will continue to place bids on exchanges to get supply from supply side services that help publishers and app developers manage and optimize their inventory; networks to allow publishers to have a technological layer to monetize ads and manage their digital real estate; in other words: right now, every piece in the digital advertising industry puzzle has a function.”

“If one of those specific functions gets obsolete, it will just disappear or get consolidated… using Blockchain as an infrastructure layer will allow all these applications and services to run in a trusted, transparent and verifiable way.”

Overly hyped

It is easy to get overly excited about the potential of blockchain with its ability to aim at many different sectors – including online advertising. However, one should instead be looking at its core structures; decentralisation, transparency, and immutability, and seeing where these beneficial processes of blockchain can be used.

As Trahtemberg explains, there is already a structure for online advertising that works; it just needs a few kinks to be worked out. Moreover, as Gansca states, one of those kinks is the lack of transparency.

The usage of blockchain in the online advertising space has enormous potential, but that potential should not be taken out of context. The blockchain space is still very nascent and experimental, for an entire advertising market, of such magnitude, to be predicated on this technology would be catastrophic. However, to utilise the technology to ensure transparency could revolutionise the space with little disruption.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By  Darryn Pollock

I am an award-winning journalist that has covered a variety of topics from finance to economics, technology, and even sport. With the emergence of Blockchain technology and the rise in popularity of cryptocurrencies I have focused my efforts towards this fascinating and impo…

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‘It’s hurting us’: Confessions of an ad tech exec on GDPR consent-string fraud

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By Jessica Davies

Three months ago, four ad tech vendors flagged that they had identified fake consent strings. Consent strings are generated by a publisher’s consent management platform and passed back to all that publisher’s digital ad partners to show which impressions have user consent for personalized advertising, and which don’t. It seems the issue hasn’t gone away.

For the latest instalment in our confessions series, in which we trade anonymity for candor, we spoke to an ad tech executive who is frustrated that consent-string manipulation is potentially costing its business hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Excerpts lightly edited for clarity and flow.

How big a deal is consent string fraud?
It’s cropping up in a lot more conversations. Certain demand-side platforms are looking for consent-string anomalies by checking the different consent strings that come through different exchanges for the same domains. Those exchanges that look like they have lower levels of consent than others are being flagged by the DSPs as anomalies, but the irony is that those that stand out may not be the anomaly.

How are they not anomalies?
The exchanges that appear to have lower volumes of consented requests are only looking that way because they’re not tampering with the consent strings. The real anomalies may be those who don’t look like they have been affected, because it’s likely they’re altering the strings, or potentially behaving in a more nefarious fashion.

Are there different kinds of consent-string fraud?
Yes. We see two main types.The first type is due to a lack of interoperability between the consent strings being generated by Google’s CMP, and those that are generated via CMPs in the Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe’s GDPR framework, which use the IAB consent string. Each code is generated to do the same thing — to show a publisher’s ad tech partners which impressions have consent attached or not — but they use different codes and although everyone would like them to be interoperable, they’re not. Some DSPs don’t even know how to read the Google consent-string version. Therefore some vendors may be manipulating the strings so they can work in either environment.

That seems kind of understandable.
It is is some ways, but it’s a frustration for any exchange that’s following the rules because it puts them at a massive commercial disadvantage. We’re sticking to the IAB’s rules, but it is hurting us to do so. Those exchanges that aren’t altering them, like ours, are then hurting commercially as a result because we’re not able to monetize the same volume of inventory. Those that are tampering with the strings, are hurting less. There isn’t much visible enforcement yet from the IAB on this.

How much are we talking about being lost here?
Potentially hundreds of thousands of pounds.

What about the second type of fraud?
Some of the more murky stuff isn’t visibly happening among the tier-one vendors, but more likely with the tier-two and-three vendors and the mid to long-tail publishers. I know of one that gives publishers an option like: “tick this box if you have consent but are not using an IAB CMP,” and then the exchange is creating a string to look like they do have IAB consent from a CMP.

What does this mean for your business?
Because some of these more nefarious activities are likely to be more prevalent in the smaller exchanges, the actual impact may not be huge. There’s potentially a larger impact from anyone who is converting consent signals from one framework to another. But I see it being something we will continue to have to look into and troubleshoot well into 2019.

Are these just teething issues?
There are still technical examples of consent strings not being properly transmitted. And that’s not necessarily because of shadiness, but due to how complex our ecosystem is — there are lots of ways publishers connect to demand through containers, header bidding, tags — some things just get lost along the way. It will be extra work to ensure appropriate consent strings are passed through in the right way, and in a way that can be read.

How can this be stopped?
The problem with coming down on this issue is that it will cause pain through the value chain. It’s a little like the wider issue with ad fraud — not many businesses are incentivized to completely clamp down on it because everyone’s motivations are commercial. No one gets a bonus for being legally compliant, they get a bonus for hitting their numbers. Really, the only businesses with the incentive to want to remove fraud entirely are the advertisers because it’s their budgets.

By Jessica Davies

Sourced from DIGIDAY UK

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Entertain to Sustain: Wielding the Power of Entertainment to Drive Social Change

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Our current digital environment is arguably more about attention than information. We have more information than we know what to do with and we can access it nearly all the time. What we consume is less dependent on what’s available and driven largely by what can win and hold our consideration. Such was the focus of, “Entertain to Sustain: Where Entertainment & Social Good Meet,” a panel co-hosted by the Ad Council and our social/digital agency Situation Interactive, on Wednesday, November 14th.

In a conversation moderated by Katie Deighton, Laura Matalon, Owen Baker, Sheri Klein and Tom Lorenzo discussed the blurring line between advertising and entertainment, the role of entertainment in championing social good causes and the balance of promoting social good work. Catch a couple key takeaways below.

Moderator:

Panelists:

  • Laura Matalon – Chief Marketing Officer – Hamilton: An American Musical
  • Owen Baker – VP, Client Services – FOX Networks Group
  • Sheri Klein – VP, Campaign Development – Ad Council
  • Tom Lorenzo – VP, Creative – Situation Interactive

1. The Medium Doesn’t Matter, Storytelling Does

When asked about the entertainment industry’s role in tackling social good, all four of the panelists emphasized that great storytelling always wins. Each agreed that effective social good marketing isn’t reliant on a particular medium but common among all memorable campaigns is strong storytelling.

Own Baker (Fox) shared that, “Great storytelling commands attention and resonates with people at a gut level,” a key component to getting a consumer to care about an issue. Whether you reach consumers through a television commercial, a printed story, a movie or out-of-home advertising a brand’s ability to tell a compelling narrative will make or break a campaign.

Sheri Klein (Ad Council) echoed this sentiment in saying that the Ad Council’s model of advertising for social good hasn’t changed but the ways we reach audiences has. Take for instance, the Love Has No Labels campaign, which recently launched the Ad Council’s first original, short film.

2. Authenticity Wins Every Time

We’ve reached a point where social good work is no longer an optional extracurricular for brands but a requirement. In fact, 88% of consumers believe that companies have the power to influence societal change. Aside from delivering quality products/services, brands are now expected to take a stance on social and environmental issues. An expectation that has resulted in very public successes and missteps.

Laura Matalon shared that Hamilton is selective about the causes it chooses to associate with and only chooses ones that align with its brand. The musical centers on American history and thus champions issues relevant to Americans, such as voter participation.

Situation’s Tom Lorenzo shared that, “Beyond supporting causes, it’s about supporting ideas,” meaning that brands that come across as authentic in progressing social good efforts aren’t doing so on an ad hoc basis. To make a strong impact and impression, brands should then focus on bigger ideas like messages of empowerment and equality that transcend any particular cultural moment.

Food for Thought

To close out the panel our speakers were asked, “If money were no object and you could solve one issue at your company or in your industry at the snap of your fingers, what cause would you champion?” Sheri Klein (Ad Council) chose industry wide diversity. Owen Baker (Fox) picked elevating women. Tom Lorenzo (Situtation Interactive) said social good as something not added in, but as a core part of every company. Laura Matalon (Hamilton) shared with a chuckle, “Have Lin-Manuel Miranda run for public office.”

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Can In-Store Experiences Turn the Fortunes of Our Department Stores?

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Sourced from BusinessNewsWales

Rising costs, overheads and rates, in line with the growth and convenience of online shopping has presented the traditional bricks and mortar retailer with some very real and serious challenges, as we’ve recently seen with the high-profile woes at Debenhams and House of Fraser.

So, does this mean the end is nigh for these types of business, or is it a case that, in order to survive and thrive, they are going to have to adapt to the modern retailers’ expectations?

The Experience Economy

Online shopping provides a level of convenience that that physical stores really would struggle to compete with. Searching, finding and selecting a pair of jeans via a laptop in your living room is a lot easier than wandering up and down overloaded clothes aisles, seeking the pair you want, in the size you need.

In which case, the department store needs to find another way to incentivise the customer into the store.

A lot has been written in recent times about how society is placing increasingly higher value on the ‘experiences’ over commodity items. And this is something that the high street store can still offer.

Returning to the classic notion that a visit to a department store should be an event, something that is enjoyable in and of itself, rather than simply as a means to buy stuff, might be the pathway to incentivising shoppers across the threshold.

Retail as a leisure activity.

It’s by no means a new concept, but is it a case that it’s a concept that stores have abandoned in favour of less-appealing environments where the focus was all on the mighty pound?

Debenhams have already grasped the nettle, looking towards experiential retail as a way of turning their fortunes around. Their latest store in Watford, offering such things as a beauty salon treatments, and even a Gin Bar.

Bringing Personal Shopping into the Mainstream

The traditional view of personal shopping is that it’s something of an exclusive service, reserved for the big-spending VIPs.

But why should it be so?

If there is a case for making in-store experiences more memorable, then there is certainly a case for broadening the personalised service customers can receive in-store.

After all, the Amazon effect of remembering our purchases and offering personal recommendations is an expected part of the online experience – so why not replicate this with an in-store equivalent?

This might be providing customers with a simple way to book an in-store appointment online, using the booking journey as a way to gather information about the client such as favoured styles, clothes sizes, maybe even their preferred tipple, to ensure the experience is enjoyable and catered to their tastes in the store.

What could this achieve?

  • A good experience for the customer feeding into greater brand loyalty
  • Personal information gathered when a booking is made can empower the in-store staff to tailor the offering to the client, encouraging greater revenue opportunities.
  • Personal shopping can generate 4 TIMES more than the average walk-in customer
  • Data insight for personalised marketing online and offline in the future

The worrying risk of store closures and the loss of jobs is clearly very real on the UK High Street in 2018. It’s reflective of high costs and changes to the way we all shop and indeed live our lives.

The traditional retailer has some challenges and will have to make some tough decisions and changes to the way they operate in order to meet them. Moving towards a more leisure oriented in-store experience is certainly a means to help encourage more people back into the store. In conjunction with this is the need to create a more personalised experience for the customer, consistent across online and offline channels, through intelligent capture and application of data, and greater focus on in-store appointments, consultations and events to help generate greater loyalty to the brand and higher spending customers.

Article written by Gareth Rees Jones, Managing Director of thinkBooker, an online booking and scheduling system that allows retailers to join up their online and offline channels to improve customer experience.

Sourced from BusinessNewsWales

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“Nanoinfluencers” Are Nothing New – It’s Just Word of Mouth on Steroids

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By Joe McCarthy    

With larger influencers losing some authenticity and credibility, and with microinfluencers still too pricey, brands are now investing in the vast realm of “nanoinfluencers.” The NYTimes defines nanoinfluencers as social media users with between 1,000 and 5,000 followers — who can drive sales and brand loyalty.

‘Nanoinfluencers’ might seem like a hot new trend, but realistically it’s a new word for an age-old marketing practice. Consumers have always been recommending products, experiences, and companies to their friends and family. The only thing that’s changed is the technology that surrounds them and the newly minted term “nanoinfluencer.” Whereas in the past, these micro trendsetters worked independent of brands, companies can now leverage, shape, and measure their influence.

Brands have always sought ways to authentically reach their audience – social media influencers have been a natural extension of that game plan. Savvy brands will unearth this flavor of ‘influencer’ in the form of user-generated content (UGC) to amplify the authentic voice these individuals lend to their content.

In Consumers We Trust

That’s the main takeaway of a recent New York Times article, which presents the concept of nanoinfluencers as an eccentric deviation from the normal playbook. “Are You Ready For Nanoinfluencers?” suggests that the rise of these mini influencers is both a sign of how brands are endlessly pursuing relevance, and how consumers are increasingly willing to blur the line between work and leisure.

In fact, in a global survey of consumers, Nielsen found that 83% of consumers trust the recommendations of friends and family over other forms of advertising. Another study found that that 41.5% of shoppers said they wouldn’t buy from a brand if they couldn’t access reviews, and a report by the Wharton School of Business revealed that referred customers are up to 24% more loyal on average than non-referred customers. Shoppers who engage with User-Generated Content (UGC) are more than twice as likely to make a purchase than their peers and UGC increases on-site conversion rates by 12%.

Brands are also well aware of the importance of word of mouth and grassroots marketing. In one study, 80% of furniture brands said that word-of-mouth was their biggest driver of sales.

In the past, the benefits of word-of-mouth marketing were hard to measure. What’s more – before social media, an individual’s circle of influence was limited to traditional connections. Now, people connect broadly and share loads of content that can serve as an endorsement for a brand. Brands have the opportunity to leverage that content to provide a degree of authenticity to marketing campaigns, building customer loyalty in ways that larger- scale marketing efforts cannot.

“It’s like one of your friends telling you a new skin care product is amazing, but instead of me telling my friends at happy hour, it’s me telling them on Instagram,” one nanoinfluencer told the Times.

The New Normal

There are 657 billion photos posted online every year. There’s a good chance that some of those photos relate to your brand and, if that’s the case, then those photos can potentially be leveraged in ways to expand your marketing content.

Brands can gather organic UGC in a number of ways. For example, scanning hashtags, brand mentions, and location-based information on social media can yield relevant UGC. Photo contests are another way to generate UGC, and brands can even encourage brand loyalists to upload photos directly to a brand site.

Once this content is gathered and user permission is granted, brands can repost images on branded social media accounts, incorporate them into product galleries on websites, and use them in larger marketing efforts.

Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants is one of many brands that has been able to leverage the benefits of UGC. The hospitality company has been able to employ UGC to drive bookings and engagement for more than 60 destinations.“Social media’s peer-to-peer content informs and inspires purchasing decisions because of its authenticity and first-person storytelling capabilities,” Whitney Reynolds, Director of Social Media @ Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants, recently told Pixlee. “When it comes to travel marketing, user-generated content is a goldmine hidden in plain sight.”

Feature Image Credit: geralt / Pixabay

By Joe McCarthy    

Sourced from Business 2 Community

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5 Ways Startups Can Drive Massive Organic Growth

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By Sujan Patel

t can feel like a David and Goliath scenario.

As a startup, you may be tempted to look at the established giants in your niche and believe you have no chance of beating them. They have the reputation, reach, and budget to acquire and retain customers.

But if the biblical allegory teaches us nothing else, it does demonstrate that an informed and savvy underdog can defeat a perceived champion.

Easy? No. Quick? Nope. But 100% doable.

How? By achieving organic growth.

Download your free marketing goal-setting template here. 

No matter who or where you are, or how much money you have to work with, a sustained and focused plan to organically grow your audience, reputation, and customer base can deliver big, big results.

What is organic growth?

Organic growth refers to growth as a result of efforts achieved through internal efforts within a company, such as by means of creating higher-converting marketing content, increasing sales, and retaining more customers. Essentially, organic growth is growth that’s achieved by the company, versus growth that’s achieved through mergers and acquisitions or rounds of funding.

Organic growth generally achieves a higher rate of return for companies, but takes longer to achieve because it involves upfront marketing, sales, and customer service investments.

The black and white statistics for startups and new businesses can be a bit frightening at first glance:

You need to change the narrative. Put another way, one-third of new businesses make it to ten years, 20% of startups survive past 12 months, and 25% of venture-backed startups flourish and see a return-on-investment.

Doesn’t that sound better?

Failure is a part of doing business, and the reasons for it vary: insufficient or lack of market research, poor planning, not enough capital, bad or misguided marketing, outcompeted, no demand, expanding too fast, and on and on.

You’ve got to plan and work for success. You’ve got to hustle.

In the business world of the 21st century, the tactic that levels the playing field is online organic growth. Generate leads, spread awareness, grow your reputation, acquire and retain customers, and produce advocates.

Ready? Let’s do this.

5 Examples of Organic Growth in Business that Startups Can Achieve

1. Invest in a long-term content creation strategy.

There are no shortcuts, and you need to remember that going in. Successful businesses of any size play the long game, understanding that growth and profit may take some time.

In 2018 and beyond, inbound and content marketing are fantastic strategies that get results.

Source: HubSpot

Consider:

Source: Content Marketing Institute

That said, you’re not going to dethrone the king with 1-2 blog posts. Invest time, effort, and whatever money you can. Create a concrete plan. Write it down and share with every stakeholder.

None of this is fast or easy, but you get what you put in. Successful startups aren’t afraid of hard work.

2. Experiment with emerging trends and strategies to beat established competitors.

Don’t be intimidated by the big guys. They may have an existing audience and catalog, but their success can sometimes work against them. Maybe they’ve grown complacent. Maybe they don’t put a premium on growth anymore. Maybe retention is not their strong suit.

Be better.

As a startup, you can’t outspend them, but you can out-hustle them. You can innovate, experiment, and think outside the box in a way that may either be impossible or ridiculously slow to implement for them.

Create better content. Visit the blogs of the biggest businesses in your niche, and you’ll likely see the same subjects, topics, categories, and even headlines. This “me-too” stuff is safe, but boring, and you’ll never stand out if you follow their lead.

Be different.

Identify what works – an online search query or tool like BuzzSumo can instantly show you – then improve upon and expand it. Take it in a different direction. Make a video rather than an article. Share it with the people that made the inspiration piece so popular.

Cultivate your reputation as the expert for Topic X, and leads, customers, and fans will eventually come to you as your reputation grows.

Be fun, engaging, and different. Try new and emerging trends.

Be better.

3. Strategize for growth, then execute.

Success and growth take planning. Make sure you have a clear idea of what you want to do – and how to accomplish it – with your content marketing. Have a better, more focused content strategy than the next guy or gal.

Only 39% of marketers have a documented content marketing strategy. That’s an opportunity for you.

Source: Content Marketing Institute

To optimize for growth, build your strategy around pillar and cluster content for better SEO, user navigation, backlinks, and more.

Pillar Content

A pillar page or piece is typically a comprehensive guide, post, or ebook on a broad topic. It’s something that could be broken down into many smaller pieces, like Facebook Ads or how to build brand loyalty.

At Mailshake, we spent time, money, and effort creating our Cold Email Masterclass and Email Outreach Playbook. These are pillar pieces: they generate a lot of traffic, increase time on site/page, and produce a lot of quality backlinks and engagement.

Cluster Content

Cold email is a big subject, though. Within those two pieces, there are many internal links to relevant sub-topics on our site, such as subject lines, follow-ups, and personalization.

That’s cluster content.

Source: HubSpot

Both the search engines and visitors love pillar and cluster content because it’s easier for both to understand a subject and find what they’re looking for. That’s a major win for you.

Better, more convenient, more detailed content means more shares, more links, and ultimately, more growth.

Include a variety of topics and formats to keep your audience from getting bored, like blog posts, videos, podcasts, animated presentations, ebooks, images, charts, webinars, infographics, and more.

Build your content strategy around pillars and clusters from day one, and you’re primed to drive massive organic growth.

4. Build relationships.

There are literally billions of people online. Audiences of thousands or millions already exist for others, and they’re in constant need of quality content to share with their group.

You can use that to your advantage.

Build mutually beneficial relationships with editors and other content creators in your industry and niche. Using the Voila Norbert email finding tool is a must for building these relationships effectively. Leverage those relationships to get your content seen by a wide and far-reaching audience.

Going back to my point about playing the long game, this strategy is not a quick fix. But it’s perhaps the most powerful way to increase awareness of you and your brand.

Make a list of the movers and shakers – both individuals and websites – in your niche. Those are the big fish. Set that aside for now.

Make another list with the lesser-known creators. Conduct a search query for the keyword or topic of your latest piece, and jot down the names and sites on the SERPs that you don’t recognize.

Do the same with a service like Social Animal or NinjaOutreach.

Those are the other small fish hungry to grow their audience – just like you – and they’ll be eager to use your content to do so.

Follow and engage with them on social media. Leave a comment on their latest blog post. Give them a compliment on a recent achievement. Share their best stuff with your audience. Find a broken link on their site and let them know.

Cold email is the best way to automate this outreach, and most providers allow you to personalize at scale. Don’t forget to follow up if you don’t get a response. And then follow up again. And again.

Establish a connection. Give without asking for anything in return.

Once the relationship is underway, include and link to them in your content, and notify them. They’ll be happy to share. Ask them for a quote, a quick Q&A, or a longer interview. Pitch a guest post idea.

Help them, and they’ll help you. Eventually, you’ll be sharing each other’s content without being asked.

Once you’ve established a network of small and medium-sized fish, you can start reaching out to the big ones from earlier.

5. Use technology to work smarter, not harder.

Find the tips, tools, and services to simplify your growth.

Make A/B testing and conversion rate optimization part of everything you do: email, content, landing pages, and more. What’s not working can be fixed. What’s already working can be better.

Avoid competing for the highest-volume keywords, and instead focus on the lower-volume – but higher-converting – ones. These long-tail keywords are easier to target and better reveal searcher intent.

Master the three dimensions of organic growth: investing, creating, and performing.

Because at the end of the day, David beat Goliath by knowing more and thinking it through.

That’s the takeaway.

To learn more, read our list of more growth hacking strategies to try.

By Sujan Patel

Sourced from HubSpot

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How Facebook’s News Feed algorithms impact non-profit publishers: Shorenstein’s new report

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By Rande Price

The Facebook’s News Feed, introduced in 2006, was once a strong source of traffic for many publishers. News organization utilized the intermediary platform to grow their audiences. The social sharing of news also altered the direct-to-consumer paradigm.

Earlier this year, Facebook announced that their News Feed would prioritize posts from friends and family over news content. While some news publishers faced modest declines, others reported significant ones. Chartbeat, a content analytics platform, provided data showing Facebook traffic to publishers declined 6% since the beginning of January. However, LittleThings, a publication focused on feel good stories and other content for women, claimed they lost 75% of their referral traffic due to changes in Facebook’s New Feed and subsequently shut down.

In its latest research, The Shorenstein Center on Media Studies explores the impact on non-profit news brands. Non-profit news organizations rely heavily on social interaction to help encourage donations. A traffic decline could negatively impact donation revenue. Shorenstein’s new report, Facebook Friends? The Impact of Facebook’s News Feed Algorithm, offers a custom analysis of eight non-profit news publishers.

The research divides the publishers into two categories: investigative and single-subject. The investigative group focuses on producing investigative journalism on a wide range of topics. The single-subject group produces investigative journalism in the context of a single subject. The three investigative organizations include The Center for Public Integrity, ProPublica, and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. The five single-subject organizations include Chalkbeat, The Hechinger Report, The Marshall Project, The Trace, and The War Horse. The analysis focuses on two key metrics – total users and total sessions – looking at the three months prior to and after the News Feed change.

In the three months after the News Feed changes, in terms of overall traffic, the investigative organizations saw small changes in both the number of users and the number of sessions. In contrast, the entire single-subject cohort registered growth for these two metrics.

The analysis also looks at the composition of traffic, where the traffic is coming from, by using the Google Analytics channels Direct, Email, Organic Search, Other, Referral, and/or Social. Referral traffic was most consistent; increasing both in users visits and sessions. Only two of the eight non-profit publishers show social referral increases. Not surprisingly, Facebook referrals closely follow in line to social.

Given some of the non-profit news publishers registered small to moderate traffic increases, the Shorenstein research hints to Facebook’s potential growth path for non-profit news publishers, even with the algorithm changes. The difference between larger commercial news publishers and non-profit may be due to how non-profit new organizations’ stories are shared on Facebook. More research on this is needed to understand the consumer experience sharing content from commercial news publishers compared to non-profit news publishers.

By Rande Price, Research Director—DCN@Randeloo

Sourced from WHAT’S NEW IN PUBLISHING

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The Role of Video in Content Marketing

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By Ana Gotter    

When you think of the term “content marketing,” what pops into your head? If you’re like most people, you likely think of blog posts. Maybe some ebooks or extended guides. If you’re also like most people, you likely won’t think “video”– but you should.

While video has been used more for other types of marketing in the past, it has a solid place in content marketing. Videos are incredible mediums for storytelling and relationship building, after all, and though those features can enhance an ad, they also speak to the core purpose of content marketing. Copy is meant to sell; content informs and build relationships.

So what exactly is the role of video in content marketing? In this post, we’re going to discuss why video is so vital to content marketing and how you can use it to improve the results you’re already getting in every way.

Why Video Should Be a Vital Part of Your Content Marketing

One thing I want to clear up really quickly is the difference between copy and advertising and content marketing.

Copy and advertising focused on selling something immediately. It’s meant to drive immediate action. It’s brief and to the point.

Content might still encourage you to take certain actions, but it’s more about storytelling, informing, and establishing relationships. You’re providing value and drawing customers in that way instead of going for the hard sales pitch.

A lot of businesses focus on video exclusively in advertising. They create hard-hitting explainer videos meant to drive sales instantly. This is obviously effective, and we write about it a great deal on this blog. But it’s not the only way to use video.

Video is an outstanding medium for content marketing, and I’ve argued in the past that video is so content-oriented that YouTube should be approached as a content marketing platform instead of a social media one. It can be used to provide exceptional value in a quick, digestible way that audiences will be happy to engage with and share.

It helps that video is a compact form of content. Instead of copy/pasting an entire blog post and its supporting images into a Facebook post (which no one would ever do), people can just share your video with a simple click.

How to Improve Content Marketing with Video

Video has a lot of benefits and a lot of diverse use cases. Let’s take a look at the four biggest ways you should be using it to improve your content marketing campaigns across the board.

Create Standalone Video Content

We’re seeing more and more long form content being shared across multiple platforms, to the point where we’ve even seen an emergence of platforms like IGTV.

Video content that’s meant to engage with users, teach them, or offer value to them in some other way is a great way to enhance your content marketing. You’re adding a new medium of content that’s engaging and easy for users to process quickly.

And sometimes, video can capture a subject more efficiently than even the best-written blog post ever could. Instead of writing a blog post about how to fix the engine of the car, for example, it would likely be a lot more effective to watch a video going over the same thing. It’s easier for people to understand, and it can often get the point across much more quickly.

Sometimes video tutorials are more beneficial than text-based how-tos. In this case, you’ll see videos appearing high in the SERPs.

Your standalone video content can truly standalone, existing in separate campaigns from your blog or lead magnets, but it can also work alongside it. Cover similar topics, and then send users back and forth from your videos to your blog and vice versa.

Embed Videos in Blog Posts

Once you’ve got that video content up and running, embed them in relevant blog posts. Are you talking about overall car maintenance? Insert that video showing how to change an engine in the appropriate section, embedding it into the post. This adds value for your readers, it makes your content more engaging, and it even gives you a new type of goal to track in Google Analytics; (you can actually see how many users click to play your videos).

Videos appearing in blog posts do count as additional media, and the more thoroughly you’re able to cover a single subject, the happier your readers will be.

Use .SRT Files to Improve SEO

We already know that captions are important to include on videos, especially with 85% of videos being played on Facebook without any sound. Including closed captions to counteract this trend is important, but they have another great use, too.

When you use .SRT files to create closed captions for your video, you’re also giving your video content a big SEO boost that will help you to attract relevant traffic. Google can’t crawl videos, but they can crawl .SRT files, which are essentially text transcripts that you embed into the video.

This gives you an enormous SEO advantage, because you can hit a lot of keywords you weren’t even targeting directly and show up in more relevant feeds.

If you’re not sure how to create an .SRT file, it’s easier than you think, especially if you use YouTube. You can see how here.

Create Videos to Promote Your Content

Even if you’re most comfortable sticking with blog posts as your primary form of content, you can still use video to send more traffic your way.

As a part of Shakr’s content marketing strategy, we create short announcement videos for our blog posts using our high-performing video templates. We feature the blog title in short, 5-second-long videos that we share on social media. Since videos are often favored in feeds and immediately suck you into watching, it’s been an effective strategy that we’re sticking to (at least for now!).

Conclusion

Blog posts are the staple of most brands’ content marketing strategies, but that definitely doesn’t mean they should be the only part. Video can help your marketing efforts by enhancing the content itself, providing new content available to you, helping you connect with your audience, and making it easier to promote the posts you already have. It’s a valuable and flexible asset, and it should be treated as such.

Feature Image Credit: Free-Photos / Pixabay

By Ana Gotter    

Sourced from Business 2 Community

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24+ Sites to Find Free Images You Would Actually Use for Your Marketing

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By Courtney Seiter

Here at Buffer, we think a lot about visual content.

We’ve shared our own study on the importance of images in Twitter posts for more social sharing. We’ve explored tools that help anyone create visual content. Our social media management tool incorporates image posting because we know how important that element is to engage your followers and fans.

But there’s one question we get asked quite often: Where can you find free images that are high quality and cleared to use for your blog posts or social media content?

It’s a question with a lot of different answers and caveats. Nearly every image created in the last 30 years is still protected by copyright—a protection that gives virtually every author the exclusive right to use or reproduce their work. But you can find a public domain photo, use a Creative Commons image that might need attribution, or even create your own image from scratch.

In this post, we’ll share more than 20 different sources and tools for free images, covering searchable image sites, create-your-own-image tools, and more.

(Related: If you are interested in learning how to pick and use such images, you might like our complete guide to using stock images in your marketing.)

24+ Sites to Find Free images You Would Actually Use for Your Marketing

Understand these terms before using any free images

A few things to know before we get started. The following terms will come up often as we discuss free image sources. Read over the terms and conditions of each site you try so you know exactly when and what type of attribution is required.

What is Creative Commons?

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools. There are various types of Creative Commons licenses that range from allowing any type of use with no attribution to allowing only certain uses and no changes.

What is public domain?

Works in the public domain are those whose copyrights have expired, have been forfeited, or are inapplicable. Finding something on the internet does not mean it is in the public domain.

What is royalty free?

Royalty-free images aren’t necessarily free. In most cases, you’ll have to pay a one-time fee to obtain the rights to use the image. Then you can use it as many times as you like. The “free” in “royalty-free” only means that you do not have to pay royalties to the owner of the image every time you use it. For a comprehensive read on royalty-free images, check out this guide by Amos Struck.

24+ websites to find free images for your marketing

To better help you evaluate these sites, I performed the same search, if possible, on each using the term “happy people.”

1. Unsplash

Unsplash

Unsplash has its own license, which essentially lets you use the images for free, in any way you like, except for using them to create a competing website. (We are huge fans of Unsplash here at Buffer!)

2. Burst (by Shopify)

Burst

Burst is a free stock photo platform for entrepreneurs by Shopify. The images are both free and royalty-free. (Burst has a cool section of business ideas, with tips and high-resolution images for getting your business started.)

3. Pexels

Pexels

Pexels also has its own license, which states what you can and cannot do with the images. You can use and modify the images for free for both commercial and personal use without attribution.

4. Pixabay

Pixabay

Images on Pixabay are licensed under Creative Commons Zero (CC0), which means you can use the images without asking for permission or giving credit to the artist (though it’s always appreciated). Pixabay provides a gentle reminder to check that the content depicted in the images doesn’t infringe any rights.

5. Free Images

Free Images

Free Images provides over 300,000 free stock images under its own license. The license allows a very broad range of uses, though it does list several restricted use cases (which are quite common for most free images sites).

6. Kaboompics

Kaboompics

Kaboompics uses its own license, which is similar to Creative Commons Zero except that you cannot redistribute its photos. There are two things that I love about Kaboompics: one, it allows me to search by color, and two, it provides a complementary palette of colors in the photo.

7. Stocksnap.io

Stocksnap

Stocksnap uses the Creative Commons CC0 license so its photos are free to download, edit, and use for both commercial and non-commercial projects.

8. Canva

Canva

Canva is an online graphic design tool that also offers free stock photos. One advantage of using Canva is that you can quickly turn an image into a custom graphic to use on social media or your blog.

9. Life of Pix

Life of Pix

Life of Pix lists free high-resolution photographs and partners with Adobe Stock for more (paid) stock photographs.

10. Gratisography

Gratisography

Gratisography also has its own free photo license, which lets you do “almost anything you can think of”. While they have a rather limited number of images now, many are high-quality images that I would use.

11. Flickr

Flickr

Flickr is an image hosting platform where you can find images that can be used and modified for commercial purposes. Select “Commercial use & mods allowed” under the “Any license” filter to find those images, and remember to check the license for each image as they vary.

12. The Jopwell Collection (by Jopwell)

The Jopwell Collection

The Jopwell Collection contains several albums with hundreds of images featuring people in the Jopwell community. The images are free to be downloaded and used as long as you visibly attribute Jopwell. (You can read the story behind this collection here.)

13. WOCinTech

WOCinTech

This is an album of photos of women of color in tech, started by Christina and Stephanie, the founders of #WOCinTech Chat. The images can be used as long as you attribute #WOCinTech Chat or wocintechchat.com. (While the team isn’t updating the album anymore, there are over 500 images to choose from!)

14. CreateHER Stock

CreateHER Stock

CreateHER Stock’s team has manually curated more than 200 high-quality images of women of color, which might be used for personal use only. (Do check out their license here.) You can also receive new free images every month when you sign up to their newsletter.

15. Death to Stock

Death to Stock

Unlike most websites mentioned in this post, Death to Stock doesn’t have a gallery of images. It sends you 20 new photos every month when you sign up for its newsletter.

16. Getty Images

Getty Images

This might come as a surprise to you (as it was to me). You can use images from Getty Images on your non-commercial websites for free by embedding them. Downloading an image and uploading it to your website is still a no-no—you’ve got to embed it. An embed is slightly more intrusive than simply adding a photo into your post – the embed keeps its own frame, share buttons, and branding. Still, for many blogs, it’s an option worth looking into.

17. PicJumbo

Picjumbo

PicJumbo offers a variety of free images for any kind of use—free of charge with no registration required. You can also get new free images by subscribing to their newsletter. (If you have the budget to spare, do check out their premium photo collections such as this, which looks amazing to me! It even has vertical images for Stories content.)

18. Crello

Crello

Similar to Canva, Crello is a free graphic design tool by Depositphotos, which has many free images for you to use.

19. Depositphotos

Depositphotos

Depositphoto offers a sample of free images, vectors, editorial content, and footages, which is updated every week. You can also sign up for an account to get the free stock files every week.

20. iStock

iStock

iStock releases a new batch of free stock files every week when you sign up for a free membership.

21. New Old Stock

New Old Stock

New Old Stock is a collection of vintage photos from the public archives, free of known copyright restrictions.

22. Superfamous

Superfamous

Superfamous houses the work of Dutch interaction designer Folkert Gorter, whose photography is available under the conditions of a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. This means that you can use the work for your own purposes — including commercial use — as long as credit is provided.

23. Google Advanced Image Search

Google Image Search

Google Advanced Image Search is a method of finding free-to-use images through Google’s own search tools. Here’s a quick guide.

24+. Facebook posts, Instagram posts, tweets, and more

It’s also worth noting that you can embed Facebook posts, Instagram posts, tweets, YouTube videos and even Slideshare decks to your blog post.

Pinterest boards are a little trickier to embed, but it can be done by using its widget builder and copying and pasting the code into your blog post. (For WordPress users, I noticed that I have to publish the blog post while in the “Text” editor mode after pasting the code for this to work.)

 

Often, readers can engage with embedded posts more deeply than static content by following users, liking, or commenting on the posts.

Consider replacing screenshots with embedded posts so that readers can engage with your examples.

Schedule your images with Buffer

Thanks so much for reading all the way to the end of the blog post. As a thank you, I would love to share a nifty feature that we have built into Buffer to help you share your images as quickly as possible.

Whenever you share your blog posts or marketing websites with Buffer (either through your dashboard or the browser extension), we will automatically pick up images from those websites and suggest them to you for your social media posts. You just have to click on your favorite image to add it to your social media post.

Buffer's suggested media feature

(Note: When sharing images from others’ websites, it’s always advisable to check with the owner of the website or image first.)

 

By Courtney Seiter

Sourced from buffer

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How to Make Your LinkedIn Company Page Stand Out

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Want to create a stronger presence for your company on LinkedIn? Wondering how others are using company pages to support their business goals?

In this article, you’ll discover how 10 prominent businesses are making the most of LinkedIn and 4 key components of an engaged LinkedIn company page.

#1: Recruit Talent

Tesla is on a mission to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy—partly through making affordable electric vehicles more readily available to consumers.

The recruiting team at Tesla uses their company page to talk directly to potential employees. Through a variety of posts, Tesla’s team works to make sure people know as much as possible about the company, working conditions, and the brand’s accomplishments.

They focus quite a lot on behind-the-scenes content to reveal how their cars are made, show people working on products, highlight places they’re working from, and generally give people a look at Tesla from the inside.

Click HERE to read the remainder of the article

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Sourced from Social Media Examiner

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