Digital Marketing Archives - Page 14 of 18

In News

How to Get Payback from Instagram?

April 11, 2018 No Comments

Choosing Instagram for business provides huge opportunities to reach 700 million potential followers who can positively impact your business fortune. Yes, the number of Instagram users crossed the 700 million mark almost a year ago. The most positive aspect of Instagram is the outlook of Instagrammers towards business. They are eager and ready to engage with it both within the app and beyond.

The business friendliness of the social media platform becomes evident from the fact that numerous business brands enjoy the interaction with 120 million users on the platform. This is great news for SEO because all Instagram business accounts carry links to the business websites that enjoy the patronage of the Instagram traffic. It thus becomes clear that Instagram can reinforce your SEO campaign and make it more effective. That 80 percent Instagram users track (follow) at least one business is the reason that more and more businesses are turning to Instagram as the chosen social media platform.

Connect with real people

Since followers are at the core of your Instagram performance, it is natural that people often go into overdrive to expand their fan base. While you can buy Instagram views that can prop up your business albeit artificially, garnering the attention of viewers organically would ensure that you interact with real people only. Unless you have meaningful interaction with real people, you can never derive the real gains for business. Only when people take an interest in your niche, build a relationship with you and engage with your content that you can develop a band of loyal followers that no bots can match.

For succeeding with Instagram, you must know your target audience and have the means of connecting with them. You must create powerful content that provides a meaningful way of building followers comprising of real people who can contribute to better business results. What you should do to develop real followers that can pay back to your business would become clear on going through the remaining part of this article.

Have a sound strategy for Instagram

To ensure that you can justify the returns on investment, you must have a good plan for using Instagram as a marketing platform. Be clear about what you want to achieve by using the platform, mostly it could be for boosting SEO so that you can devise suitable strategies for implementing the plan. It would point out the audience that you must target to fulfill your business goals.

Know what competitors are doing

By researching on what your competitors are doing, you could know what kind of realistic following you should expect. It would also help to know what kind of content would work for you, the frequency of posting content, what are the key industry hashtags including branded hashtags and more. You would also gain insight into how other businesses interact and engage with the audience that you are trying to reach.

Set goals

Set goals to achieve because it forms the foundation of the Instagram strategy. Consider your overall business and marketing strategy to get leads about how you must frame your Instagram strategy that aligns with the business goals. Whether you want to drive more traffic to websites, build brands or support the SEO and marketing campaign, the platform can support you well.

Give a purpose to your content

Create a compelling story that you can tell by using images that would give a purpose to the content and make it interesting. When there is a purpose behind the content, it creates engagement among the audience you target and would lead to sharing of content that opens the doors for would-be followers. You can share some inside information about your products, uphold how others perceive the brand or present the brand by showing how it has received the wholehearted acceptance of customers.

Engage in cross promotion

Since the purpose of taking your business on Instagram is to acquire high visibility that leads to increased followers, an easy way of doing it is to propagate your Instagram content and account on other social media channels through cross promotion. As you are likely to have business accounts on other social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc. you must make those fans aware of your Instagram account. By mentioning your Instagram account on other social media platforms and by incentivizing them to visit your Instagram account, you can drive more followers to your account. You can even publish your Instagram posts on other channels.

Hashtags must be relevant

The hashtags have to be relevant to the industry niche or your business so that potential followers who are keen to engage with photos and content relevant to your business would be able to discover you. This would lead to the enrichment of the follower base. When creating hashtags make sure that you infuse enough originality into it that makes it exclusive for your business. Indeed, you must take a cue from popular hashtags by using the search function of Instagram, but you must add your creativity to it. However, you must avoid the lure of going overboard to create hashtags that can be quite weird. Also, avoid using gimmicks in hashtags that might momentarily seem profitable but would keep you away from engaging with real people meaningfully.

Drive people to your Instagram account from all channels of communication

You must not lose any opportunity to showcase your Instagram account and must use all communication tools at your disposal to drive more traffic to Instagram. Spread the Instagram links on all social media platforms and website as well as in online newsletters and e-mail signature so that whenever people visit those places, they know about your Instagram account. Since these people already know you, they would not hesitate to visit your Instagram account. Even providing Instagram links or hashtags in blog posts would further expand the horizon of followers that originate from the blogs.

How much advantage you get from Instagram depends on your capabilities of using the platform correctly.

By Walter Moore

Sourced from iamWIRE

In News

10 Trends That Will Reshape Digital Marketing in 2018 and Beyond

April 10, 2018 No Comments

By Charulata Ravi Kumar.

AI will play a critical and ever increasing role in 2018 and beyond and marketers must invest and ride these trends effectively

Today, digital trends seem to be fashionably altering too rapidly to keep pace with. What’s not keeping up is an organization’s agility to adapt. Social platforms have made it imperative for marketers to be the first or be scrolled out and in the fusillade of messaging, a consumer trolls down any that is not unique or irrelevant.

10 important trends will define the marketing framework of organizations. Five of which are in the organization process framework and five are emerging trends driven by consumer preferences. To be able to ride this hyper-wave, we need to ask ourselves a few questions… everyday!

Transforming a legacy organization to a dynamic one requires a fundamental change in thinking, structure and process evolutions. The more visionary ones that lead the way will be the change makers, large or small in size irrespective.

Five Organizational Trends That Will Impact Digital Marketing Frameworks

Structure on Demand – Legacy organization structures are a bane to its agility. Unless the entire internal eco-system is networked to remove all hurdles and expedite the process from idea to end delivery and service management, the threat of getting disrupted hangs sword on its head. Organizations will be forced to create “structure on demand” teams that emerge and dissolve to needs without the baggage of the old-fashioned matrix reporting hierarchies. Marketing will no longer be the sole ownership of the marketers but will be split into specialized parts being led by experts.

Leader on Demand – A ‘Structure on Demand’ will also require ‘Leaders on Demand’. Leadership too will become more project based than a fixed organization structure based since solutions at any point in time will require a very different set of leadership skills suited to a particular project. The concept of a universal leadership will loose its appeal in the coming years and we are beginning to see this trend in the more progressive marketing organizations.

New Marketing Roles – With the core of marketing shifting from brand-centricity to unique Customer Experience (CX) creation, traditional designations of digital marketing and channel marketing etc will start to disappear. Marketing teams will be led by CX Managers, Omnichannel Managers, Content Marketers & Design Managers. Digital by itself will no longer be a role as it become ubiquitous in the organisation.

The Marketing FlexiForce: The future will be run by young professionals, especially in fast changing markets like India. And these young bees choose flexibility and freedom over fixed pay and formula. Ubiquitous digital makes remote talent leverage possible and allows for speed of innovation and delivery making marketing super agile. Transcending time zones keeps the engine running 24×7, a new expectation that customers are demanding.

Automated Marketing – Automation in marketing platforms and programmatic deliveries will also be complemented with automated CRM processes relieving organizations of its dependence on human timelines and errors. Visionary organizations are building strong capabilities in automating the infrastructure for production and logistics to support this speed-need of marketing teams. Stronger inter-dependencies will be established between departments forcing co-marketing KPIs across functions.

Five Trends That Will Reshape Digital Marketing and the Brand-Customer Equation

No two global markets are in the same level of digital maturity and so reflect trends unique to each. However, they do converge at some level on customer choices of the 3 Vs – video, voice and visual. This is of particular significance in lower literacy geographies and multi-lingual needs that drive new trends in search and social platforms.

Mobile Video on Demand (VoD)

VoD is now a no-brainer. Over a billion hours of video consumption daily by Youtube viewers, over 8 billion videos by Facebookers and with equally staggering numbers on Twitter and Snapchat, it is no surprise that over 87% of online marketers use video content. But the next wave of VoD will be the increase of what I call “RFC Content” I.e. Relevant, Forwardable & Commercializable Content. Much of what we see is a churn out of the old advertising style with tear-shedding emotional messages. The rise of this medium will be in geometric proportions. Especially in the inner markets, over-riding language and literacy barriers propelled by increase in mobile connections will see a rise in Product and Conversational Content; and Commerce embedded social content taking over.

Voice as the Primary Tool for Search and Social Media

Perhaps not fully leveraged all through 2018, but this will clearly become a growing trend in the near future. Human lethargy to type as well as lower literacy levels in inner markets will catalyze this shift. Marketers will be wiser to create voice based interactive modules that can engage users better than verbose text to provide information. So better fine tune that voice of yours as you begin to leave voice-prints all over the net!

Visual Search Over Text

Image search, together with voice search, will ease the tedious task and errors of type search. The Power of Google Lens and its immense application potential will open up great possibilities in sectors such as Travel, Healthcare, Education, Fashion to name a few. Marketers must collaborate with leaders in visual search tools to leverage this for their brands early and even participate in its Beta stage.

Augmented and Interactive Video Group Chats

Still in its nascent stage, this trend will be a definite enhancement of chat platforms that are currently very text restrictive. And as voice and video grow in search and social use, this natural extension will bring like-minded social groups closer together and creating stronger but closed peer to peer influence groups. Marketers will need to create data access points to weave into these micro group chats and use extensive AI to leverage conversations to their advantage.

Customer Becomes the New Big Influencer

Already a trend in the West, the trend of customer-certified products will rise and brand claims will lose relevance on hard sell promotions. Social influencers are already impacting purchase decision amongst the netizens and the credibility they bring steadily peels off the delusive claims of celebrity endorsers. And now, customer influencers are beginning to add a whole new dimension of post purchase review authenticity. Organizations must work on managing long term customer relations to ensure these brand ambassadors are active throughout their product use journey.

AI will play a critical and ever increasing role in 2018 and beyond and marketers must invest and ride these trends effectively. Simply embedding the features to their digital assets will yield little result and ROIs will be under the scanner. Marketers are getting overly swayed by content storytelling. That’s great for a few awards if it tugs at the heart but smart digital presence has to bear concrete business results and marketers who seamlessly integrate the organizational fluidity with agile innovative customer solutions will wear the crown and hold the shield with pride.

Feature Image credit: Shutterstock

By Charulata Ravi Kumar

Director of Digital Marketing at SP Jain School of Global Management

Sourced from Entrepreneur

In News

Digital Marketers Will Devote More Resources to Online Reputation Management in 2018

March 28, 2018 No Comments

Online reputation management is very necessary all of a sudden.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Businesses say they plan to allocate more resources to their online reputations in response to the growing popularity of social media and online reviews.

According to a new survey from Clutch, 40% of businesses will increase their investment in online reputation management (ORM) this year.

All this is due to the growing power of social media and third-party reviews sites, which impact businesses’ control over their online reputation.

Clutch surveyed 224 digital marketers and found that more than half of businesses (54%) consider ORM “very necessary” for success. As a result, 34% said they allocated more resources to ORM in 2018, and an additional 43% said they plan to hire a professional public relations or ORM agency in 2018.

Businesses already invest a significant amount of time observing their online reputation, Clutch found. More than 40% of digital marketers (42%) monitor their companies’ brand online daily, while 21% monitor their online reputation hourly.

According to public relations experts, businesses frequently monitor how their brand is portrayed online because they know even one negative media mention can quickly damage the public’s perception of their company.

“When people search for brands online, they tend to search for stamps of credibility,” explained Simon Wadsworth, managing partner at Igniyte, an online reputation management agency in the UK. “If potential customers find anything negative, that could end up being a significant amount of leads the business won’t get from people who are put off from using the service.”

Social media also has shifted the ORM landscape because it gives consumers free-reign to share their opinions and experiences quickly and frequently: 46% of businesses look to social media most often to monitor their online reputation.

By using professional agencies that have expertise in online reputation management, businesses can minimise losing new customers who may be dissuaded from purchasing their product or service.

To read the complete report, click here.

Do you supply services to the Irish Media Industry? Have you listed your company in our Media Directory? It’s free! Everyone’s favourite price! Click here to do it now.

In News

Getting People to Focus on your Product Will Make Them Desire It More

March 27, 2018 No Comments

Here’s why you need to get your advertising to zoom in.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

The relationship between desire and attention was long thought to only work in one direction: When a person desires something, they focus their attention on it.

Now, new research reveals this relationship works the other way, too. Increasing a person’s focus on a desirable object makes them want the object even more – a finding with important implications for marketers seeking to influence behaviour.

The study, published in the journal Motivation and Emotion, is the first to demonstrate a two-way relationship.

“People will block out distraction and narrow their attention on something they want,” said Anne Kotynski, author of the study. “Now we know this works in the opposite direction, too.”

In marketing, advertisements with a hyper focus on a product’s desirable aspect – say zooming in on the texture of icing and frosting – might help sell a certain brand of cake.

Findings suggest the ad could be targeted to people who have shown an interest in a similar product, such as running the cake commercial during a baking show.

This finding also works in other areas outside advertising too. For example, doctors could potentially help their patients develop a stronger focus on healthy activities that they may desire but otherwise resist, such as exercising or eating a balanced diet.

The study’s findings also add a wrinkle to knowledge of focus and emotion. According to a spate of previous research, positive emotions, such as happiness and joy, widen a person’s attention span, while negative emotions such as disgust and fear, do the opposite: narrowing a person’s focus.

“We conceptualise fear as drastically different from desire,” Kotynski said. “But our findings contribute to growing evidence that these different emotions have something key in common: They both narrow our focus in similar ways.”

The findings also fit the notion that both of these emotions – fear (negative) and desire (positive) – are associated with evolutionarily pursuits that narrowed our ancestors’ attentions.

For example, fear of predators motivated attention focused on an escape route, while an urge to mate motivated focus on a sexual partner.

“If a person has a strong desire, research says this positive emotion would make them have a wide attention span,” Kotynski said. “Our research shows we developed a more beneficial behaviour around desire: focusing our mental energy on the important object, much like fear would.”

The study

Study participants were shown images of desserts mixed in with mundane items. They were instructed to pull a joystick toward them if the image was tilted one direction and push the stick away if it was tilted the opposite direction. Researchers recorded the reaction time of each.

Participants who responded fastest to pull the images of desserts were those whose attention had been narrowed. Responses were much slower to the mundane, and for participants whose attention was broad, suggesting narrowed attention increases desire for desserts but not for everyday objects.

The study used dessert pictures to measure reaction time because such images have been shown to increase desire across individuals, most likely due to a motivation to seek high fat, high calorie foods that is rooted in evolution.

There you go people. If people love cars and you can get them to focus on the car you are hawking, you’ll have a better chance of converting that to a sale. May the ROI forever be in your favour.

Do you supply services to the Irish Media Industry? Have you listed your company in our Media Directory? It’s free! Everyone’s favourite price! Click here to do it now.

In News

Women-Owned Small Businesses More Likely to Use Social Media

March 23, 2018 No Comments

Women-owned businesses are most likely to use social media. Men! What y’all doing?

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

A woman-owned small business is more likely to use social media, according to a new survey from Clutch, a leading B2B research and reviews firm.

Among women-owned businesses, 74% use social media, compared to 66% of men-owned businesses.

The findings came as no surprise to experts, who said women overall are more likely to use social media. Given that trend, female small business owners more easily can bring their business onto social media.

“Women are generally better conversationalists than men,” said Jeff Gibbard, chief social strategist at digital agency I’m From the Future. “They tend to be more expressive and more emotive. It’s no surprise to me why more women business owners use social media.”

Women often communicate better than men, which translates to the online world where they are more likely to use social media effectively.

Millennial-Owned Small Businesses Lead Social Media Use

There is also a generational divide among small businesses’ social media use. The survey finds that 79% of millennial-owned small businesses use social media compared to 65% of small businesses owned by older generations.

Millennials, like women in general, frequently use social media for their personal lives. Their social media skills easily carry over into their businesses – unlike older generations, experts say.

“The older people didn’t grow up with social media, so many don’t understand how to use it for their business,” said Shawn Alain, president of social media agency Viral in Nature. “They went through a significant part of their life without even the internet, and they remember what it was like not to have a smartphone or email.”

Millennials are also more likely to use Instagram and Snapchat than older generations, but Generation Xers and Baby Boomers are more likely to use LinkedIn.

Most Small Businesses Use Facebook

Facebook remains the most popular social media channel for small businesses, no matter the gender or generation of the owner – 86% say they use it, which is nearly twice the number of small businesses that use the second-place channel, Instagram (48%).

Among small business users of social media, 12% say they use Facebook exclusively for their social media efforts.

Overall, 71% of small businesses use social media, and more than half (52%) share content at least once per day. Images and infographics (54%) are the most popular content types that businesses post to social media.

Read the full report here.

Do you supply services to the Irish Media Industry? Have you listed your company in our Media Directory? It’s free! Everyone’s favourite price! Click here to do it now.

In News

Facebook’s Trust Crisis: What Now?

March 22, 2018 No Comments

Less than 1 in 3 people call Facebook a responsible company, according to a new survey.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Barraged by accusations of spreading divisive fake news and amid new allegations that it handed over personal information on up to 50 million users without their consent, Facebook is losing the faith of the people, according to a new survey.

Almost 4 out of 10 people surveyed said: “Facebook is not a responsible company because it puts making profits most of the time ahead of trying to do the right thing.” Less than 1 in 3 said that Facebook is a “responsible company because it tries to do the right thing most of the time even if that gets in the way of it making profits.” The rest were unsure.

By a 7-1 ratio people surveyed said that Facebook has had a negative influence on political discourse. Sixty-one percent said that “Facebook has damaged American politics and made it more negative by enabling manipulation and falsehoods that polarize people.”

The survey was conducted as new revelations surfaced that the company connected to the 2016 Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, inappropriately harvested personal information on millions of Facebook users.

The sharp rise in negative feelings is a significant departure from Facebook’s standing prior to the 2016 election, when the rise of so-called Fake News and polarizing content led to calls for the company to take greater responsibility for the content on the popular social media site – or face government regulation.

By a 2-1 margin, people surveyed said it’s Facebook’s responsibility to remove or warn about posts that contain false or misleading information. And 59 percent reported that the company is not doing enough to address the issues of false and inflammatory information that appear on its site.

“Facebook is at a crossroads because of its inability – nearly a year-and-a-half after the election – to get a handle on its divisive effects on society,” said Tom Galvin, Executive Director of Digital Citizens, who commissioned the survey. “From spreading fake and manipulative information to becoming a ‘Dark Web-like’ place for illicit commerce, Facebook seems to losing the trust of the American public. Regulation will not be far behind for social media companies if things don’t change.”

This declining trust reflects a growing concern about the impact Facebook and other social media sites have on young teens. In the survey, more than two in five people surveyed said that the minimum age to have a Facebook account should be at least 18 years old.

“Digital platforms have to rise to the occasion and assure internet users that their personal information will be safe, that the content will be legal, safe and not contrived to manipulate. In short, they have to demonstrate they will be the positive influence on our society that they espouse to be,” said Galvin.

Do you supply services to the Irish Media Industry? Have you listed your company in our Media Directory? It’s free! Everyone’s favourite price! Click here to do it now.

In News

Netflix Shows Are Entertaining Enough, But It’s the Digital Marketing That’s Masterful

March 22, 2018 No Comments

By John Boitnott

Effective digital marketing has more to do with creative strategies focused on the individual customer than it does with big budgets and advanced technology.

In five years, the share of households with a Netflix subscription has increased 92 percent. Today the majority of households in the United States subscribe to Netflix, and that number is slated to rise this year.

Why is this happening? The product is designed so well that you and I have been sucked into shows, only to emerge from our homes days later. The creative team is skilled at creating programs that receive both popular and critical praise.

But Netflix doesn’t just produce good shows, it also knows how to use advanced digital marketing techniques to acquire new customers and retain existing ones. Let’s talk about a few of the digital marketing principles that make Netflix so successful. Follow them and you may just see similar results.

Personalized content is the best kind.

What sets Netflix apart from other streaming services? Amazon, HBO and Vudu all have access to thousands of television shows and movies. They offer intuitive user interfaces, and they are available across devices. Yet Netflix is uniquely situated to dominate the streaming video revolution thanks to the company’s obsessive approach to content personalization.

My Netflix homepage looks entirely different from yours. This is thanks to the power of proprietary algorithms that predict what kind of content you’ll enjoy, and hide the rest. On Amazon Prime Video, I can’t even find the last thing I viewed there easily. Netflix has them beat here.

You might be thinking that content personalization is only available to companies like Netflix that have the capital to employ hundreds of the world’s smartest engineers. But entrepreneurs can also tap into content personalization in a few different ways.

Tools like Optimizely and Adobe Experience Cloud let you to personalize content based on a variety of data points like the country associated with an IP address, or whether or not a visitor is already a lead in a CRM. Based on this information, marketers can choose to display different website experiences in order to better serve the interests of a particular visitor.

As an alternative to third-party software platforms, marketers can always “fake” personalization with a little elbow grease. By building behavior based email workflows, marketers can ask email recipients to click various links depending on their interest. Once their interest is registered, the rest of the email workflow can be based on the interests articulated by recipients.

Takeaway:

Remember, personalization isn’t about relying on advanced algorithms. Instead, it’s about identifying and providing the kind of experience the prospect, customer or visitor is most interested in having.

Multi-channel campaigns are key to getting your message out.

Netflix is available on seemingly every device. From computers to smart televisions, users can access Netflix wherever and whenever they want. Marketers at Netflix take a similar approach to promotion.

To hype season two of the company’s hit show Stranger Things, Netflix teamed up with Snapchat to release an augmented reality experience. At the same time, Netflix used Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and email marketing to promote the upcoming season.

Takeaway:

Multi-channel marketing isn’t about spending big bucks on advertising stunts. It’s about creating marketing campaigns that meet members of the target audience wherever they “live.” In the case of Stranger Things viewers, Netflix knew that their target audience would spend hours on social platforms, so they developed a strategy accordingly.

Simple is powerful in a complex world.

We live in complicated and noisy times. As a result, the average person has an attention span of just eight seconds, according to the New York Times. Netflix chooses to keep things simple when creating a mission statement or designing a user interface.

The company’s investor relations page says, “We are a relief from the complexity and frustration that embody most MVPD relationships with their customers. We strive to be extremely straightforward.”

It’s no surprise then that for non-customers, the Netflix homepage is so simple it’s sparse. It takes just two scrolls to reach the bottom of the page, and features two messages: “watch anywhere” and “cancel anytime.”

Takeaway:

Use simplicity as a differentiating factor, and make it easy for members of the target audience to understand what you do and how you can help them. Ensure that this approach translates to marketing material, product experience and customer service.

Email marketing is still a key component to customer onboarding.

Despite claims to the contrary, email marketing is not dead. In fact, it’s used by Netflix as a key component of customer onboarding and nurturing.

New Netflix customers receive a series of emails that make content recommendations and encourage new users to explore the platform. This is a way of driving platform adoption, which improves customer retention in the long run.

Long time customers also receive periodic emails from Netflix. To promote the release of a new show called The Punisher, Netflix sent customers a marketing email that appeared to be spam at first glance. But once opened, the email played a GIF that slowly redacted information until a button at the bottom appeared, encouraging subscribers to watch the new show.

Takeaway:

Email marketing is not dead; unimaginative email marketing is. Netflix marketers invest hours in building creative email marketing campaigns designed to engage and delight recipients. You don’t need sophisticated tech to engage people in your database. You just need to understand the target audience, and apply some imagination to email marketing.

Netflix is successful thanks to a focus on understanding target audiences. Once that happens, marketers launch creative cross-platform campaigns that deliver simple and clear value propositions.

Remember that success in digital marketing isn’t a result of big budgets and advanced technology. It comes from creative and customer-centric strategies.

Feature Image Credit: Jonathan Nackstrand | Getty Images

By John Boitnott

Journalist, Digital Media Consultant and Investor

Sourced from Entrepreneur

In News

How to Win at Marketing Using a Hashtag

March 21, 2018 No Comments

A travel company has managed to stir up a lot of viral traffic with their hashtag. Watch and learn, people.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

What do a dream wedding in New York, an adventure through the mountains of Sri Lanka and a family’s search for their roots in Scotland all have in common? All saw a hospitality professional going out of their way to make or save someone’s trip. And a holiday booking company use this mushy sequence of events with a hashtag to fire up social media views and get a great repsonse from them.

Booking.com call themselves the global leader in connecting travellers with the widest choice of incredible places to stay. Established in 1996 in Amsterdam, Booking.com B.V. has grown from a small Dutch start-up to one of the largest travel e-commerce companies in the world. Part of The Priceline Group (NASDAQ: BKNG), Booking.com now employs more than 17,000 employees in 198 offices in 70 countries worldwide.

So, what are they doing with their social media marketing? They are riding hastags like a showjumper would a prize horse.

They have had some great success with their recent hashtag #BookingHero. They asked people to share their travel stories using the hashtag. The best story won travel prizes and big kudos online.

Following thousands of submissions via social media, Booking.com selected the three most touching and inspiring accounts of hospitality professionals going above and beyond to create unique and unforgettable travel experiences for their guests.

The customers were then flown back to say thank you to the person who saved their trips. Here are the stories.

The point isn’t the stories though. The point is that real people’s journeys made the hashtag come alive and generate traffic for booking.com. In fact, the call out for submissions via social media has been so successsful that Booking.com is now using the hashtag to extend the social media campaign with long-form video content that extends the #BookingHero message, with TV to follow.

According to recent research conducted by Booking.com across 25 markets in 2017, a personal connection is essential for many travellers with 29% saying that an accommodation feeling like home is key and 24% sharing that a welcoming host is a make or break factor during the first 24 hours of their trip.

Said Pepijn Rijvers, Chief Marketing Officer, Booking.com. “These stories beautifully demonstrate that an amazing trip is about more than simply finding the right destination or the perfect accommodation– it’s also about the people you meet along the way which truly make for an unforgettable journey. And that’s what travel is all about.”

And for the company, it is about finding the right hashtag and getting it to go viral.

Do you supply services to the Irish Media Industry? Have you listed your company in our Media Directory? It’s free! Everyone’s favourite price! Click here to do it now.

In News

Uh-Oh. How Do We Mobile-Advertise to Gen-Z When They Don’t Like Their Phones That Much?

March 20, 2018 No Comments

Gen Z use their phones a lot, but are relieved when they are taken away. So how do marketers reach this age group if they have a love/hate relationship with their smartphones?

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Members of Generation Z are relieved when placed in a situation where they are unable to access their smartphones for several weeks. This is according to a new study conducted by Screen Education, a non-profit organisation that addresses smartphone addiction.

The study involved participants aged from 12 to 16, who spent 2-4 weeks at Camp Livingston during the summer of 2017. Because Camp Livingston does not permit its campers to bring smartphones with them, they are an ideal group for conducting research about refraining from smartphone use.

According to Michael Mercier, President of Screen Education, “Many children said they have become overwhelmed by their smartphones. They no longer can keep up with all their notifications, and they are burdened by the ‘drama’ they encounter through social media via their smartphones. Consequently, they were relieved to be separated from their smartphones because it eliminated that stress.”

This relief was reflected in a survey conducted with the campers after they had returned home. The campers were asked the extent to which they experienced feelings of gladness and frustration from being without their phones. “A large number − 92% − experienced gladness, while only 41% felt any frustration. We had expected the opposite,” said Mercier.

When asked what their experience would have been like if they had been allowed to bring their phones to camp, campers revealed just how severe smartphone addiction is among their age group. “They almost unanimously admitted they would have spent the entire time on their phones,” recounts Max Yamson, Executive Director of Camp Livingston. “They said they would not have formed deep relationships with the staff and fellow campers, would not have connected with their surroundings and nature on the same level, and would not have engaged as much in recreational activities.”

According to Yamson, “The study shows that the campers were glad to have left their phones behind so that they could experience a deeper level of engagement.”

“The research also revealed a stunning insight,” said Mercier. “Many campers discussed the experience of face-to-face communication as though it were a novel one. They exhibited a sense of discovery at learning that face-to-face communication is far superior to screen communication when it comes to building friendships and getting to know other people.”

Yamson added, “One camper said that in four short weeks she got to know her friends at camp better than she knows some of her friends at home – because she mostly communicates with her friends at home through screens.”

Other key findings include:

92% said it was beneficial to have gone without their phones while at camp
83% considered having gone without their phones for several weeks to be an important life experience
35% were successful at curbing their smartphone use after leaving camp
17% tried to influence a friend to spend less time on their phone after leaving camp

The researchers plan to follow this study up with additional research during the summer of 2018.

Marketers trying to catch the attention of this demographic may need to think carefully about how they approach mobile advertising for this generation of digital natives. It’s another day in the life of modern media.

Do you supply services to the Irish Media Industry? Have you listed your company in our Media Directory? It’s free! Everyone’s favourite price! Click here to do it now.

In News

A New App Can Create Facebook Ads Without the Cost

March 16, 2018 No Comments

This handy app can help you create ads with impact but with very little effort.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

An app called Plotaverse helps marketers to create great ads without the dreaded and costly content creation process. Quickly bypassing established app giants, the young startup’s iOS app made the list of Facebook’s top 10 mobile apps.

The photo app’s animation features allow businesses of any calibre to create impactful ads fast and on a budget. More or less, you can choose from many artistically appealling gifs and put your message over them. The artwork on the site is truly eye-catching.

But how did Plotaverse’s 8 months old mobile app manage to disrupt visual advertising, going up against 8 billion video views a day on Facebook alone?

Images animated with Plotaverse, formerly known as Plotagraph, are the key to its success. The app ads movement to any single still photo. This creates ads that stand out in saturated media feeds.

Brands like Coca Cola, Wella, Chevrolet and Red Bull were seen boosting their brand with captivating Plotagraphs. There is no need for video, multiple photos or video editing skills to turn a photograph into a Plotagraph. Users of any skill level can quickly animate and post uniquely moving images to their business and social page.

On Instagram and Facebook, Plotagraphs have proven to attract up to 5 times the amount of views and engagement than surrounding images.

Every day, 4.5 million business pages on Facebook are trying to cut through 1.32 billion daily active users according to WordStream. As expected, Adobe’s titan apps, Photoshop Express and Spark Post head Facebook’s list of Photo Enhancing apps. But the tiny startup’s photo animation app has unexpectedly spearheaded the looping content industry.

To check it out, click here

Do you supply services to the Irish Media Industry? Have you listed your company in our Media Directory? It’s free! Everyone’s favourite price! Click here to do it now.