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13 Smart Ways For Marketers To Leverage TikTok

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Sourced from Forbes

TikTok continues to surge in popularity. As of January of 2021, the platform had more than 680 million users worldwide. With so many users on the short-form video app, it’s quickly become a relevant channel for advertising. However, it can be a challenge for brands to create a short video ad without it coming across as run-of-the-mill, highly produced commercial.

If you’re considering using TikTok in your marketing efforts, it’s important to understand how to effectively reach your target audience on the platform. Below, 13 members of Forbes Agency Council detail the best ways to grab consumers’ attention and gain their trust by leveraging TikTok to market your business.

1. Entertain Before You Try To Sell

Leverage TikTok by making authentic content that aims to entertain first and sell second, if at all. As the adage goes, “If you’re going to crash a party, bring champagne.” To stretch that analogy a bit, modern audiences are smart enough to know if you’ve brought champagne or a cheap bottle of Cava from the shop down the road. – Dan Cullen-Shute, Creature

2. Leverage Influencers And Branded Hashtag Challenges

One way to engage audiences on TikTok in a contextually relevant manner is to work with TikTok influencers to promote your brand or product. The platform has a creator’s marketplace to help you search for influencers that best fit your brand, audience and desired outcome. Another option is the branded hashtag challenge ad format, which encourages user-generated content about your product or brand. – Greg Garunov, Sightly

3. Drive Emotion And Connection

TikTok is built off of driving emotion and connection with the viewer. Marketers can easily leverage authentic influencer content from this platform that could become explosive on other platforms at a lower cost, yet still has a higher impact than even a Super Bowl commercial, as we’ve seen with the viral TikTok leggings, for example. – Logan Rae, Argon Agency

4. Share Practical Advice

Short-form video has been around for decades in the form of video news releases or news segments, with little care paid to it. Instead of trying to sound smart, share practical advice that helps another person level up personally, professionally or emotionally. Raw, unedited advice will captivate an audience that’s willing to listen. – Brad Ginsburg, Global Communication Works (GCW)

5. Give Them A Reason To Watch

Authenticity is key for any platform. TikTok is still purely entertainment; the ad world hasn’t bombarded it—yet. That means two things: The ad value is under-priced, and the audience is growing rapidly. If your marketing doesn’t appear entertaining, they will flick right past you. Remember the give/get model here for a path to success: Give them a reason to watch, and you’ll get an impression or an action. – Rob Fallon, Bluewater

6. Follow The Trends

Part of the magic of TikTok is how the content is created. It’s meant to be fun, not perfect. Brands need to understand that a perfectly produced ad will most likely stand out on TikTok, and not in a good way. Brands need to create content that is native in format and follows the trends that other users are following. That will get you into a conversation, rather than ruining the conversation. – Brian Meert, AdvertiseMint

7. Be Timely And Relevant

TikTok trends live and die overnight; what’s popular today may not be tomorrow. The smartest brands on the platform have mastered creating timely and relevant content by jumping on trends within hours of them becoming popular. The great thing about TikTok is that content doesn’t have to be polished or professionally shot. Many brands create content on their mobile devices, with minimal editing. – Charlie Grinnell, RightMetric

8. Find Inspiration In User-Produced Content

It is crucial for brands to engage with the audience in a way that’s endemic to the platform and not like standard ads or social channels. Get inspired by user-produced content (i.e., paid talent), and don’t worry about trying to piggyback on the latest thing. Be creative and design your own tropes that are fun, engaging and relevant to the brand while encouraging the audience to do the same. – Jason Parkin, Compose[d]

9. Lean Into The Creator Community

TikTok can be a powerful channel for creative storytelling and marketing opportunities. Brands should lean into the creator community and co-create content that provides value in terms of entertainment and/or education. Each brand is unique; some brands might create behind-the-scenes content or a sneak peek at a new product, while others provide entertainment or education. – Paula Bruno, Intuition Media Group d/b/a Blissful Media Group

10. Tell A Story

Take your lead from viral TikTok creators and use the power of a story. By using text on top of a video, you won’t come across as overly polished, but you will catch their eye, even if the sound is off. Start with a short bit of text that establishes a problem plaguing your ideal customer, ideally a fear or concern. Then drop in text to help solve their problem step by step. – Samantha Reynolds, ECHO Storytelling Agency

11. Mirror Your Audience’s Interests

Don’t be something you are not, regardless of medium. Ask yourself, “Why is my audience on TikTok?” What are they looking for on the app? Create content to mirror their interests. If they are there to be entertained, post something entertaining. If they are there to learn, offer educational tips or tricks on how to use your product or service. A good rule of thumb is to make it 80% information and 20% ad. – Sara Steever, Paulsen

12. Try Using The Duet Function

TikTok has a more creator-driven aesthetic versus the “produced” approach we see on other channels. To be successful, brands have to adapt their content to trends and do creative, in-app editing instead of pushing out canned content. TikTok users can easily sniff out inauthenticity. Also, using the TikTok Duet function and filters provides a more genuine way to connect with the platform’s dialled-in audience. – Mike Popowski, Dagger

13. Get Your Team Involved

Stick to using in-app features, and commit your team to only filming with their mobile devices. Encourage your team to find content that they can do a TikTok Duet with, or trending content they can do their own versions of, such as challenges or dances. Even supplying your team with swag they can wear is enough to feature your brand without looking as if you’re trying too hard. – Bernard May, National Positions

Sourced from Forbes

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Here’s Why Entrepreneurs Make The Best Marketers

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By Shama Hyder

The best marketers are those who know how to build a brand, scale it for rapid growth, and cultivate long-term success. They understand the essentials of marketing because they have lived it first hand. I’ve learned countless strategies in the process of becoming an entrepreneur and evolving as a business leader.

Whether or not you are a founder yourself, you need an entrepreneurial mindset to be a successful marketer. Here’s what I mean: entrepreneurs are compelled to take their message and mission further because they are wholly devoted to its success. An entrepreneurial mindset means being totally sold on your company’s mission and having the ability to communicate it clearly.

But, if you’re a marketer reading this, you may not have the rounded experience of an entrepreneur. That’s okay – you just need to adopt the mindset. Here is what an entrepreneur-driven marketing strategy looks like, and how you can implement it for yourself.

Be Single-Minded And Focus Your Core Message 

Kris Lindahl, a real estate expert and founder of Marketing Team, has created a singularly focused mindset in his strategy. He takes the core message of his company and makes sure it touches every aspect of the brand. Any time they have a new idea, they make sure it matches their mission. After they achieved over $1B in sales in 2020, it appears that his strategy is working.

One of his catch phrases is, “confuse, you lose.” If you can’t keep your messaging clear and simple, you will lose customers. Single-mindedness about your core message is essential here because it keeps the marketing plan focused. When starting their companies, entrepreneurs spend an innumerable amount of hours honing the product, business model or service of the company. Because of this, their focus is clear on the core of who they are and what they do.

Even if you aren’t an entrepreneur, you should start with a single focus when it comes to marketing. Make sure that your company’s core message is clearly defined. Whether you are working for a client or for your own company, put in the time on the front end to make sure that you (and every other stakeholder involved) understand the core principles and motivations driving the business.

Make Your Marketing Strategy Personable

Entrepreneurs early in the journey of owning their businesses tend to wear many hats and fulfil many roles within their companies. While the goal is always to grow and build a well-rounded team, there’s a deeper lesson here. Make sure your marketing strategy is all encompassing. Think of it this way: an entrepreneur is so consumed with the mission of their company that it is infused in everything they do. The brand or company is brought into networking conversations, personal exchanges, and more.

An entrepreneur’s company is usually an extension of their value system. This in mind, interactions with the company are infused with the entrepreneur’s personality. Your marketing strategy should be the same. Make sure that your interactions with potential and existing customers are infused with the personality of your brand.

Lindahl does this by maintaining a distinctive presence online, in public, and even through larger media. He is the face of his brand, and its message centres around his voice. Even if your company is not driven by a leader’s notoriety or brand image, you can craft a personality that informs how you communicate in marketing messages.

Overall, entrepreneurs know the best marketing strategies because they know their brand message and motivation inside and out. Successful marketing is driven by a clear mission, and a set of core values that customers can understand. Whether you are building a business, or working for a large company, you need an entrepreneur’s mindset to drive a successful marketing strategy.

Feature Image Credit: Kris Lindahl, a real estate expert and founder of The Marketing Team. Kris Lindahl

By Shama Hyder

Shama Hyder is the founder & CEO of Zen Media. She has been named the “Zen Master of Marketing” by Entrepreneur Magazine and the “Millennial Master of the Universe” by FastCompany.com. Forbes, Businessweek, and Inc have all recognized her as one of the Top 30 under 30 entrepreneurs in the field of marketing. Shama has built a global audience and is known for helping brands succeed in the digital age. She is a bestselling author, an international keynote speaker, and has been named one of LinkedIn’s Top 10 Voices in Marketing for four years in a row.

Sourced from Forbes

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Digital Marketing’s Last Decade Is Digital Marketing’s Lost Decade

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By Dr. Augustine Fou

Most marketers had been happily paying for programmatic advertising for the last decade, very proud of themselves for being “digitally transformed.” They were also happily using vanity metrics like CPM prices, number of impressions, and click through rates because those were easy to measure and easy to report. Buying digital ads became as easy as playing a video game, with colorful dashboards that showed them what great discounts they got (“cost efficiency”), the number of impressions they bought (“reach”), and how many clicks they got (“performance”). But this triple cocktail of low price, large reach, and high performance was so addictive because every part of it was faked by fraudsters.

The low CPM prices were only possible from fraudulent or fake sites that plagiarized all their content or used no content at all. Real publishers with real human audiences had real costs of producing the content; so they could not sell ads for very low CPM prices. Further, there’s a finite number of humans that visit their sites every month; so they could not magically manifest a lot more reach. But fake sites could easily do this by buying traffic and doing audience extension. No one can force a herd of humans to all go to the same site at the same time to increase its traffic and audience; but it takes no more than one command line to instruct a vast botnet to generate a large number of pageviews on a site — exactly the amount that was paid for. And these same bots click on the ads too. Not too much or else that would be suspicious. Bots tune their click through rates to be in the 5 – 15% range, which is always higher than real human click rates. This way, marketers are tricked into thinking ads on fake sites are performing so much better than ads on real sites with real humans, so they allocate more or all of their budget to programmatic channels, which are teaming with such fake and fraudulent sites.

Do you see how this all worked together? Larger quantities of ad impressions, lower CPM prices, and better performance — indeed the illusions of vast reach, cost efficiency, and performance — led to what is now known as “digital marketing’s lost decade.” When “programmatic” ad buying really took off in 2012-13, the disparity from reality really took off as well. Note the green and yellow lines in the chart below — those represent humans’ usage of the Internet, social media, and mobile. Those two lines are pretty much flat across since 2012-13; indicating that real humans’ usage had all plateaued, already maxed out. But the blue line representing digital ad spending continued upward. How can this dissociation from reality be explained? Easily, with bots. Bots are simple software programs that can be remotely controlled to automate browsing (load more pages) and simulate desirable human actions, like clicks on ads. It was technically trivial to simulate all the things that marketers wanted to buy — more reach, more clicks, lower prices.

 

Some marketers have had the courage to run “turn off” experiments with their digital media. What was interestingly consistent is that all of them found that turning off their digital ad spending didn’t change business outcomes — eBay (2015), P&G (2018), Chase (2017), Uber (2019), AirBnB (2020). So what were they spending millions of dollars on in digital, if it were not producing real, measurable business outcomes? We may never know. But what is clear is that more marketers need to check their own digital spending more closely, and do things differently than they have been doing for the last decade — or shall I say “lost decade?”

Marketers should pay higher CPMs by buying ads from real publishers with real human audiences. You know that you have to show your ad to a human before you can get any kind of business outcome right? Showing ads to bots, no matter how low the CPM prices, will drive no incremental business for you, even though it looks really good in the video game called digital advertising — you got the highest score ever this year because you bought more ads than ever before at lower CPM prices than ever before. Yay! But that was not marketing.

Paying higher CPM prices don’t necessarily mean greater costs either. That’s because CPMs are unit pricing (cost per thousand digital impressions). If you bought fewer ad impressions, even at higher CPMs, your total cost could actually be lower. You don’t need the vast quantities or enormous “reach.” It’s not real reach, it’s just the illusion of reach, if you’re not “reaching’ humans anyway. You don’t need to buy as many ad impressions to reach real humans. Humans tend to visit a small handful of mainstream sites repeatedly. Even though they do visit long tail sites for niche content once in a while, the “at-scale” quantities of impressions from the programmatic long tail are also an illusion, that conveniently helped fraudsters feast on marketers’ ad dollars for the last decade.

Finally, accept lower click through rates. Humans click on ads very rarely (when was the last time you deliberately clicked on any ad?). But the lack of clicks does not mean the campaign performed poorly; on the flip side, the presence of clicks faked by bots does mean the campaign performed poorly. Those clicks are not real, and the high CTRs (click through rates) don’t mean real performance. If you understand the above, you will also understand that the single most important factor in digital marketing is getting your ad in front of a human in the first place. Everything else — like targeting, viewability, click rates, etc. — is secondary. Smart marketers are ditching the ad tech targeting (costs more, works more poorly) and simply showing ads to Safari and Firefox users; savvy humans use iPhones (Safari browser) and Firefox browsers; bots prefer to pretend to be Chrome, to earn more money due to ad targeting. Advertisers showing ads to Safari and Firefox users are also getting a great deal — 50-70% lower CPMs — because other marketers are not even bidding on these browsers. Showing ads to humans in the first place always beats targeting for business outcomes, because the targeting may not be accurate and bots are pretending to be the audience segments you target.

After the last decade of digital transformation, marketers should now pull themselves out the “lost decade” of digital marketing based on vanity metrics – low prices, vast reach, high clicks. Time to think differently and do different digital marketing. Pay high CPM prices for ads on real publishers’ sites, shown to real human audiences (finite reach) and low clicks. You will see that you are doing better digital marketing, indeed marketing that actually drives real business outcomes.

By Dr. Augustine Fou

I am a marketer of 25 years. I witnessed the entire arc of the evolution of digital marketing. Now I help marketers audit their digital campaigns for ad fraud and optimize campaigns based on accurate analytics. I taught digital strategy at NYU’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies and Rutgers University’s Center for Management Development. I worked on the “client side” for American Express, and on the “agency side” as Group Chief Digital Officer of Omnicom’s Healthcare Consultancy Group and SVP Digital Strategy Lead at McCann Worldgroup/MRM Worldwide. I started my career in New York City with McKinsey & Company.

Sourced from Forbes

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19 Must-Read Newsletters for Marketers

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By Hal Koss

Some think we’ve already reached peak newsletter, but signing up for a few more couldn’t possibly hurt, right? Especially if they help you save time or do your job better.

So we rounded up some of the best newsletters that marketers should consider subscribing to right now — whether they want to get inspired, stay on top of industry news or gain actionable insights from colleagues in the trenches.

The best part? All of them are free (or have a free version, at least).

This list is by no means exhaustive — and not every entry is applicable to every kind of marketer — but it should offer a solid starting point.

2PM

About: 2PM’s newsletter provides curation, summary and analysis of the most important stories at the intersection of media and commerce. It also includes original essays and data insights by Web Smith, an investor and advisor of several companies.

Audience: 2PM says it’s for “deep generalists and the intellectually curious.” Start-up founders (especially those in e-commerce), brand marketers and brand strategists would like it.

Frequency: Once a week for regular subscribers, three times a week for paying members.

Sample: No. 390: Enter MrBeast

The B2B Bite

About: Jason Bradwell is on a mission to change the way people think about B2B marketing. It doesn’t have to be boring or buttoned-up, declares his newsletter’s about page. He proves it by curating and breaking down a few stories each week meant to inspire B2B marketers.

Audience: B2B marketers and startup leaders.

Frequency: Weekly.

Sample: Why Every B2B Org Should Be Selling T-Shirts

BrandStreet

About: If you’re trying to grow your brand into a household name, BrandStreet offers a community to guide you on that path. Readers can subscribe to its weekly email, which rounds up several items “to help you build smarter and better,” along with its two additional newsletters, one from each of its co-founders, communications veterans Ari Lewis and Chris Berry.

Audience: Anyone building a brand through earned media, content marketing and social media.

Frequency: Weekly.

Sample: The articles on BrandStreet’s site provide a taste of its point of view.

The Brief

About: The Brief provides a quick-to-read digest of the day’s most essential stories about digital marketing, strategy and social media. It’s written by Junction, a digital strategy agency, and hits inboxes every Monday to help readers start their weeks up to date with industry news.

Audience: Marketers who want to keep up with news and trends.

Frequency: Weekly.

Sample: Subscribe to read.

Chantelle’s Marketing Newsletter

About: Written by marketing strategist Chantelle Marcelle, this newsletter spotlights emerging ideas and trends, curates interesting marketing articles and surfaces research and case studies that marketers should be paying attention to.

Audience: Brand marketers.

Frequency: Weekly.

Sample: Subscribe to read.

The Daily Carnage

About: If you want to start each morning with a quick read that curates a handful of the biggest marketing headlines of the day, you’ll want to check out The Daily Carnage. It also includes a shot of analysis and fun stuff, like a vintage ad and a quote of the day.

Audience: Marketing leaders, people who open too many browser tabs.

Frequency: Daily.

Sample: One Condiment to Rule Them All

First 1000

About: This one’s niche. Each issue explains how a different tech start-up got its first thousand customers, providing a quick history lesson on companies like Snapchat, Doordash and Etsy, and the various marketing strategies they employed to grow into success stories. Much more fun than Wikipedia.

Audience: Startup founders, growth marketers, brand builders.

Frequency: Weekly.

Sample: Spotify

Geekout

About: Whether you run your company’s social media strategy or just want to keep up with the latest Facebook or Twitter news, Geekout provides a weekly digest to keep you in the know. It’s written by Matt Navara, a social media strategist, and he provides original, succinct analysis in every issue.

Audience: Social media marketers.

Frequency: Weekly.

Sample: TikTok Needs to Stop Doing This

ReadShould Your B2B Company Start a Podcast?

The Growth Newsletter by Demand Curve

About: This newsletter curates marketing insights and growth tactics from members of the Demand Curve community, which is made up of growth marketers and start-up founders. Each issue is bite-sized, actionable and features new voices from people in the trenches.

Audience: Startup founders and growth marketers.

Frequency: Twice a month.

Sample: The Growth Newsletter — #010

Lenny’s Newsletter

About: Lenny Rachitsky, previously a growth product manager at Airbnb, writes a weekly advice column for leaders in tech. He addresses reader questions and shares his perspective on topics like growth, product and people management.

Audience: Growth marketers, product managers, start-up founders.

Frequency: Weekly (paid) or monthly (free).

Sample: How to Kickstart and Scale a Marketplace Business

Market Mix

About: If you’re a current — or aspiring — marketer in the cryptocurrency space, Market Mix is aimed squarely at you. Brad Michelson’s newsletter tackles subjects such as brand building, performance marketing and influencer strategy — all written by someone who’s helped build fintech and crypto brands.

Audience: Marketers in crypto and fintech.

Frequency: Weekly.

Sample: Referrals Are the Ultimate Growth Hack for Crypto Marketers

Marketing Brew

About: Written with the trademark smirk of its parent newsletter, Morning Brew, this thrice-weekly newsletter highlights the biggest news items in the advertising and marketing world — along with fly-by commentary and big-picture context — to help busy marketers stay oriented in a fast-moving industry.

Audience: Marketing and advertising professionals, especially those who are Millennials or Gen Z.

Frequency: Three times a week.

Sample: The Driest January

The Marketing Mind Meld

About: Marketing is really all about tapping into human psychology, which is why The Marketing Mind Meld explores the relationship between human behavior and successful marketing. Written by growth marketer Kushaan Shah, the newsletter answers questions like what makes memes sticky, and how scents can influence what we buy.

Audience: Brand marketers, curious people.

Frequency: About every week or so.

Sample: #21: What Can Pollination Teach Us About Branding?

Raisin Bread

About: This newsletter, “baked” by freelance marketer network MarketerHire, curates relevant news, discusses up-and-coming trends and features exclusive Q&As and interviews with some of marketing’s top leaders, such as Cameo’s Greg Caplan and ShipBob’s Casey Armstrong.

Audience: Brand marketers.

Frequency: Weekly.

Sample: Mafia Marketing

#SEOFOMO

About: Whether you’re a newcomer to SEO or a veteran who likes to keep up with ever-evolving best practices, this newsletter offers resources and tools designed to help build out your skills. It also includes an SEO job board if you’re looking for a change of scenery or trying to break into the industry.

Audience: SEOs and digital marketers.

Frequency: Weekly.

Sample: Subscribe to read.

The Sociology of Business

About: Written by executive strategist Ana Andjelic, the Sociology of Business is intended to help marketers see the big picture over time, rather than give them tips and tricks to start using today. Each issue explores new consumer trends and evolving tastes, and how brands can keep up and position themselves for success.

Audience: Brand strategists, culture observers.

Frequency: About three times a month.

Sample: The Taste Map

This Week in AdTech

About: Adtech is a notoriously confusing and rapidly changing industry. This newsletter, from Canadian adtech consultancy AdProfs, attempts to make it just a little bit easier to keep up. Each week, it rounds up and summarizes relevant articles.

Audience: The busy ad tech professional.

Frequency: Weekly.

Sample: Subscribe to read.

Total Annarchy

About: This newsletter, written by Ann Handley of MarketingProfs, is written in the style of an old-fashioned, snail-mail letter: It’s personal, voicey and reads like it’s actually addressed to you. It’s also full of marketing and writing insights from someone with decades of experience.

Audience: Brand storytellers and copywriters.

Frequency: Every other week.

Sample: Brand Storytelling Template; My 2 Proven Ways to Increase Open, Click Rates

VeryGoodCopy

About: Leave it to a copywriting newsletter to be extremely compact yet still effective enough that you learn something every time you read it. VeryGoodCopy provides short articles dispensing nuggets of copywriting wisdom and occasional interviews with successful marketers and writers.

Audience: Copywriters and content marketers.

Frequency: Weekly.

Sample: Subscribe to read.

Feature Image Credit: Shutterstock

By Hal Koss

Sourced from builtin

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“It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach”: How marketers are using Reddit to build loyalty and drive sales

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By Erika Wheless

In November of last year, Tushy, the DTC bidet attachment company, debuted an ad on Reddit where it agreed to make a limited edition bidet that changed the “Bum Wash” label to “A** Blast” if the ad was upvoted 10,000 times.

Andy Stone, director of growth marketing at Tushy, says the company took a closer look at advertising on Reddit after being approached by Joe Federer, the former head of brand strategy at Reddit who founded [An Internet Reference], which specializes in advertising on the platform.

According to Stone, Tushy saw an average of 4.5x return on ad spend looking at the full scope of the customer journey. They plan to have Reddit as part of their regular ad strategy this year.

As e-commerce has boomed, Reddit has started to become a player in the consumer buying funnel. The site’s honest, in-depth reviews make it attractive to high-intent customers. “The path to purchase is changing and we’re seeing that Reddit is more front and centre in the e-commerce experience,” said Jen Wong, COO of Reddit.

Late last year, Reddit rolled out three ad inventory tiers with a focus on targeting and brand safety, which has been an issue. Marketers didn’t want to risk brand safety on the opinionated site. Despite these updates, Reddit is still an experimental space for marketers and requires a more nuanced approach than repurposing an ad from Facebook. But there are some brands who have managed to strike the right tone and have seen successful conversions.

Breaking into these communities can be a challenge for marketing teams. It’s particularly important to have thoughtful targeting and creative, and to be ready to engage with users’ questions and comments. Reddit users are notoriously opinionated.

“It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach,” said Stone.

Reddit’s ad platform is still relatively new. “Advertisers can’t yet expect the bells and whistles they might expect elsewhere,” said Alex Young, director of paid social at Carat. “There are only a few ad formats, buying methods, and optimization functionalities.”

Redditors are not shy about downvoting brands who don’t engage in the spirit of the site. Electronics Arts ended up with a world-record, most-downvoted comment after a poor response to a Redditor’s question.

“A brand’s success is more to do with the demeanour of the brand than the brand itself,” said Federer. “They have to come correct and take time to get those community nuances.”

Federer says he would love to see Reddit’s ad offerings lean into their unique communities. “Right now it feels pretty in line with other social media platforms,” he said. “I wish there was a clearer way to ad value, like adding a filter or widget in the sidebar for r/adobe.”

There is a lot of potential upside for brands that get it right. Last October, the site said it averaged 52 million daily viewers. (Facebook said it had 1.82 billion daily users last September.) In December, Wong told the Wall Street Journal that Reddit’s ad revenue totalled more than $100 million in 2019 and was on track to rise by more than 70% in 2020. Reddit declined to breakdown or share revenue details.

Oh and Tushy’s limited edition bidet? “OP will make good on the actual product,” assures Stone

By Erika Wheless

Sourced from DIGIDAY

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What Skills Marketers Say They Want In 2021 — And Why

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Although 86% of marketers feel they are adequately trained and skilled, nearly all report that they want a new skill in order to advance their careers. The most frequently reported skills are data analytics, performance marketing, social media, and SEO.

Sidecar surveyed 146 marketing professionals in the retail industry. The majority of respondents were based in the U.S., with the remainder in Canada. All reported that they contribute to ecommerce marketing efforts at their company.

  • C-Level executives want skills in data analytics, social media, and performance marketing.
  • SEO directors or vice presidents want data analytics, performance marketing, and leadership skills.
  • Associated and managers want data analytics, SEO, social media, and performance marketing.

Job titles including associate, manager, director, vice president, chief marketing officer (CMO), and chief executive officer (CEO). The analysis groups these titles into associates and managers, directors and vice presidents, and C-level. Responses were fielded between September and October 2020.

Some responses were not discrete skills marketers want, but rather strategic knowledge and big-picture capabilities they hope to acquire. One CEO cited the ability to create the perfect balance between digital marketing spend and great content. A director asked for strategic thinking on how to lead a brand through the changing environment.

The top five functions that have had the greatest focus in hiring during the past 12 months include social media, content marketing, SEO, email marketing, and graphic design.

This differs from the functions that marketing professionals plan to hire for during the next 12 months. Social media marketing tops the list, followed by email marketing, content marketing, digital strategy, data analytics, and graphic design.

Survey participants were asked what platforms they would like to spend more time on. Some 42% cited Google paid search, while 41% cited Facebook, 40%, Amazon; 40%, Instagram; 37%, Google Shopping; 32%, Pinterest; 20%, TikTok; 15%, Snapchat; 13%, Walmart; and 10% cited Microsoft.

Participants in the survey were asked which tasks they want to devote more time to. Brand building and data analysis were tied for the top response, with about 45% saying they want more time to do each, followed by 43% who cited competitive analysis, while 36% cited customer experience; 34% cited creative; 33% cited multichannel strategy; 32% cited customer shopping trends; 32% cited marketing attribution; 20% cited more time to devote to improving their company’s mobile experience; and 14%, more time to set goals.

  • C-Level executives cited that they want more time for brand building
  • Directors and VP levels want more time for brand building
  • Associate directors and managers want more time for competitive and data analysis.

Marketers at small businesses want more time for data analysis, creative, brand building, multichannel marketing, and customer experience.

When asked to cite the number one goal for the company’s marketing team rather than an individual goal, 38% of marketers cited the acquisition of new customers, while 29% cited driving profitability; 9% cited increasing customer lifetime value; 9% cited retaining existing customers; 6% cited growing brand awareness; 3% cited growing website traffic; 3% cited SEO; 2% cited developing quality content; and 1% cited improving the customer experience.

When asked to cite the top challenges for this year, (multiple choice) 51% of respondents cited limited time, followed by 40% who cited limited budget, while 32% cited competing priorities, 26% cited brand recognition, 24% cited achieving scale, and 23% cited manual processes, among many more such as competition, lack of skills in-house, lack of data-driven decisions, insufficient marketing attribution, and lack of collaboration.

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Sourced from MediaPost

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Organic LinkedIn Marketing: Proven Techniques for Marketers

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Want to improve organic engagement on LinkedIn? Wondering if LinkedIn Stories and Live could work for you?

To explore organic LinkedIn marketing strategies that work today, I interview Michaela Alexis on the Social Media Marketing Podcast.

Michaela is a LinkedIn expert and an official LinkedIn Learning trainer, coach, and consultant who helps businesses master their LinkedIn organic presence. She co-authored Think Video: Smart Video Marketing and Influencing.

You’ll learn what kind of content works best in the LinkedIn feed and how best to use LinkedIn Stories and Live video to engage the people in your network.

Listen to the Podcast Now

This article is sourced from the Social Media Marketing Podcast, a top marketing podcast. Listen or subscribe below.

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The reason LinkedIn is important to professionals, especially marketers, comes down to user intent. Michaela notes that while most people spend time on Facebook and Instagram to reconnect with friends and family or to escape, people come to LinkedIn to grow, connect, learn, and meet new people. As a result of the current pandemic and a rise in remote working, people are also turning to LinkedIn to stay in touch and engaged with their colleagues and teams.

When you pair that strong user intent with the platform’s growth over the past year, its place as a global, professional networking space is unquestionable. Almost 700 million people are on LinkedIn, and 45% of internet users who make more than $75,000 a year annually use LinkedIn.

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Sourced from Social Media Examiner

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Ad Age 2020 Marketers of the Year

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Sourced from AdAge

TikTok tops our annual list of the top performing brands of the year

The 10 brands that comprise Ad Age’s 2020 Marketers of the Year list didn’t just survive the pandemic, they thrived.

The list is topped by TikTok, which emerged as a major pop culture force and must-stop for an increasing number of brands, including several on our list. That includes cosmetics upstart e.l.f., which had the foresight to jump on the platform back in late 2019 with its 15-second “Eyes Lips Face” song, and has since amassed 10 billion views for its TikTok content. Other new economy brands making the list include meditation app Calm, whose Election Day marketing set a new standard for timely product placement. Online marketplace Etsy smartly tapped into trends like DIY and customizable goods, including, yes, masks.

But breakthrough marketing in 2020 was not confined to plucky start-ups. Stalwarts like State Farm, which is nearly 100-years-old,also cracked the list, thanks to a reinvention strategy that included putting a new spin on its iconic “Like a good neighbour” tagline. McDonald’s, No. 2 on our list, found ways to reach new audiences, including with its wildly successful Travis Scott collaboration.

The list—chosen by a team of Ad Age reporters and editors based on factors that include business results driven by breakthrough advertising and smart strategic thinking–is full of brand marketing lessons, including from an unlikely source: Conservative anti-Trump PAC The Lincoln Project, whose go-for-broke attitude shows that fearlessness is a key ingredient for great creative. “We’re not unemotional about this stuff,” TLP cofounder Rick Wilson told us. “We’re passionate about this stuff.”

No. 1: TikTok

No. 2: McDonald’s

No. 3: Lowe’s

No. 4: The Lincoln Project

No. 5: Etsy

No. 6: Calm

No. 7: e.l.f.

No. 8: Lego

No. 9: Adobe

No. 10: State Farm

Sourced from AdAge

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Five Things Marketers Can Learn From Biden’s Victory

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By Dr. Augustine Fou

Early Saturday morning, November 7, 2020 – “Biden Wins!” After days of agony waiting for final ballots to be counted, the race for the President of the United States is called, by one network, then another, then another, then all of them. Cheering and people rejoicing in New York City could be heard through open windows, as people breathed a sigh of collective relief. The thunderstorm is over; a ray of sunlight broke through. And a rainbow marks the beginning of better days ahead, as we rebuild kindness and decency towards every fellow human.

Tom Denford jokingly suggested in a tweet “Super excited to learn “5 things marketers can take from Biden’s victory” on Monday morning. I could not wait till Monday, so I wrote it today. Indeed marketers could learn some things from Biden’s victory, perhaps 5, perhaps more. Here are the five that come to my mind, having been in and observed marketing for 25 years. What follows is not political commentary, but commentary on marketing.

Slow, wins.

Everyone knows Aesop’s fable of the tortoise and the hare. And “slow and steady wins the race” is a phrase repeated regularly. This is particularly true for marketing, but sadly it has been particularly forgotten in the headlong rush into digital. Too many marketers try to buy success by showing more ads to more people more often. They push their agencies to buy ever more vast quantities of digital ads, at ever lower unit prices. This has led to a prolonged deterioration of actual business outcomes and marketing efficacy, a veritable “lost decade” of digital marketing.

The headlong plunge into digital and the unchecked spending in programmatic channels led to dramatic increases in the number of ads purchased, and a concomitant increase in ad fraud. The number of humans on earth didn’t suddenly multiply many times over; and their time spent online, on social, and on mobile didn’t multiply many times over either. But the number of digital ads did multiply, reaching into unfathomable territory – half a quadrillion ads per year. The vast majority of these ads were created out of thin air by bots, not by humans visiting sites, using social media, or using mobile apps. So while marketers are spending $350 billion every year on digital ads, their business outcomes don’t reflect the spending. And the marketing efficacy is lower and lower due to more and more fraudulent activity.

You can’t buy your way to “wins” quickly. Slow and steady does indeed win out, long term.

Right, wins.

When marketers are spending so many billions of dollars in digital, someone’s going to ask if it’s worth it. So the marketers that are doing the most spending (ahem, CPG companies with too much money to spend) look for ways to justify it. The metrics they and their media agencies conveniently chose were quantity metrics like number of ad impressions purchased, the average unit price, and the number of clicks, traffic to their sites, and click through rates. But just because these metrics were easy to measure doesn’t mean they were the right metrics to use to prove marketing value.

In fact, these vanity metrics, oops “quantity metrics,” were easy to think about, because more meant better. But if the marketer didn’t know about bots and fraud, they wouldn’t know that these are also the easiest metrics for bots to fake. Bots can generate more ad impressions, and drive higher click through rates, and create more traffic to advertisers’ websites all to make the campaigns appear to be performing better than they really are. Despite drastic increases in these quantity metrics, business outcomes remained flat to down. Some business outcomes may have gone up, but the rise was entirely unrelated to digital marketing activities (more people wanted to buy toilet paper for some reason, not because of advertising). And remember when P&G cut $200 million from digital ad spending and saw no change in business outcomes?

Having the right metrics in place, and using them, means you know when you are driving real outcomes, rather than just getting “more of” various vanity metrics.

Detailed, wins.

With the right metrics and analytics in place, it “pays” to be detailed oriented and actually check the details yourself. Too often, these duties are passed off to agency partners. While some agency partners have the right-skilled analytics folks to look at the data for you, most don’t have the desire to do more work than they are paid for. Sadly, if the client (the advertiser) appears to be happy with campaign performance and doesn’t ask for more details, why make the effort and show them analytics? So advertisers must look more closely at analytics for their own campaigns.

With detailed data, they can see if campaigns are actually performing — not the clicks and traffic stuff — but actually driving incremental business outcomes. If the campaigns are not, and if there is ad fraud observed, marketers can make tweaks themselves to optimize the campaigns while they are still running. It’s much like making small course corrections with tiny movements of the steering wheel when driving down the highway. You don’t make large turns. Having detailed analytics enables you to see whether there is any fraud impacting your campaigns — common send and your gut will tell you something needs to be further investigated. And it will tell you what is working or not working so you can make the small course corrections as you go.

Detail-oriented wins out over handing off your analytics and duties to someone else.

Good, wins.

While fraudsters “clean up well” and are the slickest of the slick salesmen, ad tech companies can only dupe clients into paying for their snake oil for so long. Sooner or later, when advertisers start looking at the right data in more detail, like we said above, they will realize the snake oil didn’t “cure the cancer” as it claimed. In fact, it WAS the cancer that was draining ad budgets — directly into the fraudsters’ pockets (as opposed to showing ads or doing better digital marketing). The fraudsters make a quick buck, sometimes gobs and gobs of it, “by hook or by crook.” They can fool enough advertisers enough of the time to take money off of them. And even when the are outed, they just change the name of the company or start another company and go back to doing what they do best. Yes, this has happened, A LOT, in ad tech. And we’re not even talking about the cases where fraud detection companies shake down clients and prospects — if you don’t pay us, we’ll lower your score, mark you as fraudulent, or remove you from lists.

In the long run, extortion, crime, and even petty theft, are not sustainable ways to do business. Doing good, and doing good business, are good for the long run, not to mention you sleep better at nights, not having to worry when you will be found out. Good, doing the right thing, is often harder and definitely takes more time and effort than stealing a quick buck. But good wins.

Trust, wins.

One you get good at doing good business for your clients, you also do good business for your business. You earn trust over time; you build real bridges with your clients, so they stick with you through good times and bad. They trust you to be stewards of their ad budgets, and to invest it wisely in marketing activities that drive real business outcomes for them, not vanity metrics reported on monthly spreadsheets.

Trust wins in the long term; and this brings us full circle to the first point – slow, wins. Trust is slow to build, but can be lost in an instant. If you invest in trust with your clients and partners, the pay off is over time; it’s not a lump sum pay-out, like one of the choices on a lottery ticket. Trust wins, and slow wins more. Earn it over time by building real relationships, even if short term metrics, and profits, are not as high.

Together, Everyone wins.

And finally, today, Democracy wins and decency wins. Hope and faith have hope again. Onward and upward for the United States of America, and for all citizens of humankind.

Feature Image Credit: STRF/STAR MAX/IPx

By Dr. Augustine Fou

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website.

I am a digital marketer of 25 years. Now I help marketers audit their digital campaigns for ad fraud that isn’t caught by widely used ad verification services.

I have witnessed the entire arc of the evolution of digital marketing, since the mid-90’s. I taught classes in digital strategy at NYU’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies and Rutgers University’s Center for Management Development.

I have worked on the “client side” for American Express, and on the “agency side” as Group Chief Digital Officer of Omnicom’s Healthcare Consultancy Group and SVP Digital Strategy Lead at McCann Worldgroup/MRM Worldwide. I started my career in New York City with McKinsey & Company.

Sourced from Forbes

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How Predictive Analytics Takes the Guesswork Out of Ad Performance

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By Heather Fletcher

Marketers should first determine why they’re optimizing ads at all

Everyone loves a sure thing, especially someone who’s paying for an ad.

In a world where many business leaders waste money on ads by going with their gut feelings or worse—collecting as much data as possible on ad audiences and inevitably targeting them with irrelevant advertisements—what are the best ways for performance marketers to use predictive analytics to optimize ads?

Performance marketers need to start by figuring out why they’re optimizing their ads at all.

Do they want to increase sales? Acquire customers? Accomplish some other goal? This seemingly simple step is where a lot of performance marketers go wrong. They collect all of the data they can instead of the data they should.

Imagine if Karen Heath from Teradata hadn’t wanted to help a retailer increase diaper sales in 1992. She may never have sought out the data showing that when men bought the high-margin item, they also bought beer. By placing beer and diapers together, the retailer’s sales rose.

This one finding for one retailer that resulted in product placement changes in 1992 eventually evolved into the more advanced predictive analytics that optimized multichannel marketing in 2011.

Now, in 2020, the practice is so advanced the basic definition of predictive analytics says it incorporates machine learning techniques.

Predictive analytics practitioner Helen Xiaoqin Yi, a data scientist at a major electronics retailer, suggested performance marketers use “predictive tools to create audience segments or explore new potential audiences” with algorithms like SVM, logistic regression or neural networks.

“Then we can analyse their preferences from the comments, reviews, social media, interactions with ads, events or any relevant campaigns, and design several plans for different segments,” Yi said.

Stephen H. Yu, president and chief consultant at Willow Data Strategy, advised that performance marketers figure out who should be targeted with which ad and through which channel before personalizing ads.

“A series of personas based on propensity modelling can be useful in determining the most optimal offer and creative for each target,” Yu said.

Devyani Sadh, CEO and chief data officer of Data Square, provided three possible segments:

  • Prospects: Identify top-performing prospect ad audience segments based on demographic and psychographic similarities, content preferences, and interests of known high-value customer “clones.”
  • Active customers: Model customers’ prior history along with a “similarity index” of others with similar purchase patterns to optimize ad content. Examples include cross-sell or the next logical product (concurrent or sequential)
  • At-risk or lapsed customers: Stage 1 is identifying those who are staged to attrition or already lapsed, but are likely to respond to an offer. Stage 2 is optimizing ad messaging for retargeting or other initiatives by predicting special offers and promotions most likely to resonate with this group, based on history.

Yi suggested launching a small test of several ad designs using different times of day, durations of exposure and placements in order to prove that the optimization worked.

Then, give credit where credit is due. Yu added that performance marketers need to make note of how well each element and channel worked. In other words, don’t default to blanket attribution.

For example, performance marketers will want to keep track of more than just ad placement. Within this one area alone, Sadh said performance marketers can “optimize ad placement by ranking top-performing platforms, affiliates, social media sites, websites, search engines and regions by extrapolating from navigation patterns, search, browsing behaviour and digital identities of known converters.”

But even a sure thing won’t be a sure thing forever. Just like how search engines regularly update algorithms, performance marketers will need to revisit the predictive analytics process to continue optimizing their ads. Sometimes, marketers will have to start from scratch.

Yi said program or campaign dashboards will tell performance marketers if they need to update the models they build based on the process.

“No matter what the results are, we should always summarize and learn from them to prepare for the next campaigns,” she said.

Feature Image Credit: Predictive tools can help brands form audience segments and gain new consumers. iStock

By Heather Fletcher

Sourced from ADWEEK

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