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In News

Advertising in Fashion Magazines is Dead to us Now

February 19, 2018 No Comments

Now? Fashion brands are meeting with social media influencers directly.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Hundreds of NY Fashion Week influencers were invited to a party specifically held to put them in front of brands that want some of the spotlight. The party was held by a company called Influence, which connects brands and influencers. Together, they create social campaigns that expand visibility and engage new audiences for brands. The influencer gets paid, and the brands get to reach audiences that they might not be able to access using other methods. Welcome to the “now” of fashion and brand marketing.

Influence is a sister company to the already-successful operation called Newswire. Newswire currently have an online portal that publishes thousands of press releases every day. Journalists and influencers can go straight to company news, by keyword or subject search. This means that they can get their news directly from the companies, rather than have the interaction brokered through a PR agency. This renders the traditional PR agency almost obsolete.

The way the PR industry is changing is similar to the way that fashion magazines are going. Teen magazines and fashion publications are no longer the huge, powerful entities that brokered deals between brands/fashion houses and their audiences. Now, it is the online fashion influencers who have huge sway with their fans, and brands can contact them directly. This circumvents the hugely expensive fashion magazines, whose circulations are falling dramatically.

As an example, a top YouTube fashion influencer is Chriselle Lim. Her channel is growing at a breakneck pace. Her videos reveal how to transform basic pieces of clothing into stylish apparel. Chriselle has support from global brands such as Target and Estee Lauder.

The change in the way brands and fashion are marketed has been incredibly rapid. Fashion magazines? Pah. Now Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube are the place to put brand marketing spend.

But back to the party. The event hosted hundreds of NY Fashion Week Influencers at Manhattan’s chic Sixty Soho Hotel. Influencers and brands from across the globe arrived to share in networking and developing opportunities for campaign partnerships that strengthen an Influencer’s channel and widen content reach for brands. The party was also used to promote Influence.com itself. And it worked, because here you are, reading about this new company.

Said Director of Influencer Marketing, Magnolia Sevenler, “Whether you are an influencer or marketer, the Influence by Newswire platform provides a community to build your campaigns.”

According to Sevenler, the platform has been well-received from both marketers and creators for its simplicity and reach. “It’s exciting to see all the positive feedback…as we enter a new era of marketing, where micro-influencers can be rewarded for their passions and brands can reach new untapped audiences.”

The company has plans to expand its network and add additional features to enhance users’ experience. And it is doing this all because the fashion magazine industry is destined for a papery grave. It’s time to move on, people, and bring your marketing spend with you.

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In News

Millennials Are Not All Alike (And They May Surprise You!)

February 9, 2018 No Comments

New research studying the millennials market has identified five unique subgroups.

A new research study from Zeldis Research Associates reveals surprising findings for marketers which belie the frequent mythology that Millennials are “all the same.”

Unlike many other market studies attempting to better understand Millennials as a single group, Zeldis researchers identified five Millennial segments based on income, attitudes, and other important factors. This “Seen One Millennial and You Haven’t Seen Them All” study is part of Zeldis’ ongoing investigation into how marketers can better reach and successfully engage this group.

“Despite a lot of the media coverage we hear, Millennials are not one homogenous group, unfortunately and incorrectly characterised by a few negative stereotypes such as lazy or entitled,” said Zeldis Executive Vice President Amy Rey. “Our research shows that there are important differences among Millennials. We wanted to dispel some of the myths and help marketers better understand the nuances that will help make Millennial-targeted outreach, products and messaging more effective.”

Five Identifiable Segments

Based on online interviews with 1000 Millennials aged 21-36, the Zeldis researchers identified five unique segments: Faithful Optimists (31% of the sample), Struggling Parents (23%), Secular Activists (22%) Tech-Savvy Independents (14%), and Pessimistic Conservatives (10%). Some of their findings include:

– Faithful Optimists, the largest segment, tend to be joyful, hardworking, dependable, and religious. They are more likely to be non-white and heterosexual.

– Struggling Parents tend to be pessimistic about their lives and about the country. They don’t pay much attention to politics or technology. They are more likely to be white women with children and tend to be less educated and from rural areas.

– Secular Activists are more likely to be politically liberal, and to be pessimistic about the country’s future. They tend to be single, childless, and secular and are more likely to be part of the LGBT community.

-Tech-Savvy Independents are more politically conservative but also environmentally conscious. Optimistic about the economy, this segment has a higher proportion of males and non-whites, and tends to be from urban locations.

– Pessimistic Conservatives, the smallest segment, are likely to be from suburban areas. They tend to be religious and politically conservative. Skewing male and non-white, they have high incomes but are pessimistic about their economic future.

Though holding some attitudes and beliefs in common with other segments, each group showed nuanced differences that the Zeldis researchers believe are important for companies to understand and apply when marketing their products.

The full results are available at ZeldisMillennialsStudy.com.

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In News

Content Marketing 2018: The Only Way Going Forward For New Age Marketers

February 5, 2018 No Comments

By RP Singh .

Content will be the new currency for marketers going forward if they have to survive in this huge marketplace.

Seth Godin says, “Content marketing is the only marketing left” and I am a firm believer of this statement. The way entire marketing ecosystem has evolved on last 3-4 years, there are some brave decisions required from marketers to survive the next few years. There are multiple reasons supporting the rise of content marketing, I have tried to classify them as Hard & Soft Factors, both equally important in their own right.

Hard Factors

Ad blocking
India is one of the leading countries when it comes to adoption of ad blockers. According to some reports, almost one third of users today have ad blockers installed on their devices. You will agree that these are evolved set of users, always a priority on marketers list to target. So, if they are watching ads, where do you go from here. You serve them content. Content that is useful. Useful can further be defined as Entertaining, Educational, Motivational, Relevant etc. Ad blocking is a global phenomenon today and doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon.

Reducing ad response rates
Forget ad blockers for a moment. Just compare performance of your advertising today with that of 3 years back. Is it generating same amount of response? The clutter is even more, users have more choices of consuming media which leads to lower performing advertising activities. The newer generations are not interested in advertising, period. The only way to get them along is to provide them with something they care about, something they like, something they consume. Everything that goes to a consumer apart from core product or service can be content marketing opportunity for brands.

Mass targeting is a thing of past
Are you still targeting consumers like Males, 18-35, living in a Metro? No, right? You would rather segment your users beyond demographics. And today, technology allows you to know much about them. So, when you target them almost 1-on-1, you will need a lot content, in different formats. Gone are the days of mass targeting and mass messaging, especially when you have sophisticated technology platforms at your disposal to target individual users.

Blurring Media lines
The lines between Owned, Paid & Earned media are blurring day by day and which medium will become your key distribution platform, based on how consumers take it, is something which cannot be predicted with accuracy today. The key implication of this is that marketers need to create content which can be distributed across Paid, Owned & Earned channels. Needless to mention that you will need variety of content to suit the medium because ‘one content fits all’ will not work anymore.

Soft Factors

Mobile generation
Marketers will need a lot of mobile first or mobile friendly content. The uber mobile users today require snack-able content which can’t be done using your existing assets as they were not created keeping ‘mobile screen’ and ‘mobile behaviour’ in mind. Marketers will need to create, for example, vertical content rather than horizontal to appeal to ‘mobile only’ users. They will need to create ephemeral content for these users who are available on platforms like Snapchat etc.

Newer tech needs content
We have all seen the emergence of newer platforms such as AI, AR, VR etc. What do you deliver to your users using these all-new platforms? You will need a different & newer kind of content. You can’t still serve ads through these platforms meant for content consumption. If your customer outreach strategy involves use of any such technologies, you will need more and more content to satisfy the need of content on these platforms.

Role of Search engines
Search engine algorithms are changing more often now as compared to the past. Having relevant content on your destinations will provide a new competitive advantage to marketers in terms of SEO. Almost all search engines give high ranking to content heavy pages, after all they are all content aggregators at the end of the day.

Complicated buyer journey
Consumer purchase journey was never so complicated. We all love to see, compare, review online before buying anything today. The sales cycles are complex and marketers need different type of content at different stages of path to purchase. They can’t be delivering ‘sales oriented’ content in the awareness stage for a consumer. This phenomenon is even more critical for B2B business where sales cycles are usually very long.

Rise of influencers
We all know how important are the influencers in this Social Media driven marketing world. There are large & micro influencers which a lot of new age users refer to for various decisions related to brands. Marketers have started engaging these influencers for distributing their brand related messaging and these influencers will need content as the social currency to distribute to their own respective followers.

Content will be the new currency for marketers going forward if they have to survive in this huge marketplace. Thankfully, some marketers have already taken initial steps and are learning as they go along, but they will be far ahead of the curve soon if other do not follow the suit.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in the article above are those of the authors’ and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of this publishing house. Unless otherwise noted, the author is writing in his/her personal capacity. They are not intended and should not be thought to represent official ideas, attitudes, or policies of any agency or institution.

By RP Singh

Sourced from BW Business World

In News

Marketers Plan To Increase Spending On Branded Videos Created By Publishers

January 31, 2018 No Comments

By Alex Weprin

Marketers looking to spend money on video advertising are likely to increase spending on branded videos created in conjunction with publishers this year, and are showing less enthusiasm for traditional 30 second pre-roll video ads.

Those takeaways come from a study by Trusted Media Brands, which examined the state of video advertising in 2018 through its “Digital Video Outlook” survey.

The survey was conducted by Advertiser Perceptions, with respondents including about 300 digital media decision-makers in the Advertiser Perceptions Omnibus Panel.

According to the survey, 35% of respondents said they plan to increase spending on the creation and distribution of branded videos over the next 12 months, compared to 28% that say they plan to increase spending on pre-, mid- and post-roll video ads.

The push for publisher partners is closely related to the widespread problem of brand safety, with 39% of respondents citing that concern as the top reason for partnering with publishers on branded video. Expertise in content creation was the second most popular reason, chosen by 33% of respondents.

By Alex Weprin

Sourced from MediaPost

In News

6 ways ad agencies can thrive in an AI-first world

January 17, 2018 No Comments

By Frederick Vallaeys

Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) will change the way search marketers do business. In the latest article in his multipart series on PPC and AI, columnist Frederick Vallaeys shares his strategies for keeping your agency successful in a world of AI-first PPC.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning have long been part of PPC — so why are AI and machine learning all of a sudden such hot topics? It is, in part, because exponential advances have now brought technology to the point where it can legitimately compete with the performance and precision of human account managers.

I recently covered the new roles humans should play in PPC as automation takes over. In this post, I’ll offer some ideas for what online marketing agencies should consider doing to remain successful in a world of AI-driven PPC management.

[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]

By Frederick Vallaeys

Sourced from Marketing Land

In News

Content Conversations: Top Content Marketing Lessons Learned in 2017

December 7, 2017 No Comments

By Ashley Zeckman

It doesn’t matter if you are a team of one or a team of one hundred, outside insights can be incredibly valuable for improving your approach to content marketing.

Since we know you’re likely busy working, wrapping up 2017 and planning for 2018, we’re here to help. Recently we had the chance to sit down (or stand up?) for some great content conversations with some of today’s top marketers.

Below you’ll find their top content lessons learned in 2017 as well as how you can apply these insights to your own content marketing approach.

Don’t Be Afraid to Take Risks

In a profession with so many moving parts and fast-paced changes, it can be easy to become risk averse. The problem is, if you don’t take risks to create great, more impactful content, your competition will, and your audience will follow.

Content risks don’t have to mean completely changing your approach. It can be slight tweaks and tests along the way to improve performance and innovate.

Ann Handley
Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs

“More marketers are getting comfortable taking risks because sometimes our very best work comes out of us taking a risk.” @annhandley tweet this

Ask Yourself:

What are some small risks that you can begin taking today to improve your approach to content marketing?
How can you work testing new content approaches into your routine?
What can you learn from other marketers that are having success with innovation?

Make Owned Content a Cornerstone

It’s no secret that social networks and content on 3rd party websites are a great way to attract your audience. Ultimately though, these approaches should be used as a means to draw people to owned content on your website.

Social algorithms change constantly and you’ll find that if you put the majority of your efforts into building relationships on those platforms, you can lose that audience faster than you gained it.

Joe Pulizzi
Author & Keynote Speaker

“Use social media platforms to get your audience to your own content so you create a direct connection.” @joepulizzi tweet this

Ask Yourself:

Which platforms are currently the biggest drivers of audience members to your owned content?
How can social networks and other credible websites become part of your strategy for driving visitors to your website?

Focus on Quality Content

As more and more brands become publishers, that means that a huge influx of content has been hitting the search results and inboxes of your target customers. Unfortunately, a lot of what is out there is not at the level of quality that it needs to be to provide value.

That means, customers are becoming overwhelmed by crappy content and are in dire need of quality content created for them by marketers who understand their top needs.

Chris Brogan
CEO, Owner Media Group

“There should be a big, wide-open playing field for marketers that are passionate and make real business happen.” @chrisbrogan tweet this

Ask Yourself:

What would it take to create high-quality content on a consistent basis?
Should content quantity be reduced in order to focus on impact?
Can your team truly identify the difference between low and high-quality content?

Pay Attention to Distribution

All too often, content distribution and amplification are either ignored, or treated as an afterthought when creating content. At the end of the day, we are marketers that are responsible for the performance of the content that we creates which means giving distribution the time and attention it deserves.

Alexandra Rynne
Content Marketing Manager – Marketing Solutions, LinkedIn

“Give your content room to breathe and focus on what works and what doesn’t so you can approach it better next time.” @amrynnie tweet this

Ask Yourself:

Are you creating content for content’s sake or is your content tied to business objectives?
How can you give content distribution and amplification the same attention as creation?
Are you documenting which forms of content distribution are effective? And which ones aren’t?

Eliminate Marketing Buzzwords

It doesn’t matter if you create content for a B2C or B2B audience, the key is connecting with people. When marketers focus on creating product, solutions or services based content, they’re ignoring the true needs of their audience.

Buying audiences don’t care about marketing buzzwords, they want to know what problems you can help them solve. This requires creating a true connection and providing honest and helpful content based on what their top needs are.

Tim Washer
Writer & Producer, Cisco

“Instead of trying to change what people say, we need to change how people think.” @timwasher tweet this

Ask Yourself:

Is our content focused on the message we want to send or the true needs of our customers?
How much do we actually know about what our target audience wants and needs?

Invest in Dedicated Content Marketing Staff

You wouldn’t hire a plumber to do your drywall or a professor to act as an electrician. The same can be said for your marketing team. While there are some marketers that can fulfill multiple roles, now more than ever it’s critical to work with a dedicated content marketing staff.

That can mean hiring full-time resources in-house and/or partnering with an agency that has expertise in your industry.

Dayna Rothman
VP of Marketing & Sales Development, BrightFunnel

“One of the most important things your team needs is a dedicated resource to run content.” @dayroth tweet this

Ask Yourself:

Who in my organization is truly responsible for content?
Are we setting content teams up for success?
Do we need outside help to scale our content marketing program?

Document Your Content Strategy

While we are seeing a 1-2% increase each year in marketers who have a documented content strategy, we are still nowhere near to 50%. Your content strategy should be your guide for all content you create and serve as an anchor point if your team ever starts to get off track.

Without a documented strategy, it is MUCH more difficult to meet business objectives and make a case for content’s place within your organization.

Chris Moody
Content Marketing Leader, GE Digital

“Your content strategy is the single most important document you’ll create. It’ll make you more productive and it’ll be used internally on a regular basis.” @cnmoody tweet this

What Content Lesson Did You Learn in 2017?

If we are going to move forward and improve content in 2018, it’s essential to reflect on what we’ve learned in 2017. Some lessons are easy and others are plagued with difficulty. As you reflect on the past year, think about your biggest content lesson learned. Feel free to share in the comments below!

Disclosure: BrightFunnel is a TopRank Marketing client.

By Ashley Zeckman

Sourced from TopRank Marketing

In News

To Engage Employees, Steal This Idea from Top Brands Like Jaguar, Absolut and Mastercard

November 27, 2017 No Comments

By Alison Davis.

Marketers are using this strategy to combat clutter. How to leverage the concept for employee engagement

Ask any marketer what keeps him up at night, and he’ll respond as Raja Rajamannar, chief marketing officer for Mastercard, did in a recent Adweek article: “It’s more and more difficult to succeed through traditional advertising. With the amount of clutter you’ve got to cut through . . . and the attention span of the consumer going down, how do you get past that hurdle and inspire consumers?”

Companies face the same problem when trying to engage employees in the organization–in understanding and supporting the business strategy, change and even topics like pay and benefits. Employees are so busy and so overloaded with information that they often skim through communication or even skip what doesn’t seem immediately relevant.

The result? Employee miss even critical information. As a result, they don’t feel deeply invested in the organization and don’t feel connected or understand how their work contributes to the company’s success.

To conquer this challenge, organizations need to adopt the same strategy that top brands use to create a meaningful, memorable bond with their products and services. That strategy is known in the advertising world as “experiential marketing.”

For brands, this means that rather than “looking at consumers as passive receivers of messages,” marketers involve consumers–in an in-person event, in an online activity (like creating or sharing content) or in a combination of experiences in which the consumer actively participates.

For example, Adweek describes how Jaguar created a virtual reality high-speed car chase that put consumers in the driver’s seat. And to launch its new caramel flavor, M&M’s transformed a dozen billboards in New York City’s Times Square into an augmented reality arcade where people could play games via their smart phones.

Here’s how one expert–Bryan Icenhower, president of the agency IMG Live, describes the power of experiential marketing: “What takes traditional advertising weeks, months or years to do, we can do in a moment. Experiential is a uniquely fast and effective way to build brand awareness through one-to-one connections with consumers. It engages all five senses, sparking emotions that form lasting memories which have been shown to drive brand loyalty.”

How do you apply the principles of experiential marketing to employee engagement? Here are five ways to start:

Rethink your objectives. Rather than focusing on providing “news” and other information, shift to involving your employees. Of course you want to give people access to information, but what employees need most today is the opportunity to connect–with leaders, their manager and each other. That means they need events and forums to come together both in person and virtually.
Turn every large-group meeting from one way to participative. Since you’ve wasted too many hours snoozing through presentations, I don’t have to tell you how most internal conferences and summits are deadly dull. It’s such a waste of time and money to bring people together, only to bore the heck out of them. Instead, use the power of participation to not only make the event memorable, but also to gather feedback, generate ideas and solve problems.
Give employee town hall meetings a major makeover. I spend a lot of time trying to understand why town halls have become so predictably static. Is there some kind of conspiracy going on that causes leaders to use dense slides to present too many details and to limit employee involvement to a short, stilted Q&A session? It’s actually easy to use today’s technology (like text polling) or best-practice facilitation methods to transform town halls into true experiences.
Unleash the power of play. One of the reasons experiential marketing is such a phenomenon is that people want to be involved in experiences that are interesting, stimulating and fun. And heaven knows that, in today’s stress-packed work environment, we need a lot more fun. Plus, according to Psychology Today, play has meaningful benefits like boosting creativity and building relationships. To introduce play, facilitate collaborative games and interactive exercises online.
Activate internal social media. Many companies have introduced some kind of social platform, but most still struggle with the role of online networking in their organizations. My short answer: social media provides an effective way to encourage employee participation. In fact, it offers the key to changing the dynamic from one-way communication to everybody into the sharing-and-connecting pool. Social media requires care and feeding; it’s not a matter of “build it and they will come.” But, especially if employees can participate on their smart phones, social media has tremendous potential to involve employees.

By now, I’m sure you’re getting the idea: Follow marketers’ lead by transforming the employee experience from passive recipients to active participants.

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Alison Davis

Founder and CEO, Davis & Company@alisonbdavis

Sourced from Inc.

In News

Strategies Most Marketers Misunderstood In Influencer Marketing

November 24, 2017 No Comments

By avita dcosta.

Many brands are also switching from celebrity endorsements to influencers, as it becomes and increasingly powerful marketing channel for marketers. But it’s easy to make mistakes, so how do you avoid them?

Influencer Marketing has become one of the most powerful tools in a marketing teams’ toolkit today. In 2016 Salesforce’s Paradot claimed thay 86% of marketers are already using some form of influencer marketing to reach consumers. And research shows that is probably going to continue, why?

People no longer trust the brands. A lot of us are no longer influenced by these traditional marketing techniques and increasingly we are more likely to turn to people we trust and respect – our peers. Truth be told, 74% of consumers identify word-of-mouth as a key influencer in their purchasing decisions, and influencer marketing can be a highly effective way to drive sales. It is no wonder that marketers are increasingly embracing it to achieve their business’ goals and objectives.

I’ve outlined the most common influencer marketing mistakes I’ve seen that you should steer clear of in order to be successful:

Fail to understand the audience

Your audience is your critic, if they want your product, they will be your customers. You will never be able to create a long-term and effective influencer marketing strategy if you don’t know your audience/customer. Marketers who have not yet flourished a genuine marketing personality are suggested to place their programs on hold until they understand who are their customers and what are their interests in order to achieve and interaction with the brand. It is to be noted that marketers need to understand purchasing habits, demographic information, pinpoints and psychographic information in order to create a marketing persona and conventionally, all of these statistics can be gathered through customers’ reviews.

Using Influencer Marketing in the wrong influencers/channel

Your marketing would not work unless you are working with the right influencer for your campaign. Influencer marketing is not identically effective across all channel, niche, and the target audience. If you are promoting a beauty product, much recommended working with YouTube Influencers since it is much effective in videos than a plain picture of your product and a post on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.

Expecting results in a short period of time

If you have just started doing the influencer marketing, you cannot just expect a good result in just one snap. In some cases, for a powerful influencer, marketing campaigns can produce results overnight. But mostly and especially for brands and companies that are not using E-commerce, Influencer Marketing should take time to effect. Trust and patience are advisable. It is to be noted that effective influencer campaigns help the improvement of brand awareness. When a candidate is aware of your brand, they will still need to undergo the process of your marketing funnel, the consideration and decision making stages before performing the purchase. So yes, it takes time to get the results.

Forgot to use the Analytics

Using analytics is one of the most accurate ways to get updated and determine whether your influencer marketing is effective or sat to say, ineffective. Monitoring and measuring the performance of your campaign is required in all types of platforms, from there, you will be able to know which part of your marketing campaign needs to be improved. You can find lots of platforms online that can help you measure your campaign insights and progress.

Failure in conveying expectations with your influencers

Upon working with influencers, it is much important to construct your expectations clearly. You should give your influencers a summary that includes the goals and objectives of your campaign. Collecting and including the marketing personal you have collected will help your influencers to become more successful. You may also want to include analytics information that you find valuable when marketing to the target audience.

Focused on the wrong KPIs

Influencer marketing is a powerful marketing method, but everything in this world has its own limits. Marketers need to ensure that they are using influencer marketing the right way. It is advised to focus on the KPIs which fits your brand, product, and activity, don’t just focus on getting sales, start being genuine! An influencer marketing campaign designed to influence KPIs related to bottom-of-the-funnel behaviors is not generally perfect.

Avoided this strategy because you failed “once”

Just because you failed once in this marketing strategy doesn’t mean you should give up. Marketers don’t just quit marketing because one of their marketing campaigns was not successful. Instead of quitting, if you have failed, use that failure to improve your marketing. You must understand why did the campaign fail so that you could implement better strategies and ideas the next time you set an influencer marketing campaign. Remember: Failures are one of the challenges you will face upon entering Influencer Marketing and learning from it is the key to success.

Neglected the call to action

Before you launch your campaign, make sure you have considered this question: Where should my audience click to take action upon engaging with my I.M. content?

If you planned to drive traffic to your website using I.M, make sure to construct a webpage that will allow your visitors to utilize the next action. Importantly, make sure to test the constructed web page if it is perfectly working and responsive both on mobile and PCs. Associating the call to action with an I.M. campaign and securing that it is optimized for your target are keys to success with I.M.

Chosen an inappropriate agency to manage influencer relationship

Influencer marketing has become affected and is on top of the line. Marketing agencies are also crawling and offer I.M. services. But guess what, not all of these agencies have valuable experience with I.M. strategies, I mean they do have a bit, but not on its deep understanding. Therefore, they can not make your marketing successful. Be sure to choose an agency that has experience working with influencer marketing methods that are related to your business.

Misapprehension of Influencer Marketing process

If you wanted to start influencer marketing, make sure to learn what is the process and activities involve on this strategy. This will guide you to your success.

On creating a successful influencer marketing campaign, it is important that you understand your audience. Make sure that you have properly given your influencers a summary of your expectations and think carefully on which steps to choose for your marketing campaign. Note: Success cannot be achieved immediately, hard work, perseverance is needed to taste the born fruit of your hard work.

By avita dcosta

Sourced from Digital Doughnut

In News

What Can Modern Marketers Learn From Advertisers of the Past?

November 21, 2017 No Comments

By Andrew Medal.

I was chatting with a marketing friend the other day, and he was telling me how much he loves watching Mad Men, not just for the entertainment value, but to see how advertisers used to conduct business and the creative process Don Draper and his team used to go through for each project. Fun side note: a lot of the commercials that aired during the show were commercials from that time. It was a great show, exploring everything from changing gender roles and racial issues in the ’60s to the bold, in-your-face advertising tactics that dominated marketing at the time.

While modern digital marketing has changed drastically from tools created with adtech (check out these 10 adtech trends to keep an eye out for), programmatic, machine learning, native advertising, data-driven granular targeting and the coveted “growth hacking,” some highly effective advertising methods from the old days have remained

Fifty years ago, advertising was a one-way conversation. Without the web to provide information and context, brands were free to create their own reality and to tell customers what to think about their brands. Campaigns were written around a catchy slogan and marketing materials, packaging and media supported the manufactured brand vision.

How consumer perception has changed

Well, hold on to your fedoras Mad Men fans, because that type of branding still works. “Aspirational advertising” is today’s modern version of that in-your-face, one-way conversational advertising. Yes, it may be more subtle, but it still works by gently coaxing you to improve your class by purchasing “better” brands.

Nathan Linder, the co-founder of IDW, a modern advertising agency, explains how some things have changed, and some have remained. “Today’s digital age has disrupted every product category and marketplace. The products and services that were once commonplace, such as travel agents, have now moved to services like Expedia and Travelocity,” he says.

The changes, of course, extend to advertising. Consumers can easily research every claim, consult reviews from people they will never meet and even research the origin of ingredients from the food they consume. Increasingly, consumers are more interested in fine details: Is this product GMO, from a fair trade source, made in America

With every aspect of their product line available for criticism, brands have to work even harder to sell their brand vision — without appearing to do so. Given the way things have changed, it is a little surprising that antiquated methods of brand reinforcement are still effective.

“In the advertising and marketing industry, some age-old tactics that continue to be worth their weight in gold include product placement and retail merchandising,” Linder says. “These tactics continue to be where the rubber meets the road for consumer packaged goods players. While TV, web, social and billboard continue to remain relevant, getting products within the ‘arm’s reach of desire’ is the moment of truth for CPG brands such as Coca-Cola and others, all who follow aspirational marketing.”

What it means for brands

Successful brands are still building successful campaigns around carefully crafted brand vision, and customers are still buying in for as long as the company and the product live up to the message. “Authenticity in marketing and advertising is when a brand lives up to all of its promises: quality, customer service, pricing, and when this happens brands win consumer loyalty,” shares Ryan Williams, founder of Industry Threadworks.

Everything about the brand must be consistent across all channels. From tweets to in-store displays, from customer service employees to employees social accounts, brands must control the message, and act quickly when the public perception is betrayed.

In the heyday of Mad Men, when hydration was more dependent on bourbon than on imported water, and customer loyalty was unshakeable, companies could convince customers of anything. All they needed was trust, and consumers were willing to give it. Advanced technology and the abuse of that trust has made today’s customer’s skeptical. Today’s companies have to work harder to earn that trust and work harder to retain it. The same traditional brand-building tactics are still in play, but have simply aged with the times.

Feature Image Credit: Michael Yarish/AMC

By Andrew Medal.

Andrew Medal is the founder of creative digital agency Agent Beta. He has helped organizations as varied as the California Education Department, Proctor & Gamble, Microsoft and Warner Bros. He has proven results for Fortune 500 to venture-backed startups by developing software and driving growth. Medal volunteers inside prison institutions with the Last Mile, where he empowers inmates with front-end web development skills. Join his book club on Instagram, and sign up to receive pre-sale alerts about his next book titled, Welcome to Prison Whitey: The Hilarious Factual Prison Tale of an Entrepreneur from the ‘Burbs.

Sourced from Entrepreneur

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Survey results: Here’s what 376 marketers say is working in online marketing

August 16, 2017 No Comments

By Jayson DeMers

Wondering about the current state of the industry? Columnist Jayson DeMers shares highlights and stats from a recent survey of digital marketers.

For entrepreneurs and startup founders looking for new ways to grow their businesses, there’s no shortage of information on the “whats” and “hows” of digital marketing.

For the past decade, I’ve done my best to provide even more information in those categories, helping entrepreneurs with everything from the basics of building an online presence to advanced tactics in categories like SEO.

But it’s also important to zoom out, beyond the strategies and tactics, so we can understand the “whys” behind marketing — as well as where it’s headed and when.

Last year, I attempted to answer these questions with an original survey I called “What Works in Online Marketing,” and I walked away with some interesting revelations about the state of the industry. Now that it’s a year old, I figured it was time to redistribute the survey and find out exactly where we stand today.

You can download the entire report here (registration required), but below, I’d like to highlight some of the most interesting findings from the survey and discuss what they mean for your business.

Survey methods

The survey itself was fairly simple. It comprised a number of questions regarding the use and effectiveness of multiple different online marketing strategies, including content marketing, SEO, social media marketing and link building.

We distributed the survey to 376 people, most of whom are professional marketers or business owners, and collected the results for analysis. There was a fairly equal distribution of participants by age, gender and position.

This year’s most important takeaways

So, what did we learn about the state of online marketing? These were some of the biggest takeaways:

Attitudes haven’t changed dramatically. Compared to last year, attitudes about marketing haven’t changed much one way or another. As you’ll see, marketers still feel good about the strategies they’re using, and they are investing in different tactics (such as SEO, content marketing and social media marketing) in similar patterns. There haven’t been many disruptive events to force people into new paradigms and new strategies, nor have there been any big scares or economic disruptions to curb the power of marketing.
People are ready to spend more on marketing. Nearly 45 percent of marketers are planning to increase their marketing budgets this year, with another 30 percent of responders planning to keep their budgets the same. That means 75 percent of respondents are keeping their budgets the same or increasing them, compared to less than 25 percent who are planning to decrease their budgets. This is a sign of overall economic growth, potentially, but it’s also important to recognize it as a sign that most marketers are finding success.
Marketers are clueless when it comes to ROI. But how are those marketers defining success? Return on investment (ROI), arguably the single most important metric for gauging the profitability of a campaign, remains elusive for many marketers to measure. For each core online marketing strategy, we asked marketers what type of ROI they were seeing—and the top answer for nearly every strategy was “not sure.” The only strong exception to this rule was social media marketing, which 44 percent of marketers saw a positive ROI for. Otherwise, either marketers aren’t measuring their ROI rates consistently, or they don’t know how to do it.
Facebook is king, but Instagram is rising. As you might have predicted, Facebook remains the most popular social media platform, both in terms of the number of marketers using it and in terms of the ROI those marketers are seeing from it. Over 88 percent of respondents are using Facebook, and 53 list it as their top-ROI platform. However, Instagram is also rising in importance, jumping to become the second-most popular social platform for marketers (excepting YouTube). With 95 percent of marketers planning to keep or increase their social media budgets, social media marketing is likely to stay around for a while.
Optimism reigns. Finally, optimism in the online marketing community is high. Overall, marketers are increasing budgets, but they’re also increasing budgets for most specific strategies, including SEO, content marketing, link building, influencer marketing and social media. They’re happy with the results they’re getting, and they’re predicting that the strategies they use are going to stick around for a long time. For example, when asked if they thought SEO would ever become universally impractical, unprofitable or otherwise useless, 32 percent said “maybe, but it’s unlikely,” making it the top response. Only 22 percent gave some kind of “yes” answer, and 17 percent said “no, never.”

Where are we headed?

Between any two points, you can draw a straight line. With the information from this year’s survey in conjunction with information from last year’s survey, we can predict what’s going to unfold over the course of the next year.

Personally, I look forward to seeing more enthusiasm and more investment in online marketing overall. The more people we have working in the industry, the more innovation we’ll collectively drive, and the more information we’ll have to collectively work with.

By Jayson DeMers

Sourced from Marketing Land