Have you spent thousands of dollars on an online campaign but haven’t seen the results you have expected once the campaign is over? If the campaign was all about letting everybody know how amazing your product is and what excellent features it holds, then the reason for the lack of success is obvious. People probably did not respond well to your ads because they were focused on the brand or product. Modern market asks for a different type of approach when it comes to building up customer awareness for your business.
No matter how powerful and compelling your marketing content is, clients need more to become confident about your brand. There are new e-commerce businesses popping out almost every day so why should anyone trust the word of brand A instead of brand B? To capture the audience and create a bond between you and your client base, there must be some sort of personal relation among the two sides. The customers want to see you caring, not just thinking about how to get them into buying your product.
The best way to communicate with your audience is through social networks, as they offer the most ways to interact. This, however, doesn’t mean flooding everyone’s feed with status updates and promotional content. Your social network activities should be versatile and offer everyone a chance to speak their mind as well as bring your product closer, through creative non-sales related content. It’s less about pushing the sale and more about showing the effort and devotion put into your product.
Simply put, the audience is interested in what you have to say about your business, but what really makes the difference is what everybody else has to say about your brand. There are several ways to promote your business in a manner that doesn’t seem generic and won’t bounce people back but inspire them into wanting to know more about you. Marketing experts at College Paper went to work and created an easy to understand infographics depicting some of the best online marketing strategies. We encourage you to take a look and see how easy it is to bring your business to a whole new level by simply putting an extra effort into your social network marketing activities.
By Lucy Benton
Lucy Benton is a marketing specialist, business consultant and helps people to turn their dreams into the profitable business. Now she is writing for marketing and business resources. Also Lucy has her own blog Prowritingpartner.com where you can check her last publications. If you’re interested in working with Lucy, you can find her on Twitter.
80 percent of the world’s Internet users are active on social media
By MediaStreet Staff Writers
Social media management platform Hootsuite, and We Are Social, the global socially-led creative agency, have released Digital in 2018, a report of social media and digital trends around the world.
Representing 239 countries and territories, the seventh annual report finds the number of Internet users in the world has now surpassed the 4 billion mark, putting more than half the global population online. Of that, social media brings nearly 3.2 billion active users online to connect with each other, consume media, interact with brands, and more.
The 2018 key findings include:
Internet user numbers increased 7 percent in the last 12 months to hit 4.021 billion, or 53 percent of the world’s population
Global social media usage has increased by 13 percent in the last 12 months, reaching 3.196 billion users
Mobile social media usage has increased by 14 percent year over year to 2.958 billion users, with 93 percent of social media users accessing social from mobile
Internet users are projected to spend a combined total of 1 billion years online in 2018, of which 325 million years will be spent on social media
The report also found that global growth of the Internet is propelling ecommerce forward, with 1.77 billion Internet users purchasing consumer goods online in 2017, an increase of 8 percent compared to a year ago. Collectively, consumers spent a total of USD $1.474 trillion on ecommerce platforms in the past 12 months, 16 percent more than in 2016.
Said Simon Kemp, Global Consultant, We Are Social, “With four billion people now online, connectivity is already a way of life for most of us. However, as Internet companies strive to serve the next billion users, we’ll see important changes in digital over the coming months. Audio-visual content will take priority over text – especially in social media and messaging apps – while voice commands and cameras will replace keyboards as our primary means of input. Social relationships and online communities will evolve to accommodate these new ways for people to interact with each other. This will result in rich new experiences for all of us, but businesses need to start preparing for these changes today.”
“The Digital in 2018 report highlights the continuing growth of the Internet and social media to individuals and businesses around the world. This dynamic has forever altered the customer journey as consumers and B2B professionals increasingly conduct research, make buying decisions, seek support, and recommend brands online. To achieve competitive advantage, all executives must dive deep into digital now, meeting their customers where they are to best market, sell, and serve them,” said Penny Wilson, CMO, Hootsuite.
How fast? As fast as big media companies can move when they face an existential threat.
Since I became the CEO of a publicly traded company, I have yet to take a meeting with Wall Street where some version of this question isn’t asked: “When is traditional TV finally going to move over to connected TV?”
I’m sometimes unsure of what question is really being asked — after all, it’s not hard to track the numbers on streaming, cord cutting, cord shaving and the increasing rate of cord-nevers.
It’s happening. It’s happening now. And it’s happening fast.
After fielding that question so many times and answering differently a number of times, I now think the question is usually coming from a more personal point of view. Everyone loves TV, especially right now. In terms of content quality, television is at the top of its game.
And consumers love Netflix perhaps more than any TV company ever. Sure, people loved their legacy networks more in the ’40s and ’50s, but it’s hard to imagine them being more cherished than Netflix. And Netflix is spending serious money to make such great content. They have to. They can’t get it cheap from the studios anymore. Everyone is on their own. Amazon, CBS, Disney — everyone. And they’re all trying to avoid giving content to YouTube — but that’s a different story.
Even though the content is so great, I think the question — “When is TV moving to the internet?”— also comes from a place of frustration. The number of ads per commercial break has gone up a lot in recent years. And watching TV with ads has become irritating without a DVR. The ad-to-content ratio is high, and ads aren’t personalized like they can be on the web. Viewers wish everything could bypass what the chief product officer at Netflix calls “the tyranny of the grid.” And everyone wants to watch on-demand.
So I think the big question is something more like, “When can everything be on-demand? When will that happen?”
It’s happening much faster than people think. Two of the best content aggregators in media today — Hulu and Spotify — are what I call tea-leaf companies. Watching what they do gives you a glimpse of the future. Of course, Spotify isn’t a TV company, but TV can still learn from it. Hulu and Spotify both offer two types of subscriptions — one with nearly zero ads and another with ads. In both cases, the ad-funded option exposes the consumer to less than half the number of ads that you’ll get in a typical hour of linear or cable TV. In both cases, about 75 percent of consumers are choosing the ad-funded model. Most consumers would rather see ads and pay less.
Keep in mind the current cable set-up costs the average consumer more than $100, plus lots of taxes and fees. These go up every year. The median U.S. household income is about $50,000. So Wall Street and Silicon Valley should remember that most people can’t afford to pay for 15 subscriptions to get rid of ads.
But TV can’t survive without ads. My cable TV costs more than $250 a month and comes with nearly all the channels. Of my 500 stations, however, 490 of them have lots of ads, and none are personalized to me. Very few consumers can afford to get rid of all the ads. And many content providers won’t even offer the option.
Ultimately, TV will come to your house over an Ethernet cable, not a coaxial cable. All TV will be delivered over the internet, because it’s better. Everything will be on-demand, like Netflix. Just like today, most of internet-fueled TV will still be ad-funded. There will be a few no-ad channels, just like Netflix and HBO are today. But most TV content will be ad-funded, and there will be far fewer ads than there are today. The ads will be tailored to you. As consumers, you’ll actually like the ads, because they’ll appeal to you about products you love or products you don’t know about, but will love. These impressions will cost advertisers more per ad. Publishers and TV content creators will get a great cut of every ad dollar. And the global ad business will grow.
The unsustainability of linear television has a happy ending for consumers and the entire TV ecosystem. Some players currently in linear television, especially distributors, will win. Some, of course, will lose.
I’m not the only one who thinks the internet will power everything. Randy Stephenson, the CEO of AT&T, has a vision that he has spent more than $100 billion to realize. That’s a “bet the farm” number. Because of this, AT&T has become the biggest tea leaf to watch. And even more so now, with the AT&T and Time Warner deal. This is the biggest media deal in recent years, and most don’t yet understand the gravity of its implications.
Stephenson changed the game last year when he bought Time Warner. He paid more than $80 billion for what may be the most premium content in TV, which includes Turner and HBO. His vision centers around three things: On-demand content, 5G technology (which will change the internet forever) and fully addressable, personally tailored ads.
These three things work together to make it easier to install a new customer. They are making the ultimate move in cable TV — offer everything on-demand and for less. The cheaper bundles will barely be reminiscent of current cable packages because every ad will be tailored to a household, and all content will be on-demand. 5G is mobile. Since Stephenson can get economies of scale, and AT&T controls both the largest satellite TV company and the largest mobile network, he’s hoping to gain market share during the transition. Cheaper and better usually does that.
Every media company in the world, from Comcast to Disney, is losing sleep over this deal. AT&T was the first to make a huge bet, but it will not be the last. 5G will be available by 2020.
So the answer to the question, “When will TV hit an inflection point?” is: “As fast as big media companies can move when they face an existential threat.” I wouldn’t underestimate how fast people can run when their life is on the line.
TV will be delivered over the internet. And just like everything on the internet, change happens fast.
Feature Image: Say hello to the future cord-cutters of America: Juliana Sanchez, 5, and her brother, Francisco Sanchez Jr., 2, watch children’s programming on YouTube on their parent’s cellphones at their home.Gary Reyes / Bay Area News Group / TNS via Getty Images
Jeff Green is the founder and CEO of The Trade Desk, a demand-side platform that powers the desks of the world’s most advanced buyers in online advertising. In 2015, Green and his co-founder Dave Pickles were named Entrepreneurs of the Year in the Greater Los Angeles region by Ernst & Young. Reach him @TheTradeDeskInc.
A security firm has managed to recover deleted notes as old as a couple of years.
The iCloud Notes you delete are supposed to be permanently wiped within 30 days. Gone forever, never to be seen again. Russian security firm ElcomSoft has discovered, however, that Apple has been keeping deleted notes in the cloud for far longer. Its security researchers were able to retrieve notes that should’ve vanished weeks and months ago. In some cases, they were even able to recover notes from way back in 2015.
It’s worth noting that ElcomSoft used special tools and software, so nobody will accidentally stumble upon a note you deleted last year. For your old files to resurface, somebody has to be actively targeting you. Still, it’s definitely a security issue that Apple should fix ASAP, and we’ve reached out to Cupertino to ask if it has plans to patch it up in the near future. ElcomSoft seems to be confident that Apple will, since the tech titan quickly fixed the similar Safari and iCloud Photo Library security lapses it found in the past. Since it’s the third time the firm discovered that Apple retains info that’s supposed to be gone, though, it posed some interesting questions that might never get answered:
“Once we made a discovery about deleted photos being kept in iCloud Photo Library for years, Apple was prompt to making those images disappear. Once we discovered that Safari browsing history records are never deleted from the cloud, Apple patched that as well. There is no doubt Apple will fix the current issue. The question is: what other data you don’t want Apple to keep is still retained by the company? And does Apple actually destroy deleted records or simply hides them or moves to a different server? These questions still have no answer.”
