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Commentary The Influencer Myth: Nobody Has Influence Anymore

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Raise your hand if you are aware that Don Imus is retiring this week after 50 years on the radio.

It is possible many of you had not heard this. I did not hear about it until I received a press release from CBS News some time last week in advance of this past weekend’s edition of “CBS Sunday Morning.”

The news release announced that Imus would be seen on the show in a farewell interview conducted by Anthony Mason. And so he was. You can watch the segment here.

Imus’ decision to retire did make news for a day or so back in January, following a tweet from his radio show. But like so many media milestones today, the news did not seem to resonate or spread, or even sustain itself for more than a 24-hour (or less) news cycle.

 

There was a time when the concept of a world without Don Imus on the radio was unthinkable. This week, that world suddenly becomes very thinkable. Imus is scheduled to have his last broadcast Thursday morning (March 29). After that, “Imus in the Morning” will be no more.

His retirement has more to do with the aging process than the relative strength or popularity of his radio show today. As noted in the “Sunday Morning” piece, Imus is 77 and battling emphysema.

He seemed exhausted, but he has long seemed that way. Given the lifestyle he maintained for many years, not to mention the early hours of a job that required him to talk for four or more hours every day, it is surprising that Don Imus lasted this long.

All those years in the public arena, airing his opinions on every subject and issue known to mankind for five decades, must have been exhausting.

Most of Imus’ 50 years on the radio unfolded in the era before the Internet changed and flattened all media. A guy like Imus, heard on more than a hundred radio stations every morning, held enormous power — or so it seemed at the time.

In the “CBS Sunday Morning” piece, a 1997 cover of Time magazine was shown featuring “The Most Influential People in America.” Imus was one of them. So were Rosie O’Donnell, Tiger Woods, Madeleine Albright and “Dilbert” cartoonist Scott Adams.

Was there really a time when Rosie O’Donnell and “Dilbert” were influential? Apparently, there was. Time magazine was influential too in 1997, but not anymore.

In the era before the Internet, personalities seemed bigger. Restricted only to the “big” media prevalent at the time — TV, radio, newspapers and national magazines — the pool of so-called “influencers” (a term coined in the Internet era, not before it) was smaller.

Since there were fewer of them, and the circulation of their media platforms (viewership, readership, listenership) was so much higher than any comparable media today, their influence was more acutely felt.

Who has such influence today? Rachel Maddow? Sean Hannity? Maybe they have some, but their audiences are much smaller. And their viewership is made up of people who already agree with them. They are preaching to niche choirs.

Except for the national, communal experience of watching the Super Bowl on a winter Sunday, there is no mass media anymore — at least not in the way we once understood the term.

Media personalities such as Don Imus were lucky to work in the era they worked in. Everybody knew who they were. For better or worse, their most outrageous utterances made news because people — a mass amount of them — cared about what they said.

Media personalities today will never know the joys of mass popularity of the kind enjoyed by Imus and his radio peers — a short list that includes Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern.

Those of us old enough to remember Imus and his era should thank him for a job well done. There will never be another one like him.

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Sourced from MediaPost

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3 Strategies for Smarter Advertising on Any Budget

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By Monique Serbu 

Smarter advertising is needed … whether you’re managing a multi-million dollar marketing budget or scraping ad campaigns together with pennies.

Many of the pricey ads that appear in Times Square or during the Super Bowl get a lot of attention. However, their cost doesn’t determine their success.

By thinking creatively & taking advantage of advancing technology, smaller brands on limited budgets can enjoy the same positive results as bigger players.

Get inspired by smaller brand strategies below, and see how their ads compare to recent big-budget favourites.

1. Smarter Advertising By Thinking Outside Traditional Media

Not every ad campaign needs to air on TV during primetime hours.

To better promote the MiniCooper to unimpressed drivers in the United States in the early 2000s, Mini’s Let’s Motor campaign spent its $25 million budget less traditionally, with positive results.

The brand, which was trying to increase exposure in the US market, traded pricey TV ads for face-to-face interactions with their audience at malls & busy public places.

Instead of trying to beat already established brands on their home turf, Mini chose a new strategy.

In the end, the effort doubled brand awareness after one year. $25 million may still seem like a huge budget to a small brand, but with many automobile companies spending $2 to $3 billion dollars on advertising per year, the individual campaign was comparably affordable.

Don’t forget to consider new channels or places your dollar could go further, even if you’re alone among your competitors. Rather than getting stuck in a rut, you could find yourself ahead of the curve.

2. Partnering Wisely

The Art Institute of Chicago doesn’t have the deep pockets of a major corporation, but with a savvy idea for a partnership with Airbnb, the museum, working with Leo Burnett Chicago, took $500,000 and created their most visited exhibit ever—and a $2 million boost in revenue.

As the first US museum to ever exhibit all three paintings in Van Gogh’s “The Bedroom” series together, the Art Institute of Chicago wanted to raise awareness and ticket sales ahead of its historic opening.

To do it, the museum trusted Leo Burnett Chicago to build a replica of the bedroom depicted in the paintings. Then, each bedroom was made available for anyone to rent on Airbnb.

Talk about smarter advertising!

Rather than investing in routine or traditional advertising, Leo Burnett improved the brand’s reach drastically by choosing an unexpected platform.

Consider partnering with other brands for smarter advertising. Choose companies your target audience already trusts and pitch a partnership that could be mutually beneficial.

3. Get Inspired, then Scale

Lamenting the fact that you can’t afford to buy prime ad space?

Try taking inspiration from larger brands who can, and then scale down.

One 30 second ad in the Super Bowl cost $5 million dollars in 2018.

Facebook and Instagram, by contrast, have advertising options that fit a variety of budgets, and a newer Facebook feature called Flex Targeting allows you to send your ads out only to customers who match profiles you set up ahead of time.

This is a great way to make sure you’re spending efficiently by reaching the right people.

Even large brands are becoming more sensitive to where their ad dollars are going, with Proctor & Gamble as the latest big-name brand to improve its efficiency by slashing a bloated budget.

A few things large, expensive ad campaigns are often (though not always) good at? Beautiful imagery, effective messaging, and good laughs.

Even if your next ad campaign will look nothing like a Super Bowl ad, large-scale campaigns can serve as inspiration.

While being able to spend more may always remain a goal for you, it isn’t the ticket to effectively increasing brand awareness or your customer base.

Even established brands have to be realistic about what they can spend.

Smarter advertising is a constantly evolving strategy!

Smarter Advertising Is The Future

We’ve seen firsthand what happens with stale advertising. It takes daily optimization and innovation to keep conversions steady during your campaigns.

That, along with the new trends and “rules” of digital advertising, mean you need at least one person dedicated to your advertising efforts.

Lastly, pricing alone doesn’t dictate the success of your campaigns.

Even small budgets have seen big wins … and that’s truly what smarter advertising means!

Read more at https://www.business2community.com/marketing/3-strategies-smarter-advertising-budget-02034640

 

By Monique Serbu 

Sourced from Business 2 Community

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‘They need to put things into a spreadsheet’: Confessions of a media exec on ad buyers

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By Tim Peterson

Brands are pumping more money into non-standard ad formats like branded content, but sometimes the hardest part of the sell can be brands’ media agencies. In the latest in our Confessions series, in which we grant anonymity for honesty, we spoke to a digital media executive whose company primarily makes its money from non-traditional advertising, like branded content and in-person events, about the biggest obstacle to doing those deals.

What’s the biggest impediment to your business?
I wish the media agencies would go away.

Why’s that?
Because they’re not incentivized to make innovation happen. They still are often living in this world of web-based impressions, banners, programmatic advertisements that, understandably, are very measurable from a quantitative perspective. But for digital advertising to move forward, we need to come up with stuff that hasn’t happened already, new ways to market to an audience, to measure whether something is successful. But the way the model works right now is the media agency requires there to be a rigid format via which the success of campaigns are measured. I mean, they’re still having problems figuring out how to measure social marketing.

Do you do things to work around the media agencies?
We are always, trying, and luckily we’ve been successful. Yeah, it’s critical you have a relationship directly with the brands.

Do the media agencies try to put themselves in the middle of it anyway?
Sure. Sometimes there’s a contract there that requires they be involved. And some brands understand that and say, “Look, we’ll figure out how to work with you and the media agency together.” We have plenty of examples of relationships where we work with the brand directly, and they bring in the media agency, and we all together figure out how to make something work for everyone involved. But more often than not, the marketer is the one legitimizing stuff to the media agency, where the media agency is saying, “How are you going to spend this much money on this?” or “This doesn’t make sense. This isn’t the way we do things.” There’s always this sort of “We have to fit this into the media agency box,” and that kills deals sometimes.

What’s an example of how a media agency has mucked up a deal with a brand?
A lot of times they need to put things into a spreadsheet, to say, “Here are the impressions, here’s the reach.” Often their models are built to deliver eyeballs at scale and to find the highest value CPMs available.

Have you had to do things to please the media agency to get the deal you want with the brand?
We have to play that game, for sure. There’s still money being made there. It doesn’t mean that it’s not worthwhile to pursue a deal from a media agency because they often connect us to brands that we wouldn’t otherwise be connected to. But ultimately we want to have a relationship with the brand, to sit in the room with the marketer and say, “What do you want to do? How can we help you do that?”

For more confessions like this one, download our complete agency confessions collection.

By Tim Peterson

Sourced from DIGIDAY UK

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Coca-Cola is breaking the agency model to experiment with crowd-sourced creative briefs

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By Katie Deighton

Coca-Cola’s latest experiment in opening short design briefs to the entire world illustrates its plans to no longer be seen as “a traditional advertiser” by appointing consumers – not agencies – as its co-creators.

The drinks giant’s head of digital, David Godsman, admitted at the Adobe Summit opening keynote that the digitally connected world is “somewhat unknown” to the brand. Nevertheless, 12 months ago it embarked on a five-year digital transformation programme, underscored by four key areas: operations, business, culture and experiences.

Surprisingly, Coca-Cola has filed its marketing and advertising operations into the latter category. Not only is Godsman asking his “traditional brand marketers to become experience makers”, but he’s earmarked the fans of Coca-Cola as vital to its content creation strategy.

David Godsman, chief digital officer, Coca-Cola

“Digital allows us to create unifying experiences which – regardless of language or place in the world – helps to bring them together,” he said. “Digital enables them to participate actively with us and co-create the experiences we bring to market

“We don’t see a world where we will continue as a traditional advertiser in that sense.”

James Sommerville, Coca-Cola’s vice president of global design, introduced one of the first forays into this strategy of consumers-as-creators. Coke x Adobe x You, which quietly launched last October on social media, comprised a succinct brief open to the entire internet, which read: ‘Create a work of art celebrating Coca-Cola, sport, movement, strength, and unity using Adobe Creative Cloud tools’.

“We thought: ‘What would happen if you just gave the world’s designers three or four simple tools and a short brief – so short that you could tweet it?’,” explained Sommerville.

The brief for Coke x Adobe x You

So far, the project has thrown up around 1,500 submissions, from trippy, fun animations to meticulous hand-drawn illustrations. All the designers were commissioned to feature the red Coca-Cola circle, while Adobe and Coca-Cola kept the Tokyo Olympics 2020 under wraps.

“If you scan these pages you’ll see the enthusiasm to work on our products and our brand,” said Sommerville, adding that the project “really is the start of our journey”.

The brand is arguably in need of a revived creative strategy. Diet Coke’s latest offerings have failed to capture the mass imagination that 1995’s ‘Diet Coke Break’ managed to, for instance, while ‘Because I Can’ was pretty much panned creatively.

It’s unlikely that Coca-Cola will eschew working with creative agencies for consumer creations altogether. Sommerville stressed that “we love our agencies partners, we need our agency partners”, but he also loves to “discover the hidden gems”. By that he means freelance artists such as Noma Bar, the graphic designers going viral, or “some guy working in Starbucks right now on a laptop”.

Noma Bar for Coca-Cola

But when conglomerate does come looking for agencies in the future, it may start knocking on other doors. Sommerville’s design lab is currently experimenting with prototypes such as a fountain that dispenses mobile data in lieu of soft drinks – the kind of project that will certainly require the expertise of creative technologists, but perhaps not those of traditional creatives.

“I really want to invite the creative community to reimagine the whole experience,” said the Atlanta-based, Huddersfield-born designer. “Everyone in this room, everyone on this planet, has the right to work with Coca-Cola.”

How does he plan on keeping those divergent, global ideas tied to a common brand idea? By looking back on the vast history of Coca-Cola.

“We have a little phrase called Kiss the Past Hello,” he explained. “A lot of people talk about failing fast – for us this is the Coca-Cola way of saying a very similar thing. Our past is so important to us. It educates us. The good, the bad, what worked, what didn’t.

“Those stories are the same, but the context has changed. We are about technology, we are about transformation and we are about talent. But ultimately for us the experience starts at the product – it’s the texture, it’s the touch of the glass, it’s the temperature.”

By Katie Deighton

Sourced from THEDRUM

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Heineken pulls ‘Lighter is Better’ ad after Twitter backlash over ‘terribly racist’ campaign

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By John Glenday

 

Lager brand Heineken has apologised and pulled its ‘Lighter is Better’ TV ad in the US following a Twitter backlash spearheaded by Chance the Rapper, who called the spot out for being “terribly racist.”

Heineken stood accused of intentionally courting controversy to generate headlines in support of its Heineken Light beer with the campaign.

The 30-second spot promoting the product showed a bartender sliding a bottle of beer along the bar to reach a woman in the distance. The glass was shown passing by a number of black customers before arriving at a white patron, ending on the strapline: ‘Sometimes, Lighter is Better’.

Chicago-based musician Chance the Rapper was among the first to scrutinise the brand on Twitter, claiming the spot was designed to provoke a reaction.

Following the media attention, the brand has since apologised.

In a statement it said: “For decades, Heineken has developed diverse marketing that shows there’s more that unites us than divides us.

“While we feel the ad is referencing our Heineken Light beer, we missed the mark, are taking the feedback to heart and will use this to influence future campaigns.”

 

By John Glenday

Sourced from THEDRUM

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A work of non-friction: is Amazon rewriting the retail rule book?

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By Rebecca Stewart

After disrupting many traditional sectors through its online presence, Amazon is now stepping into physical spaces, with tangible results. The Drum looks at how the brand is rewriting the rule book, most notably with retailer Whole Foods and its own Amazon Go store concept.

When Amazon launched in 1994 it declared itself to be ‘Earth’s Biggest Bookstore’. Almost 25 years later, the strapline feels laughably out of step with the money-making juggernaut it has become.

However Amazon has, throughout its lifecycle, remained true to its roots as a purveyor of paperbacks, going on to disrupt the category with the Kindle e-reader and self-publishing services.

And amid something of a bibliophile renaissance, Amazon is going back to basics.

Last year it announced plans to open a bricks-and-mortar bookstore in Manhattan. Meanwhile, its own physical imprint has in the past few months launched a division dedicated to short fiction reads.

Amazon is also taking a back to the future approach to retail. Its now-famed checkout-free Amazon Go opened recently to shoppers in Seattle, and the company has a network of Whole Foods stores throughout Canada, the US and UK.

Omnichannel experiences

“Amazon is coming at these industries from a position of no baggage,” muses Teaque Lenahan, regional director of business design and strategy at Fjord Seattle.

“Digitally native companies such as Amazon already know how to interact with consumers in that context, so in many ways it is an easier play for them to shape this digitally enabled, physical experience, than it is for traditional bricks-and-mortar players.”

Publishers in particular are likely to find themselves caught between the draw of a mutually beneficial relationship with Amazon and the memory of the disastrous impact that bringing sales online had on stores like the now defunct Borders.

Cory Cruser, experience innovation partner at creative consultancy Lippincott, argues that Amazon is not so much moving into the industries it helped kill, but rather shaping future behavior.

“With behavior changes come new ways to create value for customers, and reinterpreting traditional models is one way to do that, improving them in line with the behavior shift.”

Too much influence?

Aydin Moghaddam, head of PPC at digital agency Roast, laments the lack of competition Amazon asserting its dominance in these areas would bring about.

“Amazon has too much influence, and there cannot be perfect competition when one company has that,” he says.

Fjord’s Lenahan, meanwhile, is more pragmatic. “At the moment, Amazon’s foray into the physical market is either primarily for customer learning, or not yet scalable,” he says.

What’s next?

For Simon Law, chief strategy officer at WPP agency Possible, there is no irony in its forays into physical retail.

“It’s brilliant. The company has more than $22bn in cash and is using it to explore what the future looks like and how to keep retail innovating. It is investing in the new, the different and the explorative. It is doing what all business that are in decline failed to do.”

As for what’s next, Moghaddam predicts Amazon will acquire a fashion retailer, while Lenahan notes that as Amazon could trade on transparency to make money in the media arena.

For Cruser, it’s finance. “The industry ripe for massive disruption is banking, simply because the systems in this industry have not kept pace with the changing nature of our relationship with money,” he says.

Whatever happens, the company that started out as the world’s biggest bookseller is rewriting the rule book when it comes to disruption.

You can read the rest of this article in the April issue of The Drum magazine, which for the first time ever is devoted to a single company – Amazon. In it we explore why the company is becoming an increasingly attractive proposition to advertisers, and look at the increasing threat it poses to legacy brands operating in the spaces it might target next.

By Rebecca Stewart

Sourced from THEDRUM

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Branding’s Role in the Stormy Daniels ’60 Minutes’ Interview

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By John Tantillo

With the prurient curiosity of an adolescent reading a suggestive X-rated publication, whether you like Donald Trump or not, you most likely watched the “60 Minutes” interview actually to hear what was said, without even considering pictures.

The “not-so” dirty secret is that although it was a ratings bonanza for CBS, the fact is, few actually cared politically about what was said by Ms. Daniels, unless you have to prove your point and here’s why — branding.

Yes branding, that discipline many “scoff at” but which is continually used by sophisticated marketers to get the “unthinkable” elected to office. And to think that the reason for their electing Mr. Trump, a long-shot political brand, was as simple as this: “satisfying the respective needs of those whose dreams had been neglected, with inspirational words that resonated with them.”

Branding means understanding who your voters are and who they are not. It doesn’t consider “the pivot” — changing the minds of those who didn’t vote for you in the past or softening your message with words that dilute your intended meaning. It’s getting rid of strategies of a bygone era that have no relevance today.

For those who appreciate the new normal in our politics, branding is best expressed this way if you are Brand Trump — “You will be too much for some people. Those aren’t your people.”

The parsimonious effect of this branding construct is that both Trump “lovers” and “haters” can gather to their respective corners to either vilify or dismiss allegations made by the president’s “so-called friend.”

When utilizing the branding model, one can also consider the CBS interview as a group televised “Rorschach Test” where preconceived ideas regarding viewers’ respective brand perceptions are confirmed or dispelled — depending of course, on one’s perspective.

In addition to the branding issues, there is something orthogonal that needs attention. It’s the irony of this interview’s shock and awe by the media, a most unlikely scandalized audience.

Yes, the media — the very group that is more likely to have a phone number for a swinger’s bar than any one of their readers/viewers.

It is almost incomprehensible to see this group being so horrified, prudishly or naïvely thinking that a successful, wealthy and high profiled business professional would not engage in “affairs of the heart.”

It’s as if they were characters in the movie Casablanca whether the Police Chief, Captain Louis Renault (Claude Raines) utters the words to all in the casino — “I’m shocked. I’m shocked there is gambling going on in here.”

An important point here is that Americans have changed. At least the ones who voted for Brand Trump. And for some reason, this doesn’t connect with those doing the reporting. This is a mistake that could have long-term consequences for this group’s brand.

Branding, in short, is knowing your customers and satisfying their needs with “things” that matter to them. Not with incidentals that were important when life was simpler.

Except for the Civil War, today we are more divided than ever before. Appealing to our most basic instincts, Sunday evening’s interview did little but reinforce what we thought before about the president.

Other than the ratings, why did anyone even watch such a calamity?

One would guess that it’s branding — and that it is always easier when you have it and marketing in mind.

Today’s Marketing & Branding Lens Thought

“You will be too much for some people. Those aren’t your people.”

By John Tantillo

The Marketing Doctor

Dr. John Tantillo is a marketing and branding expert, known as The Marketing Doctor. JT utilizes his doctoral skills in applied research psychology to analyze the issues and personalities of the day utilizing his marketing and branding lens. This provides his readers with additional insight needed to understand the “new normal” in politics, news, and culture. Dr. Tantillo is the OpEd writer for Political Vanguard. He is the author of “People Buy Brands, Not Companies,” and the Udemy course “Go Brand Yourself!” You can follow him on Twitter @marketingdoctor and at Facebook.com/dr.johntantillo. To read more of his reports — Click Here Now.

Sourced from NEWSMAX

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Most programmatic advertisers would pay more for better measurement

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By John Glenday

An impressive 90% of marketers would be willing to lay down ‘slightly or ‘significantly’ more investment in programmatic advertising if they could be guaranteed better measurement statistics, according to a new study conducted by Infectious Media.

The difficulties inherent to the measurement problem were brought into sharp relief by the fact that 66% of respondents reported that the issue was either ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ challenging with most advertisers still reliant on clicks to verify the success of their campaigns.

This has fueled demands for a root and branch reform of measurement with 53% all advertisers quizzed now actively seeking alternative solutions.

Martin Kelly, Infectious Media chief executive and co-founder, commented: “It’s clear from our study that advertisers are waking up to the fact that the measurement model most have relied on for their programmatic campaigns is broken and digital ad spend is being held back as a result.

“Advertisers are looking to agencies to show greater leadership on how the system can be improved. Unfortunately, most have been content with the easy option of spending advertisers’ money on cheap inventory that meets a given target on clicks, regardless of the risk of fraud or the limited ROI this delivers.”

The issue of data accountability has been brought to the fore in recent months with the ISBAand IPA both seeking to galvanise advertisers into action. One potential solution is the adoption of cross-media measurement with 90% of publishers, brands and agencies in favour.

By John Glenday

Sourced from THEDRUM

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The Survival Guide to the Decline of Facebook’s Organic Reach

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By Jolina Landicho

With Facebook’s recent algorithm updates, gone are the days when you can easily reach thousands on the platform for free. Here’s how Facebook chooses what to show on their followers’ News Feeds, and what you can do about it.

If your business relies on Facebook as your top social platform, you’ve probably noticed a drastic decline in your organic reach over the past year. This drop means your posts aren’t being displayed on your followers’ News Feeds as often as they once were.

Unfortunately, if your social media marketing efforts are centered on Facebook’s organic reach instead of its paid advertising option, there’s a good chance that your future sales will also be affected. A 2017 study showed that Facebook Page engagements had dropped by 20 percent, and by the start of 2018, 55 percent of marketers saw a significant decrease in their page’s organic reach.

However, not all hope is lost. It’s just a question of how well you understand Facebook’s intentions in applying its new algorithm, and how well you adapt to the change.

The Big Decline: Facebook’s Algorithm Updates

“More meaningful social interactions with family and friends.”

This is the core tenet that led Facebook to update its algorithm to prioritize posts from actual people in your network over pages from businesses. In the last few years, the social media giant continuously updated its code and experimented with new features with the goal of pushing content from the people in your circles up in their News Feeds. What does this mean for businesses?

Three words: Reduced audience reach.

To understand the rationale behind Facebook’s recent change, you need to be clear on what Facebook is trying to achieve. While its main goal is to prioritize posts a user’s family and friends, Facebook also considers the level of engagement a certain organization has with its followers. If a business has continually provided content that fosters interaction, such as comments and shares, its future posts are considered high quality and will likely make it on the News Feed.

It’s also important to understand that this particular update in Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm is only one of many from the past couple of years, all geared toward improving user experience.

What This Means for Marketers

Facebook has received countless complaints about the degrading quality of the posts on the platform. The latest update ensures that only posts from businesses that have proven their quality of engagement make it to their audience’s feeds. Businesses that have not paid much attention to improving their engagement will feel the brunt of the update.

That said, if you are a business owner and use Facebook to spread brand awareness and user engagement, you might want to rethink your strategy. Gone are the days when you can reach thousands of users through posts and updates on your business’s Facebook page. Ever since the social giant started implementing changes to the Newsfeed’s algorithm, it’s so much harder to spread your message to both current and potential users.

To have a better understanding of the situation, let’s break it down to key areas of changes and what you can do to keep up:

1. Friends Over Pages

Facebook believes that the balance of what is showing in the News Feed tilted towards public content, ever since video and viral news started to become the trend. To bring back that balance, its new algorithm seeks to push posts from family and friends to the top of the News Feed, while at the same time, decrease the chances of public content from appearing in the feed.

What To Do?

  • Analyze what works: The first step is to determine which type of content catches fire and which ones get ignored. Conduct an audit of your page’s posts to get a hint of what works and sparks engagement among users. Focus on creating the same winning content and experiment how you can improve them further.
  • Make meaningful content: Relevant and useful content always trumps gimmicky material. By putting out meaningful posts that drive conversation, Facebook’s algorithm will be inclined to push it up the News Feed.
  • Leverage video: In a 2016 Q4 earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg said their goal was to put video first and make it easier for people to capture and share video in new ways. Videos that get watched in their entirety are ranked higher, and live videos draw more attention and engagement. Create quality video material that users will seek and watch often.

2. The End of Engagement Baiting

Have you ever tagged someone after seeing a post with a call-to-action that says, “Tag a friend who is (insert funny quote here)”? While it may be fun, Facebook is enforcing stricter measures to eliminate these “engagement bait” posts (i.e. posts with the sole purpose of driving the engagement up to trick the algorithm). This also includes posts that ask users to comment their answers, to share, to vote and/or react.

What To Do?

  • Strategize: Remember, content is still king. Make your posts significant and interesting enough to drive users to share it themselves.
  • Focus on your audience’s needs and wants: Know your brand’s niche market and start focusing your efforts on producing great material for them. People love information they can use. At the same time, people also love to share content that they find entertaining. Strike the balance between the two.
  • Post engaging content at regular intervals: Facebook now tracks the time a user spends on a post. If the algorithm senses that a particular post garners longer viewing time, chances are, the algorithm will deem it higher on the relevance ranking. Engaging content will help you keep eyes reading until the end.

3. The Rising Prevalence of Paid Ads

Now that organic reach is almost kaput for businesses, where do marketers turn to drive growth? Yes, you got that right: Paid Facebook advertising.

What To Do?

  • Learn the ropes of Facebook’s advertising system. Check out Facebook Ads Manager and Power Editor to zero in on the whole process. Once you understand how it works, create a strong marketing campaign.
  • Ask for help: If you find Facebook ads too technical or time-consuming, hire services that can do it for you.

4. Increased Use of Facebook Groups

Groups are like mini-communities within Facebook that are created by users who share the same interests. A single person is allowed to join up to 6,000 groups, making it a great avenue to look for people who might find value in your services or product.

You can make use of Facebook Groups to extend your reach by promoting your brand once you’re a member. You can also create one and invite users to join. Note that when joining groups, be mindful of their rules: Some may prohibit promotional content from its members.

What To Do?

  • Set goals: Decide on a marketing strategy that will define the group you are planning to create for your business. Will you be selling your product to its members? Sharing useful content to existing customers? Will your content focus on entertainment value or inspiring its members? Defining these goals will help you create a clear marketing strategy and map out your timeline effectively.
  • Stay active: Once you have your Facebook Group set up, look for relevant and trending content that your members can use or find interesting. Post tutorials, do Q&As, create surveys, etc., These content will engage your members and help spread your Group’s reach.

It’s All In Your Hands

Since Facebook made it harder to increase organic reach, this presents a great opportunity to spread your eggs in several baskets and diversify your marketing strategy using other social media sites, such as Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Medium and LinkedIn. You can also start promoting your brand via email marketingas it remains to be an effective avenue to nurture existing relationships and build a community of followers.

Facebook’s vision of bringing people closer through its revamped News Feed algorithm is a positive user experience. However, this same algorithm made it more difficult for businesses and brands to reach its target markets. Take a good look at your Facebook strategy, so your brand can thrive and remain visible in the ever-changing landscape of social media marketing.

Feature Image credit: Alex Ruhl/Shutterstock

By Jolina Landicho

Jolina Landicho is a marketing strategist working with various brands online, and the content marketing manager of Avenew Media. She is devoted in helping businesses bridge relationship gaps by providing in-depth, actionable advice on online marketing, business development, and growth hacking.

Sourced from business.com

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Understanding the Tools of Influencer Marketing [Infographic]

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By Laura Forer

our email service provider deploys emails. Your programmatic ad platform makes your ad buys efficient. And your influencer marketing platform connects you with influencers… Right?

Yes, but an influencer marketing strategy requires more than simply finding influencers, and you want to have the right tools in place to create a robust and successful program.

An infographic by influencer platform Izea illustrates the features you want to have as you execute your influencer marketing program:

  • The ability to discover and search for influencers
  • Easy contract and payment negotiations
  • Assurance that you’re in compliance
  • Workflow tools for working with influencers
  • The ability to promote and amplify posts
  • Facilitation of payment
  • Analytics, metrics, tracking, and reporting

The infographic explains what each of those facets of your influencer marketing program entails and why each is important, and it concludes with a section about how to choose the right influencer marketing platform for your program.

To make sure you’re on the right path to influencer marketing success, check out the graphic. Just tap or click to see a larger version.

By Laura Forer

Sourced from MarketingProfs

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