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In News

The web design trends brands need to prepare for in 2019

December 21, 2018 No Comments

2019 is set to see ecommerce sales increase by 19.5% globally, offering an opportunity to savvy brands who are up to speed on the latest web design trends and developments to drive significant additional market share.

But what do brands need to bear in mind in 2019 to ensure that they continue to deliver relevant standout online design, and therefore sales?

Mobile First

It’s vital to implement mobile first design in 2019. In 2015 mobile searches overtook those on desktop, making mobile search the highest search form worldwide. In accordance with this, Google has changed which sites they index first — they now prioritise mobile sites over those that aren’t mobile friendly.

However, it’s worth bearing in mind that this push toward mobile first design isn’t just based on ranking factors or SEO, the visual result must enhance the user’s experience on the device that they will most likely be searching from.

This focus on mobile first requires a fundamental shift in the way that websites are designed. It used to be that a site would only be created for a desktop or laptop computer and a mobile-friendly or mobile responsive design might be added as well. Today, it’s critical to design the site for the mobile user first, before creating a version that will also standout for those on desktops.

Micro-animations/movement

Using moving micro-animations along with feedback loops – that deliver movement when hovering over an icon – help make websites more usable and engaging. The details of the micro-interactions: the button clicks and the page transitions can greatly improve a user’s experience on your site, meaning they are far more likely to return. It’s this meaningful motion, connecting an action with a reaction, that satisfies a user’s desire for interactivity. And with touch interfaces, especially on small screens, it has never been more important to deliver motion in micro-animations and feedback loops to make the interaction smooth and guide users on their journey to checkout.

Custom and classic fonts

Expect a move back to custom and classic font design – clean but formal – with bigger and bolder typefaces, and a move away from humanist fonts as brands aim to standout against the proliferation of humanist typefaces.

Colour

Bright colours should be used more liberally in 2019 to deliver greater standout. The last two years has seen an explosion of big, bold colour across the internet with an increasing number of brands choosing to use their core packaging brand colours as backing for their graphics, with clashing tones moving away from the edgy start-ups into the mainstream. Those who have embraced arresting colours include The Premier League, Sky and eBay. Though bear in mind a classic font design and bright colours won’t be suitable for all. The choice of font and colours has to be right for the values of the brand and resonate with the audience they are targeting.

Optimise for search

As is always the case, making sure the design of your website is optimised for search algorithms is vital. Developments in web design will be driven by what Google’s constantly evolving search algorithm looks for. To this end, make sure that the content being communicated is relevant to your target audience and written as naturally as possible. Google looks for honest, human generated content. Of course, this must be quality content to encourage others to have weblinks back to your site to aid your SEO efforts. If users want to share your copy this highlights to Google that you are a valuable resource and the reward for your efforts will be an improved organic search ranking.

Speed

With research revealing over half of consumers leave a website if it takes more than three seconds to load, websites must be designed with speed in mind. Also, the faster your site loads the better it will rank in search results, particularly in Google search. This is not to say that websites should be sparse affairs with limited content and imagery for the purposes of speed. With better broadband it’s much easier to have image and content heavy sites that can load quickly. However if you have an app it’s seriously worth considering hosting it on a Progressive Web App (PWA) for speed purposes. A PWA can be launched from a home screen and can be ready in less than a second, often beating native apps in load times.

All brands need to constantly evolve their web design to continue to standout and deliver an engaging experience to their users that generates sales. By recognising and having these six web design points front of mind, brands will be well placed for a profitable 2019 online.

By James Pruden

James Pruden is studio director at Xigen

Sourced from The Drum

In News

Making the most of a post privacy world

August 29, 2018 No Comments

By Tom Goodwin

A generation of people have now grown up seemingly constantly broadcasting their lives on Instagram, sharing their innermost thoughts on Twitter, intimate details of life on Facebook and yet the world seems shocked that we’ve lost any sense of privacy. We now live in an age when it seems every Instagram user wants to be an influencer, to be popular and envied and to not have anyone know anything about them.

Ever more apps continuously ask us to share location data, software updates ask us to share our personal details, messaging apps want to scan the most personal communications we can imagine and access our friends lists too. And all in an era where security breaches are common, where nefarious companies seek to sway elections, where our data seems to be used to target us with ads that are designed to be as personal as possible, but never creepy, and yet haunt and chase us in on online lives.

Our homes are now wire tapped, not secretly and against our will, but we pay money and eagerly await delivery of connected smart speakers. We now volunteer all manner of information to Google, our location, photos, our calendar invites, our intentions are known by a global sentient network, more than our own selves.

It’s easy to think this is all a relentless march towards the dreadful future where our personal lives are invaded, where privacy is dead, where we can’t escape the filter bubble, where personalized ads follow us around like Minority Report, with few marketers aware it was a film about a dystopian future, not what should be done.

While we may hate personalization, the only thing we dislike more is irrelevance. We hate it when we phone up credit card companies and they don’t immediately know it’s us. We can’t imagine a world without Google offering us better search results based on our browsing history, we like that our weather is automatically shown in our location. Most people would happily swap mesothelioma class action lawsuit TV ads for a well-made commercial for some trendy new jeans.

The marketing and business world has long tip toed around the edge of the privacy debate. We take as much data as we can, whenever we can, we store it badly and hope to never awake the beast that is the customer. If we were to work around earning data from people, by giving them trust that we will use it wisely, not sell it, keep it massively securely and offer clear value in exchange, then life would be very different.

I’d love to see the world embrace privacy trading. How do we maximize the value offered to people in return for storing limited and intimate data about people in a transparent and trusted manner?

Uber knows that the only way for the app to work is to know where you are precisely and in real-time and we understand that and allow it. We know Google Traffic knows our location but uses it anonymously to process all traffic conditions and we’re fine with the net benefit. Dating apps track our location because sharing that is a small price to pay for life or evening long romance.

I like the thought experience of a post privacy world. Maybe I’m naive but if my airline knew exactly where I was at all times then it would be able to serve me better, to come and find me if I’m in the lounge and keep the plane from leaving without me. If my credit card company knew the same could it stop declining payments because I’m abroad and didn’t tell them? If my TV set knew I was in the market for a new car, new auto insurance and I liked leather manbags, is that a terrible world to live in? What if retailers had my face stored on file and I could pay for things with a smile? What if Uber could access my calendar and offer me cars when I’m running late? What if a hotel company could tell from my voice on phone calls I’m stressed and suggest a spa for me? What if a burger joint could tell I was hungry and not been there and entice me in with a special offer? What if a clothing retailer knew my size?

It’s easy to use the slippery slope argument against this and to assume that we can’t control a precise level of privacy. A company knowing you’ve bought a TV is one thing; knowing your blood test results or genetic code is absolutely another. If health insurers, for example, could ever access some of this information, we’d have absolute mayhem.

Yet the privacy debate is rooted in paranoia. It assumes companies want to know everything and not merely enough and likely in an anonymous way. It assumes advertisers want to build rich personal files and harass customers near endlessly. And given this has been so far how we’ve acted it’s easy to see why.

I’d love a discussion driven less by technology and language like targeting, and one driven by empathy and about serving people better. I’d love to see how we can start the process of asking permission, clear opt ins, clear trust, world class security protocols, and above all else a way to maximize the value exchange over a lifetime for all. Privacy is a recent invention, it’s perhaps the ultimate luxury for the future, but will it matter. Will our kids miss something like privacy, a concept they’ve probably never known.

Feature Image Credit: online information being given freely – picture from Pexels

By Tom Goodwin

Tom Goodwin is head of innovation at Zenith Media. A writer and speaker, Goodwin is the author of Digital Darwinism: Survival of the Fittest in the Age of Business Disruption. Previously, he has spoken at leading conferences and industry events around world, including Cannes Lions and CES.

Sourced from The Drum

In News

Email Leads In B2B, But Search Is Coming Up On The Inside: Study

July 3, 2018 No Comments

By Ray Schultz

Email is the top tool for driving leads into the pipeline — it is now being used by 67% of B2B marketers, according to Tapping Multi-Channel Marketing & Data As Key Engines For Growth, a study by DemandGen. Websites are used by 60%,and search by 50%. But search grew by almost 10% from last year.

Email is also the most effective channel — 59% say it works well for driving early-stage engagement. Search is second, and is cited by 56%. But email has no real competition in producing conversions later in the funnel — 81% say it’s effective, compared to 50%, who cite web sites and

No wonder the report calls email “the go-to channel.”

Overall, the study paints an optimistic picture — 70% of B2B marketers plan to increase their demand-gen budgets this year. Moreover, 22% expect hikes of over 20% and 12% anticipate 30% rises. Another 36% are allocating 1-10%.

In addition, 63% project revenue growth of more than 20%, and 25% foresee 30% increases. Also, 28% now have specific revenue-based quotas, a 5% over 2017. An 30% say pipeline influence is their main metric, for a 3% rise year-over-year. The study suggests that these are positive developments. Only 11% say accounts engaged is their primary measurement tool.

What are B2B marketers trying to do? Their main goals are focusing on lead quality over lead quantity (73%) and improving conversion rates and campaign results (72%).

Other objectives include increased lead volume (62%) and improving their ability to measure and analyze marketing impact (61%). Another 60% hope to improve their sales-marketing alignment, and 48% to improve their database accuracy.

Drilling down, case studies are best at converting and accelerating leads at the middle and late stages of the funnel (73%). Lead-nurturing campaigns are second (63%). But events are most useful in generating qualified leads at the top of the funnel.

B2B marketers are also seeking new MarTech tools, with 49% picking account-based technology (a slight decline from last year). Also, they plan to test multichannel lead nurturing (41%), content planning (37%), syndication, retargeting (37%) marketing automation (33%) and predictive lead scoring (29%).

That said, many may be hampered by the challenge of attributing and measuring campaign influence. Their databases are hardly complete, judging by this list of priorities:

We are actively reviewing our database to ensure we have full and complete contacts — 38%
Our database has good coverage, but many contacts are incomplete or inaccurate — 31%
Our contact database is inaccurate/is not adequate in covering our target markets — 18%
Our database is current and provides complete coverage of key segments — 10%
Not sure — 3%

As the study infers, all of this should lead to more accurate email marketing.

DemandGen surveyed 160 marketing executives. The study is sponsored by Content Demand, Integrate and Selling Simplified.

By Ray Schultz ,

Sourced from MediaPost

In News

B2B Marketing Has Evolved Into Something Beautiful, And It’s Time For Marketers To Adapt

June 29, 2018 No Comments

By John Gerzema

When I started out (around the time Duran Duran roamed the planet), business-to-business (B2B) marketing was confined to the domain of the literal. The customer was deemed rational and analytical, so the messaging was bland and unimaginative. B2B meant “boring-to-boring.” All the communications felt like PowerPoint presentations. We spoke in the native language of sales collateral and trade show jargon. And a bulk of the work seemed dependent on sales teams’ connections and cold calling target clients.

Yet, over the past decade, we’ve seen B2B marketing evolve into “business-to-beautiful” marketing — marketing that illuminates the beautiful stories behind businesses today, expressing their visions and values in society. Suddenly, some of the best work is aimed at procurement executives through thought leadership, branded content, social media and content marketing strategies that drive a wonderful overhead appeal to shareholders and lovers of great narratives.

The shift was inevitable, in my opinion, given the rise of the internet and social media. What we’ve realized through social is that businesses are inherently emotional beings, they are creations of our imaginations, rivers of human growth and determiners of where we build our future communities. B2B marketing is no longer isolated in the ivory tower, creating empires unknown by the general public. Instead, “B2Beautiful” marketing has made the connection between B2B storytelling and our human growth potential. These B2Beautiful stories captivate our imaginations and trigger emotional resonance — key ingredients in building that residual stickiness factor in an attention-deficit world.

My company, The Harris Poll, recently released the Reputation Quotient study (registration required), which reports that contemporary drivers are found in today’s consumer desires, and many of the storytelling strategies employed by B2C marketers are becoming increasingly applicable to B2B marketing.

We see brilliant examples of brands implementing B2Beautiful campaigns today and engaging communities even in functional, low-interest categories. Maersk, for instance, is humanizing logistics services by personifying its giant cargo ships and documenting their travels through stunning visual images on Instagram. Cisco’s award-winning documentary, The Network Effect, highlights telecom development stories, while companies such as Salesforce and The Mosaic Company have created engaging podcasts. The Mosaic Company’s podcast, “The Great Yield Mystery,” featured a dramatic audio play about two farmers trying to understand why their harvest came short — it even offered listeners clues to solve the mystery and win prizes.

These companies understand that brands are stories in and of themselves and every aspect of who they are — from their work culture, logistics, products and services, to how they think and operate behind the scenes — is essential to creating an effective B2Beautiful marketing strategy. Their strategies provide five crucial takeaways that marketers should keep in mind while creating B2Beautiful marketing, regardless of if you’re a startup or a large corporation.

1. Pinpoint Your Story

Use your mission and objectives to frame your values and use those components to create your story. Interestingly, The Harris Poll’s RQ survey also shows that there is a new market opportunity for B2B companies to take action on social issues. A new class of what we call “humanity brands” — companies that stand up for what they believe in and walk their talk. These brands are solving social ills, despite their political affiliation.

Successful B2Beautiful marketing, especially in the age of consumer activism, involves being able to identify issues that resonate with your brand and weave them into your story.

2. Weaponize Your Culture

A 2015 FORTUNE Knowledge Group report showed that corporate culture is incredibly important to building B2B relationships. Furthermore, 59% of executives surveyed rated knowing what a company stands for as more important when choosing a partner to work with, ranking higher than market dominance and innovation.

Depending on its mission, each company’s culture is unique. Once you know who you are and what you stand for as a company, you can then find engaging ways to share those convictions through the right media platforms. WeWork, for instance, uses its Instagram account to showcase their offices around the world, with photos of workers doing yoga or wearing stormtrooper helmets. They are motivating people around their motto to “make a life, not just a living.”

3. Don’t Be Constrained By Your Category

At its core, B2Beautiful marketing involves building emotional equity. Every story you set out to tell about your company should be crafted to evoke empathy. This is how you inspire B2B buyers, (who, by the way, are consumers just like you and me) to be emotionally invested in your brand.

Some of the most emotionally engaging and brilliant work is coming from a few of the lowest-interest categories. In fact, it’s there where the biggest white space is found.

4. Diversify Your Channels And Forms Of Content

As a 21st-century business, there are key owned-media platforms that are imperative for B2Beautiful marketing — a blog for brand storytelling, social media platforms (LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) and a newsletter. However, in addition to those channels, there are other platforms such as podcasts, videos, infographics and even gifs.

Work with creative partners to determine the right channels to use, depending on the stories you want to tell about the company, its products and services and core truths.

5. Ensure Your Strategy Is Buyer-Focused

We still are selling, after all, so be mindful of your target audience (B2B buyers) when you create your B2Beautiful marketing. What are their needs? Not just the tangible ones in terms of products or services, but also their values, triggers and unmet needs. What are their goals and how can you help them meet those goals?

Think about how your services amplify their missions, visions and values. Through your strategy, you can even educate buyers on ways to better connect with the end consumer and build substantial relationships that grow over time.

In the coming years, B2B marketing will, inevitably, continue to evolve in this direction. Therefore, it is important for marketers to adapt to these rules in order to differentiate their brands and remain attractive and relevant in the eyes of buyers.

By John Gerzema

CEO of The Harris Poll (Harris Insights & Analytics), a public opinion, corporate & brand reputation firm. NYT bestselling author.

Sourced from Forbes

In News

Social CRM: Top Three Business Benefits

June 22, 2018 No Comments

By Emma James

These days, it seems like an increasing number of people are using social media for one reason or another. Is your business taking the best advantage of social media to promote company products and services? No? Then, it’s time to take the best advantage of social media with the help of social customer relationship management tool.

Use social CRM tools for a better customer engagement, monitor and track the conversations of your customers’ and clients on social media platforms in real-time, respond quickly to customer complaints and queries, identify industry trends through real-time social monitoring, actively analyse the social media data to make well informed business decisions, as well as enhance your brand image.

Social CRM software is helpful for your business to provide personalized customer service in real-time as well as to improve customer loyalty. Moreover, the social CRM system fosters in developing strong customer relationships by enabling your business to track the right customer conversations in real-time on various social media platforms, as well as analyse what type of content your competitors are sharing on their social networking platforms.

Additionally, social media platforms offer several advantages to businesses of all sizes. Here are the top three business benefits of social CRM:

1. Builds Profitable Customer Relationships

Do you want your business to build a strong brand presence on social media? Do you want to reap maximum profits as well as high return on investments through social channels? Social CRM tool will help you reach all your business goals. It will enable you to reach a higher number of potential customers’ as well as to reap the maximum profits through effective tracking of clients, customers’, as well as your competitors’ social influences. By analysing the customers’ tastes and interest, the marketing team can produce relevant and engaging content, which can surely impress your customers’ and followers. Thus, the producing of highly impressive marketing content can enable your audience to instantly like your content, share it across their friends and family members on various social media channels, as well as the ability to foster healthy and profitable customer relationships.

2. Identify the Right Platforms

Obviously, it takes a lot of time and dedication to produce high-quality, engaging, and original content. However, if the produced content doesn’t reach the right social media channels; then all the hard work you put in generating the relevant content will go vanish. You can avoid this if you can invest your money in the right social CRM solution. It helps in identifying the right social media networking channel as per your business needs and requirements.

An appropriate social CRM tool will tell your company – which social channels are correct for your brand, where you can find the targeted audience, as well as at what time your potential audience groups are active on the social networking channels. All this information will help your business to produce the content on the right social channels and at the right time, which can aid in gaining more momentum on the various social platforms.

3. Boosts Your Business SEO Activities

Earlier, it was difficult for businesses to create the customer-centric content. However, with the help of social CRM software, businesses can easily analyse the digital footprints of customers’ as well as identify the targeted and potential audience groups. Using the solutions of social CRM software, businesses can have a comprehensive understanding of what their targeted audience is searching on social networking channels, their likes, and dislikes, as well as what type of content they are liking and sharing by analysing the type of keywords your customers’ are using to search for content on the various social platforms.

Using this information, businesses can create targeted, shareable, and engaging content that your followers and customers’ would find interesting. While generating the content, you can even add the specified keywords used by your audience so that they can easily find your business content in their relevant searches. If your generated content is truly engaging and valuable, then your customers’ will surely like and share the content across various social media channels, which can ultimately boost your website SEO. Moreover, if your content has a higher number of shares, likes, and comments it will send a positive signal to the Google that your content is highly impressive and original, which can enable your website to be top-ranked on the Google search engine results page.

So, what are you waiting for? Empower your business today with the right social CRM technology to grasp hold of the wonderful business opportunities present in the market today!

By Emma James

Sourced from Digital Doughnut

In News

Native Video study on open web highlights consumer shift

June 20, 2018 No Comments

By Dale Lovell

he power of video advertising may be well documented, but as consumer behaviour changes amid familiarity with video browsing on mobile devices, marketers who think the rules of engagement for digital video have already been written – and that there is a one size fits all approach – should think again.

The rise and effectiveness of native video on social media has been well researched to date. Engagement rates, reach, frequency and return on investment studies all show positive associations. But until now, there have been few studies showing the rise and performance of native video formats across the open web, specifically on premium publisher environments, where in-feed native video formats are becoming increasingly common.

We recently sought to fill that void through an analysis of more than 30 million in-feed video views run across our platform from January to April 2018. While we expected to be able to report findings on native video on the open web that were in line with the positive findings in social media, we didn’t expect that our findings would challenge the very notion of ‘what works’ in native video. But that’s precisely what happened.

Conventional wisdom in the video space, based on social data, has indicated that less is more when it comes to native video advertising, with many espousing that anything longer than 6 seconds in native video is simply too long. However, our findings would seem to contradict the perceived wisdom that mobile users have limited attention spans and are only interested in short video content.

According to our findings, smartphone users are more likely to spend time engaging with long-form video ads compared to 6-second ads when executed correctly. In fact, 72% of mobile users who have watched 6 seconds will continue to watch and engage with video up to 22 seconds. When native video reaches 15 to 22 seconds in length across premium publisher environments, mobile and tablet users that have watched this far are significantly more engaged than desktop users.

The evolution of our ‘mobile minds’

Perhaps it shouldn’t be all that surprising that people’s attention spans for native video seem to be growing longer. While the findings in our report represent the first of their kind in native video, there have been several studies undertaken around the attention of mobile phone users when it comes to reading. Over time, conclusions have shifted.

One study in 2010 found that reading on a mobile device was impaired when content was presented on a mobile-size screen versus a larger computer screen. But a similar study, undertaken six years later in 2016, showed different results. This study, conducted by the Nielsen Norman Group, concluded that there were no practical differences in the comprehension scores of participants, whether they were reading on a mobile device or a computer. In fact, the study found comprehension on mobile was about 3% higher than on a computer for content that was just over 400 words in length, and at an easier level to read.

Why the difference in results? It’s very possible that, over the period between 2010 and 2016 — the exact period during which smartphones became ubiquitous — we’ve all become more accustomed to reading on smaller screens. It’s reasonable to assume that the challenges the average person had reading on a small screen back in 2010 no longer apply now that people have adjusted to life on those smaller screens.

In a similar manner, it would appear that user behavior is changing around video consumption on mobile devices as well.

Well-held assumptions that less-is-more for video length and the broader worries about a crisis in user attention spans very well may prove to have been misplaced.

Creating compelling video content

As attention spans for native video lengthen, marketers would do well to reassess their best practices as it relates to creating content for mobile consumption. In particular, native video creators should think carefully about improving video performance during the key drop-off periods on a specific device.

For videos that will be consumed on mobile or tablet, videos should be edited to pack a punch in the first 6 seconds, in order to draw in users. The latest data suggests that the optimal length for native video content on mobile and tablet should be between 15 and 22 seconds. After 22 seconds, user interest does wane. If videos have to be longer, marketers should ensure that there are more-exciting sequences and enticing calls to action around 22 seconds, in order to maintain viewer interest up to 30 seconds.

If nothing else, these recent findings demonstrate that marketers must remain fluid in their understanding of how users engage with content on their devices. Behaviour is shifting, and yesterday’s best practices won’t necessarily apply tomorrow.

By Dale Lovell

Dale Lovell is co-founder of Adyoulike

Sourced from THE DRUM

In News

How to maintain a healthy B2B marketing budget

June 8, 2018 No Comments

By Ruth Connor

Back in the land of B2C marketing, I could build a water-tight business case for TV using insight from Think Box, present a strong argument for redeveloping my e-commerce process by pointing to indisputable benchmarking data, and get under the skin of my target customers using a bucket-load of comms planning tools.

Best of all, I could prove the impact of my efforts to senior management.

“Just look at those numbers! No, seriously. Look. At. Those. Numbers.”

Before long I was up for a fresh challenge, so I jumped ship and embraced the B2B world.

Things were, shall we say, different.

My tried and tested methods didn’t land in the same way.

And it got worse.

The finance director said the B2B marketing budget was discretionary.

And if that wasn’t enough, the sales team got all the credit for the revenue generated.

10 years down the line and again things are different – only this time in a good way. I still use insight and benchmarking to inform my marketing planning where I can – but I’ve learned other ways to convince the board of the importance of investing in B2B.

Fingers crossed you never hear the dreaded words: “The B2B budget is discretionary.”

But if you do, these seven tips will help you present the case that a healthy B2B budget is a must-have, not a nice-to-have.

Get closer to your business

Marketing shouldn’t be a silo. Get to know the various levers in your business – the things that influence the outcomes your business is trying to achieve.

For example, the marketing budget is an important lever as it influences how many leads are generated. The pricing of your product and the effectiveness of your sales team will influence conversions. While your customer relationship management will impact how long customers stay with you and how much they spend.

Understanding these levers will help shape your marketing strategy – and improve its effectiveness.

Know the magic number to ask for

It’s hard knowing what a realistic B2B marketing budget looks like, so it’s useful having some credible research in your back pocket. The CMO Survey Highlights and Insights Report 2017 from Deloitte, Duke University and the American Marketing Association found organisations spend, on average, 7.9% of their revenue on marketing and 11% of their total company budget. While according to the Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2017-2018, the number’s higher – organisations dedicate 11.3% of their overall revenue to marketing.

Understand buyer-behaviour trends – and make sure your spend mirrors them

Then you can justify exactly how you plan to spend your budget. Online is making its presence felt across every phase of the B2B buying journey – according to a study by Earnest and Imperial College London, it accounts for 49% and 58% respectively of the ‘research’ and ‘purchase’ stages.

No surprise, then, that we’re seeing an increase in digital marketing spend.

Check what you’re doing matters to people other than you

Do your metrics turn the heads of people outside of marketing? That stuff you’re tracking and reporting on – is it in sync with broader business goals and key performance indicators? Truth is, your board probably doesn’t care about the same things you do. So make sure your KPIs demonstrate your marketing is having an impact on the stuff they do care about.

Incorporate alternative measurement models

It may seem counter-intuitive, but it’s not all about directly attributing sales to your marketing activity. Assists matter too. If your content marketing strategy aligns with your customer journey, you can use your marketing automation platform to see how the buyer engaged with it in the lead-up to the deal.

Be proud of your results – you worked hard for them

Don’t hide your numbers away. Make a visually striking dashboard or scorecard that makes it really easy for your board to understand what you’ve achieved. And don’t forget to highlight where your marketing successes align with the wider business goals.

Use the lingo being used right now

More and more we’re seeing the marketing department being relabelled the ‘growth department’. Who knows, maybe next year we’ll be relabelled as a chief growth officer. Or head of growth.

But that’s OK, because marketers are good at growth. We grow brand engagement. We grow customer bases. We grow revenue.

So choose your words wisely because sometimes it pays to use the latest buzz word.

By Ruth Connor

Ruth Connor is head of marketing at Earnest

Sourced from THEDRUM

In News

B2B marketers can do more to unlock the potential of their brands

May 25, 2018 No Comments

By Tom Pepper

The team here at LinkedIn recently celebrated ‘B2B in focus’ week, a few days dedicated to unearthing the latest trends and innovations in B2B marketing.

One of the things that really struck a chord with me was a panel discussion we hosted with Kantar Millward Brown, BrandZ, Hill & Knowlton and a number of leading marketers – Dean Aragon of Shell, Judith Everett from The Crown Estate, Ryan Miles from Microsoft and Annabel Venner of Hiscox – which discussed how marketers can unlock the potential of B2B brands. There was certainly a consensus among the panel that the B2B buying journey is rapidly changing. And as a result, marketers need to work harder than ever to create opportunities for their brands.

I wanted to share three key things I took away from the panel, which I think bring this challenge to light and – when applied correctly – should help all B2B marketers take their brand to new heights.

Be more human

The growing group of decision makers playing a part in any B2B buying cycle contributes to it being longer, more complex and even more emotional than most B2C journeys.

One area where B2B marketers could borrow from their B2C cousins, though, is better understanding and tapping into the emotional drivers of decision making. It’s impossible to do this if you don’t humanise your customer first, though.

During the session, Aragon raised the point that for marketers operating in the B2B space, it’s all too easy to forget that buyers and decision makers are human. I challenge you to find someone who defines themselves as “just” a 24/7 fleet manager or procurement director.

With a better understanding of their customers, beyond simply their job title, B2B marketers can humanise their brand and content in ways which will more likely drive action. It’s no easy task in B2B, where the buying committee could be the size of a small village, but it was a great reminder for everyone in the room about where to start with campaigns.

Embed purpose in all that you do

Knowing how to communicate effectively with prospects and customers on a human level is only one part of the jigsaw. Humans are hardwired to buy into something as much as they want to buy something. It’s no different when it comes to the B2B world.

As much as selling a product, B2B marketers need to communicate the wider purpose of their business and use it to drive both awareness and conversions. That purpose needs to be more than just a pet project or the idea of growing a conscience. It needs to be lived and breathed by any organisation every day.

During the session, Venner made this point by explaining how Hiscox has a strong set of values that have successfully guided and defined the business and are consistently communicated through all that they do. In essence, Hiscox aims to be there when stuff goes wrong – to be there quickly, first and make everything right.

Not every business will always have a purpose that means something worthy; the important thing is having something to stand for. What was clear from the session was that this needs to start from the inside out, with employees, otherwise it won’t last and no one will believe it.

Break the structural silos

Engaging customers on a person-to-person level and communicating your purpose boils down to getting closer to them. Marketing teams need to break out of their own confines and better align with other parts of the organisation.

In the session the panelists talked about creating agile teams and the need for closer sales and marketing alignment. While it’s a challenge – especially within larger organisations – building nimble, forward-looking teams is also a massive opportunity.

As well as circumventing unnecessary hierarchies, it automatically means marketing activity is in tune with business priorities and sales targets, enabling a much faster decision making process.

On a more practical level, I have seen first hand how the most successful B2B sales and marketing organisations are those which integrate both types of engagement seamlessly throughout the consideration stage, delivering the right type of interaction that’s most relevant at any given moment. For example, thought leadership content from the marketing team has the potential to short-circuit the traditional buyer journey and lead directly to the award of the business.

For today’s B2B marketer, taking a broad brush approach and simply replicating the B2C buying experience is not an option. B2B marketers need to forge their own path, use technology to automate the process where they can but ensure they have purpose at the heart of their business and communicate it in a human way.

By Tom Pepper

Tom Pepper is head of LinkedIn Marketing Solutions UK

Sourced from THEDRUM

In News

Could the generation lost to the art of branding building be saved by the oldest medium in the world?

November 14, 2017 No Comments

By Guy Phillipson

For a medium that commands over 50% of total UK ad spend, online advertising is but a babe in the firmament of media.

At the age of just 22 – despite its many well-documented growing pains – digital media has become by far the biggest line item on marketers’ media plans, largely due to its targeting and accountability credentials.

Let’s compare and contrast with outdoor advertising – we’re talking the oldest medium in the world here. The ancient Egyptians used papyrus to make sales messages on wall posters; and political campaigns have even been found in the ruins of Pompeii. Wind forward to the 1790s and the invention of lithography was the launchpad for mass produced billboards, and by the 1860s the first outdoor advertising trading companies were formed.

Unlike the rest of the print sector today, outdoor advertising revenue has been unaffected by the unrelenting rise of online advertising. In fact, it’s going through a digital renaissance which I believe will spur healthy growth in the sector, and put a shot in the arm of classic brand advertising, which has undoubtedly suffered at the hands of online performance media.

There are two key reasons for the current decline in brand advertising

The first dates back to the recession. In 2009 – when a whopping £2bn was wiped off the nation’s collective media plans – search advertising was the only format to grow (by 9% if my memory serves me correctly). Every scrap of spend came under the FD’s microscope, and while traditional display media suffered double-digit cuts, the easily trackable ROI from search powered its stellar growth to command the £5bn is does today.

The second major reason is generational. Media planners are nearly all millennials (at iCrossing the average age is 31), and they live and breathe mobile and social media. So with increased sales and measurable results at the centre of every client brief, the candy of online performance marketing increasingly trumps the classic branding approach.

The question is, have these two dynamics combined to create a whole generation lost to the art of brand building?

Back in 1986, at the age of 26, I became the assistant advertising manager at (now long gone) Visionhire. In those days, dear readers, half the living room tellies and nearly all the VCRs were rented. I’d read ‘Ogilvy on Advertising’, which extolled the virtues of brand and response techniques, then largely confined to coupons in the press, nascent direct marketing and promotion at point of sale – all known as ‘below the line’ techniques. All the big money went ‘above the line’, which offered two commercial TV channels, a huge audience for the press, plus some radio and outdoor. Media fragmentation wasn’t a thing in those days. Hence the long, boozy agency lunches.

But we learnt to totally respect the branding cycle – how long it took to plan, produce and execute a campaign. And how long it would take to build awareness, consideration and purchase intent; usually several months, which was also the typical timescale for the squeaky-bum presentation from Millward Brown who delivered our Awareness Index (AI) scores on the doors, against direct competitors.

Digital Out Of Home will inspire today’s young planners

Being ever the optimist, I don’t truly believe the wonderful art and science of brand building will be lost on today’s millennial marketers and media planners. I happen to believe that the oldest medium – now reborn as Digital Out Of Home (DOOH) will be a catalyst for growth in brand advertising, offering many of the accountable attributes of online display media and hardly any of the current brand safety and ad verification challenges.

Here I’d like to congratulate JCDecaux, who filled the Hansom Hall at St Pancras for their impressive Digital UpFronts presentation this month. First off – credit to JCD for repositioning their brand alongside the big pureplays and setting out their DOOH stall for the buyers, now that it accounts for nearly half of all outdoor revenue. And it’s growing at +30%.

The story is compelling.

98% of the population sees an out of home ad each week, and for millennials it’s easily number one for reach and time spent, according to IPA Touchpoints. As a subset, DOOH offers 49% UK reach with 1.3bn weekly viewed impressions.

That little word ‘viewed’ is music to the marketer’s ears. Digital outdoor is brand safe, there’s no ad fraud, and there’s no such thing as a non-viewable impression. And, they say, 99.5% of those impressions are generated by just four different aspect ratios, all offering video and animation in nice, large formats.

But the kids want programmatic! Step forward the JCDecaux SmartBRICS self-serve planning and buying platform which currently caters for half of the UK’s DOOH estate. Planners can set parameters down to street and frame level, complete with day-parts, numbers of impressions and ratings. They can even ad rules connected to the weather, or deliver moderated tweets as part of the creative. And post campaign, your viewed impressions report is independently verified by PwC.

Now if the delights of DOOH don’t reignite the branding buds of today’s marketers and planners, I’ll eat my best socks. It’s certainly inspired iCrossing’s media strategist, Lauretta Wood who seeks programmatic perfection by joining outdoor with mobile. Growth over the next few years is easy to predict, and the prospect of high visibility, high reach, location-based video ads is surely a no brainer for the contemporary advertiser.

Just imagine the enhanced effect when you sprinkle a bit of mobile and data over the creative for the perfect match between the oldest and the newest media? We’ll see more high profile award winners like the BA #Lookup campaign at Piccadilly Circus.

Then the generation lost to planet brand will surely come back in in to land.

By Guy Phillipson

Guy Phillipson is the chairman of iCrossing UK and the former CEO of the Internet Advertising Bureau UK.

Sourced from THEDRUM

In News

The future of media agencies

October 25, 2017 No Comments

By Sam Garrity

Media agencies are facing the greatest level of disruption in our vertical we have ever seen.

I mean bigger than when we decoupled creative agencies from media buying agencies, when we were back in the day when everything was full-service, and bigger than the event of digital advertising and digital media in itself.

That moment when agencies like us were born, with new capabilities that the market did not have. This is bigger than that, because it’s fundamentally about the root-to-branch adoption of digital technology, and changes within the media landscape that affect the entire advertising and publishing supply chain.

How digital adoption effects the advertising and publishing chain

From a media owner perspective – and I’m not just talking publisher here, I’m talking about television, outdoor, radio – there are pressures upon these media owners right now to trade their inventory in a different way. That means changes to their technology, changes to their actual business plan, the way that they run their company.

Advertisers, thinking about them as businesses, they’re the driving force behind these changes that I want to talk about. They are going through transformational changes, which mean that they need a different type of agency today, right now. These pressures, either side of us from businesses, brands, advertisers and on the media/owner side, it’s meaning that a new type of agency needs to evolve right now. At an individual level, that sets a challenge for all of us in terms of the type of marketer we are going to need to become.

Where this is already happening

These are tectonic changes I’m talking about, and if you keep your eyes open, it’s happening right in front of you, in the headlines of our trade press, every single day.

Accenture, in terms of digital, have historically been involved in the big transformational discussions with the C-suite. They have now purchased businesses like The Monkeys and Karmarama. These businesses now, they are big players across the entire advertising supply chain, and within digital transformation. They are in our world. Huge networks, like Dentsu Aegis, have purchased Merkle. The agency landscape is completely changing.

The catalysts behind this movement

Buying people in real time

Firstly, this is about the personalisation of media. It’s about the fact that now, through technology, through digital advertising, we’re interested in buying people in real time for advertisers. We don’t want to buy a huge, expensive television slot with dramatic amounts of wastage. We want to buy people in real time, based upon data that we know about them.

The necessity of digital transformation

Digital, and specifically technological changes, is placing a transformational necessity upon companies globally. It’s about the experience they provide to consumers. Think about it; where do you set the bar?

How should we execute media buying in the future?

Let’s have a quick look at how we might execute media buying looking forwards. To some extent, this is in play right now. From a data perspective, you have things like analytics, CRM, first- and third-party data, all being fed into something like a data management platform, where we segment an audience based upon their propensity to do business with an advertiser, which we then feed into our ad tech, and we purchase media.

I’m talking about buying people in real time. We can now buy TV. We, as a business, as an agency, we’ve purchased radio, using data. These doors are opening for us, as an agency, and for advertisers. And this is what it’s going to look like. We’ll be trading across the entire piece, in real time. This is a data-activated, omni-channel buying machine. It’s about an experience. You want to be plumbing in personalised creative into all this. This is about a digital experience, that we would execute on behalf of an advertiser.

What type of marketers do we need to be?

This new world that we’re talking about, where transformation is taking place, and where there is a need for a new type of media and creative agency, it’s causing debate at the minute within our industry, about what type of marketer do we need to be?

Some people are saying, we need to be left-brained. Left-brained, think probably historically Accenture, mathematics.

Some people believe we need to be right-brained, which is creative. It’s the realm of traditional marketing. That is intuition, right-brain, but I’m with my counterpart at Accenture Interactive, who believes we need to be whole-brained marketers. The whole-brained marketer needs to exist within a framework like this, where analytics, CRM, media buying and creative augment a central pillar of activity, which is based around the transformational element, the strategy and, obviously comms. It has data at its core, and it also concerns itself perpetually with every single output around customer experience. That must sit at the very core of any organisational structure.

What my message is really about, and what I want to kind of get home to you all is that we will not be digital marketing agencies in the very near future. I don’t believe we’ll even be a marketing or a media agency in the very near future. I think we are now in the business of providing a customer experience. The quicker our industry orientates itself around that central theme, I think the quicker we’re going to mirror the type of value that our clients so desperately need, as they themselves transform