Mediastreet
Tag

marketing

Browsing
In News

4 Ways to Automate and Streamline Your Marketing With Advanced Tech

No Comments

By Frank Landman

When marketing becomes too much to handle, most businesses assume that they need to hire an employee or outsource to a contractor. But don’t be so quick to grow your payroll. It’s possible that you could automate many of these tasks with streamlined digital solutions.

4 Powerful Ways to Automate Your Marketing

By its very nature, marketing is an activity of scale. In order to successfully build up your business and grow your brand, you have to get in front of as many people as possible. But if you’re trying to handle all of your marketing efforts manually, you’re probably exhausted. There’s simply too much for any one person (or department) to handle alone. And this is where automation comes into play.

Automation – which is basically the strategic combination of software, applications, and artificial intelligence to streamline time-consuming processes and produce results at scale – is a powerful tool that is not deployed nearly enough by small businesses and growing brands. But if you can pick the right spots to automate your marketing, it could change everything.

Whether you’re nursing a small start-up or you have a booming business that’s bursting at the seams, the following solutions could provide exactly what you need at this precise moment in your company’s life:

1. Automate Email Campaigns

Did you know that more than 68 percent of businesses spend seven days or more on the production of just a single email? (It takes 14 percent of businesses a month or longer to push out an email!)

Or did you know that most companies are in the process of producing between one and five emails at a time?

We’ll let you do the math…but that’s a lot of time spent building and sending emails. And yet nobody is denying the value of email. So the question becomes, how do you automate your email campaigns so that you can enjoy the benefits without unnecessarily wasting hundreds or thousands of man-hours each year?

One answer is to leverage an email marketing platform that allows you to use automations and triggers to streamline these touchpoints. Any major email marketing platform is going to have similar features, but we’ll use a tool called ActiveCampaign to illustrate how effective this can be.

Within the ActiveCampaign platform, you can create individual campaigns that are automatically managed using “triggers.” A trigger is any event that your business can track – like subscribes, unsubscribes, form submissions, email opens, web pages visited, links clicked, purchases made, or specific dates (like a birthday or customer anniversary).

Once one of these triggers is “tripped,” you can create an automated email sequence that’s sent out to that user. This sequence can include anywhere from one message to a dozen or more (sent out at predetermined times and intervals).

Once you draft the email copy and create the campaign, it all happens automatically…at scale. Whether you have 10 people on your email list or 100,000, everything happens flawlessly. It can literally save you thousands of hours every year.

2. Automate Content Promotion

Content promotion is another time-consuming element of marketing that we hear a lot of people complain about. And while it is time-consuming, it can be automated without much effort. You simply have to develop a plan and create the right processes on the front end.

Here’s one dead-simple process you can replicate:

  • Step 1: Sign up for a social media management tool like Buffer or Hootsuite, which allows you to manage all of your accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.) from one place.
  • Step 2: Create an account for a tool called Zapier. This is an automation service that makes it easy to connect apps and create powerful automated workflows. It works great for marketing and content promotion.
  • Step 3: Create an automation process (called a “Zap”) that connects your blog’s RSS feed to your Buffer or Hootsuite account. Optimize it so that your blog post is shared to each of your social networks every time the RSS feed refreshes with a new blog post.

That’s just one example of how you can automate content promotion using Zapier. There are literally dozens of other ways to spread your content without lifting a finger. If you haven’t explored these opportunities yet, you’re doing yourself a disservice.

3. Automate Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is the lifeblood of successful companies. Unfortunately, most businesses don’t collect enough data to produce meaningful insights and takeaways. And of the companies that do, just a small percentage are able to make sense of the data they collect. Automating customer feedback and analysis could be a vital decision for your business moving forward.

There are plenty of ways to automate your feedback loops, but we’ll touch on just a couple. The first approach is to use an advanced SMS text survey software like Delighted to procure instant customer feedback in a convenient and streamlined process. Here’s how it works:

  • You craft a simple survey within the Delighted platform and initiate a campaign.
  • Each customer receives the survey in an SMS format.
  • Customers reply with a numerical score to each question.
  • The Delighted platform responds with a free-form follow-up question.
  • Customers can provide a more detailed explanation in their own words.
  • Data is organized for easy analysis.

If you have a Zapier account, you can trigger surveys to be sent out after specific actions are completed in a customer’s lifecycle.

You may also find it helpful to automate feedback related to customer churn. (This is especially important for subscription businesses that rely on customer retention to sustain revenue.) There are tools that can be leveraged to send out exit surveys any time a customer cancels a subscription and/or fails to upgrade from a free trial. These surveys won’t do anything to keep the customer, but they can give you a good idea of why people are leaving.

A third option is to automate your feedback analysis by using a “customer sentiment” tool. Services like MonkeyLearn can “read” your feedback and effortlessly organize all responses into general theme-based buckets. This lets you identify and group common pain points, which makes it easier to track customer sentiment and address pressing issues as quickly as possible.

4. Automate Lead Generation

You might assume that automation stops at lead generation, but you’d be wrong. While there are certain aspects of lead generation that can’t be handled by an algorithm, this list is growing smaller by the year. Thanks to advanced technology and artificial intelligence, lead generation automation is more practical than it’s ever been.

Chatbots are among the fastest-growing technologies in this niche of advanced tech. They can be used to automate and enhance the overall customer experience by increasing engagement and initiating high-value touchpoints that would otherwise go ignored.

One of the more impressive use cases for chatbots involves the use of Facebook’s native Messenger platform. Because regardless of how much experience you have or what type of skills you possess, you can create interactive chatbots with no coding required.

Facebook chatbots are basically automated customer service agents/sales reps that empower your business to engage with Facebook prospects at scale. And while you’re probably not going to close deals on Facebook Messenger, these bots are excellent “setters.” They can indoctrinate prospects into the funnel and provide a steady flow of pre-qualified leads to your actual sales team.

Here are some examples of powerful ways you can leverage Facebook Messenger chatbots to assist with lead generation:

  • Blast out content and share it with your most loyal followers
  • Conduct quick webinar signups and get people to show up to live events
  • Automate your drip campaigns and nurture leads
  • Send out appointment and event reminders so that people never miss an engagement
  • Provide powerful customer service (including answering FAQs and giving out directions)

As mentioned, you can build your own bots for free (and it’s relatively easy for anyone to learn). Rather than having to code, you simply create logical workflows that operate on an if/then basis. These bots can take some time to build (depending on how intricate you want to go), but will ultimately save time when deployed on a large-scale basis.

Reduce Bloat With Automation

Automation can’t solve everything, but it can provide relief in areas where you need it most. Advanced technology, like the solutions outlined in this article, prevents bloat and allows you to scale without having to continually add more people to the payroll. It’s an efficient way to manage resources and grow in a timely and sustainable manner that respects both the brand and the bottom line.

You don’t have to implement each of these solutions today, but it would be wise to take action as soon as possible. Pick one area where you stand to improve the most and put that strategy to work.

Then, once you have that piece in place, move on to another one. It’s through this diplomatic yet proactive approach that you’ll find results.

By Frank Landman

Frank is a freelance journalist who has worked in various editorial capacities for over 10 years. He covers trends in technology as they relate to business.

Sourced from readwrite

Read More
By
In News

How creativity can drive business results: Adobe, Lego, Unilever, IBM and Diageo will show the way

No Comments

By amit bapna

A year on from Covid-19’s first lockdowns, nations and economies seem to have better control and growth is on the mind as a semblance of recovery is in sight, particularly in Asia Pacific.

Even within this chaotic situation, the region has shown signs of faster recovery than many other parts of the world and are even providing learnings to other parts of the world on how best to navigate through the challenges. While that is heartening news, it also leads to the question on how ready are brands from a creative standpoint to navigate this new and emerging reality?

To help marketers unravel this critical puzzle, The Drum and Adobe have put together a power-packed panel with senior representatives from formidable brands like Lego, Unilever, IBM and Diageo. These top brand leaders will come together for a 60-minute session with live Q&A and deep-dive into the key challenges that the marketers and creatives are facing in producing content that engages customers as well as connects with them, at scale.

The session will discuss how a good mix of talent and technology can help in unlocking the answers to these challenges and allow collaboration to thrive in a new hybrid way of working. It will also look at the following key themes:

  • The changes that the brands have had to navigate and adapt to since the pandemic began
  • ​The evolving creative approaches
  • Raising the role of creativity in driving business goals
  • The emerging face of creative collaboration in the new world

The discussion, on 21 April 2021, will be moderated by Charlotte McEleny, The Drum’s Asia Pacific publisher, who will be joined by Michael Stoddart, director, strategic business development (APAC) at Adobe, Grace Astari Italiaander, creative lead – innovation at Diageo, Primus Nair Manokaran, head of creative at The LEGO Agency (APAC), Kartik Chandrasekhar, global brand vice president of Lifebuoy at Unilever and Isabella Bain, sales and creative associate director at IBM.

By amit bapna

Sourced from The Drum

Read More
By
In News

We Need More Empathy in Marketing Right Now

No Comments

By Pat Timmons

McDonald’s and GoFundMe do it well

In today’s digital world, we are constantly bombarded with noise, information and marketing, making it near impossible to remember every message that you scroll past on social media. However, if they do it right, you remember what those brands made you feel.

People do not want to be sold to.  They want to feel safe. They want to feel heard. They want to feel some sense of normalcy.

No industry practices empathy marketing better than the music industry.

Think about the latest album that you listened to on repeat. What made you love that music so much? Most likely the campaign, music or artist made you feel something. The artist and their team use empathy to relate to their target audiences, and they frame the music in a way that makes the album/single super relevant to their audience. Even in music, there are campaign best practices. There is no one end-all-be-all growth hack to make a song soar to the charts. What made artists successful was their ability to connect with their audience on an emotional, intimate and meaningful level.

For example, Justin Bieber put out a song called “Lonely” this year, and it spent 23 weeks on Billboard’s Global 200 Chart and peaked at Number 5. Bieber used vulnerability to share his own story and empathy to connect with us all on a deeper level.

So how does this translate to brands? How can brands embody empathy to build trust with their audiences? Here are recent examples of brands doing it well:

McDonald’s has been leaning into the most impactful emotion there is: nostalgia, making us crave their experience as we scroll through social. Something as obscure and random as popping the buttons on a soda lid conjures up the emotions associated with McDonalds, e.g., road trips, memories with friends, etc.

GoFundMe felt the fear and anger of the world as cases of hate crimes toward the Asian American & Pacific Islander community surged. They did not simply make a statement, but they also used their platform to build the AAPI Community Relief Fund to create a centralized resource for people to turn to and support. They felt the universal emotions of fear and anger and acted upon it with empathy.

Webflow created a whole new event experience for its community. The company used empathy to understand that its community was burned out. Zoom fatigue was real. Webflow created a custom Gather Town space that made the event interactive, gamified and fun. The physical action of sitting at their desks was the same, but the experience was personal and full of empathy and will be extremely memorable for the company’s guests.

You can use your superpower of empathy in a meaningful way. It’s the importance of writing to people’s emotions, not just the target demographic. By using language that involves them and makes them the focus of the conversation, you can make your audience feel something.

By Pat Timmons

Sourced from ADWEEK

Read More
By
In News

Important Digital Marketing Shifts for 2021 and Beyond

No Comments

By

1. If brands are hoping to stay relevant and keep up with the content creation phenomenon, 2021 needs to be the year of Empowering Employees to Power your Brand. It is plain and simple—employee censorship on social channels is a disaster for brands. We can no longer control the message folks. The social framework is “bigger and stronger” than our puny frameworks. Instead of fighting it every step of the way, USE it to your advantage, or you’ll pay a steep price in diminished return… especially during these times of change and uncertainty. Your employees are the best way to humanize and personalize your brand… and truly the best way to scale relevant, contextual content creation

Did you know that employee created content (ECC) receives eight times more engagement than content shared from the company itself? On top of that, employee content extends brand messaging by over 500%. Crazy, right? So why aren’t more companies getting employees engaged in content creation? It’s well known that companies with engaged employees outperform their peers; involving employees in content creation can help to create a sense of common purpose.

The truth of the matter is that the social evolution is a business evolution. Only by changing our old frameworks can we possibly hope to keep up—because social media and the way communication is evolving, along with so many other applications during the pandemic, have completely altered the business landscape. #ROE… Return on Employees.

2. Changing shopper behaviour creates a land grab for retailers and brands alike. Established brands like Nike are making huge strides to connect directly with shoppers, preparing for a future where a good portion of retail is direct. Upstart brands including AllBirds, Warby Parker and Dollar Shave Club have been pushing incumbents to embrace more flexible channel strategies as well, and the trend is expanding exponentially in 2021. Incumbents and challengers alike are exploring all kinds of channel mix combinations although with a common tactical thread… all brands are seeking direct relationships with shoppers instead of relying on third party retailers… especially with how the #Covid19 pandemic has dramatically altered shopping behaviour.

3. Customer Experience with our Marketing… we worry all the time about customer experience with our employees, product, purchase, and service, BUT we have overlooked a critical part of the customer experience, and that IS how “our” marketing affects “them.” We’ve got data coming out of our ears, so tracking the results of our marketing efforts in terms of dollars and cents is becoming easier and easier. However, all these efforts only measure the upside of banging consumers over the head (how many more clicks, shares, engagements, and ultimately sales, do we get). No regard is given to the downside numbers. What we are NOT tracking is the point at which our customers turn from just annoyed, too fed up with our bot stalking and algorithm tweaking.

I think we need to spend as much time finding ways to track the negative effect of our marketing efforts as we do the positive ones. Every brand that continues to bang your customers or followers over the head again, and again, and again – without regard to the damage it is doing to brand equity – is going to suffer as we move forward in this customer, “my media, my commerce, my way”, world.

Marketing will truly win when humans control the machines, instead of the machines controlling the humans. 

By

Sourced from Ted Rubin Straight Talk

Read More
By
In News

When two agencies become one: all the things nobody tells you about marketing mergers

No Comments

By Sam Bradley

Agency mergers are a fact of life in the ad industry, but a badly managed process can wreck what was originally great about a business. We gather advice and wisdom from agency chiefs on navigating the M&A maze.

A smart merger or acquisition can take a business to the next level. But after the champagne’s been corked and the confetti swept aside, the hard work isn’t over.

To find out how best to dodge the pitfalls and potholes of the M&A road, we picked the brains of agency bosses at recently acquired or merged businesses.

For Lee Beattie, managing partner and chief executive officer of John Doe Group, a merger was the best way forward for her business, Glasgow-based Wire, to grow. ”We’d reached a point in Scotland where we had won all the best agency awards and we had what we considered the best clients.”

While she and business partner Pam Scobbie had seen success pitching to bigger clients down south, the lack of a London outpost was holding them back. ”It was really bloody difficult,” she says.

So, building on an existing relationship with fellow PR firm John Doe, they embarked on a merger to bring the two firms together. ”We wanted to be up for certain brands… and [John Doe managing director Magin Trewhella] wanted to grow the agency. It felt like a jigsaw puzzle coming together,” she says.

In an ideal world, Beattie says she and her three now-co-owners would have taken a week to sit down and ”bolt through all this stuff.” Instead, the process took a year, longer than is typical – there has been a pandemic to deal with, after all. The newly merged John Doe Group is now pitching for work with a combined headcount of 40, and just announced its first win as a combined enterprise with the Highland Spring account.

Nicolas Roope, co-founder of Poke, recalls its 2013 acquisition, and later merger with two other agencies, by Publicis. He and his partners wanted to continue to grow their business, but market conditions were hardening.

”We thrived in our first 10 years because the incumbents didn’t have a clue,” he says. ”But we got to the end of that period and thought that there probably wasn’t long left for agencies like us as independents. Scale was going to be a problem if we didn’t act.”

Poke shopped around for buyers for about a year before choosing the French conglomerate. ”A lot of the value we’d created at Poke was intangible. We wanted to find somewhere where they appreciated what we’d created. Arthur Sadoun [now chief executive of Publicis Groupe] was driving our acquisition… he was very ambitious, he understood the challenges their network faced – and he understood where we were coming from, the value we were bringing to the table.”

After the original sale in 2013, the company was bedded into the wider network over five years; Roope departed in 2018, after organising its merger as Publicis. Poke. ”It was a parting gift – figuring out how to strategically position this merger enterprise and create something new. But once that merger was completed… I didn’t really have a natural position to occupy, so that was the moment to step out.”

Without the hurdle of an acquisition to deal with, mergers between network agencies can generally proceed quicker. So when WPP decided to merge digital shop VML and storied ad agency Y&R in 2018, it moved fast. Planning for the consolidation began just two months before the merger was unveiled, according to global chief executive officer Jon Cook.

”We moved from conception to launch very quickly,” he tells The Drum. ”We announced we were going to merge at the start of the next year… which bought us some time. While everyone knows it happening, you still have a moment to breathe and put the infrastructure in place. It was a good lesson.”

Team journey

Mergers can rearrange the tectonic plates of a business, leading staff to fear that career trajectories are askew. Moving at speed meant Cook’s team could quickly address one of the biggest areas of concern: assuring the staff of both agencies that they still had a berth.

Transparency and timing are key, he says. ”I learned to be very transparent about what I knew. If you can identify why you’re doing this, what the new brand will be and why it will have value – and communicate that with complete confidence while at the same time being very clear about what you don’t yet know – people are generally going to understand.”

According to Stephen Maher, chair and chief executive officer of the freshly merged customer experience agency MBAstack (formed after MSQ acquired MBA), it’s important to ”reassure everyone that there aren’t going to be redundancies.”

”I just think you have to be upfront. We said that, fundamentally, nothing’s changing. It’ll be the same people, the same relationships and the same culture. There will be refinements, but there will also be more resources because we’ll have more people.”

Beattie advises: ”You have to talk to the team at the right time, when you’re certain that it is definitely going to happen and you can actually answer their questions. Everyone’s going be thinking: what does this mean for me? If you can’t answer that, you probably shouldn’t be having the conversation.”

Managing internal announcements is a little easier when staff number in the dozens. For VMLY&R, hundreds of agency leaders needed to be brought into the fold in advance. ”You need to make a judgement on how many people you need, and can trust, to get the right amount of work done before an announcement. If you have too few you’ll be ill-prepared when you announce. And if you have too many, you’ll run the risk of communications being leaked,” Cook warns.

As the agencies integrated together, Cook says that particular attention was given to managing staff concerns. ”I was sure people would see the value and the strategy in it. But I was nervous – would everybody be able to find their place in that new company? My ultimate fear was that someone would feel smaller as the company got bigger.

”We put a lot of work into making sure that no person felt smaller. We have a lot of people so I can’t say without exception, but I feel we’ve done a good job of making it so you get bigger as we get bigger,” he explains.

Still, some departures are to be expected. Between location changes and the transition to a larger organization, ”you’re going to lose a bunch of people,” says Roope.

He recalls that persuading Poke’s ”extraordinary, eccentric” team was tough. ”One of the biggest challenges of the whole thing is taking the team on the journey. You have to accept you’re moving into a new reality – you can’t take everything that you’ve built. For more seasoned staff who’ve seen these things before, they’ll know what’s coming. But it’s particularly acute people for who’ve been with you for a long time.

”There’s a lot of fear about the consequences of being acquired – did that mean we were going to be like every other Publicis agency?”

Despite occurring during a pandemic-fuelled recession, both the MBAstack and John Doe Group mergers were completed without redundancies. VMLY&R lost about 1% of its global headcount in the wake of the move, though Cook states this was due to ”natural efficiencies” rather than a concerted cost-cutting effort, and that its staff numbers have since grown anew.

Client confidence

Just as important is communicating a new consolidation to clients. A spokesperson for AKQA, which merged with Grey last year, tells The Drum: ”The key focus areas are our clients and employees. This is also in line with key decisions around communications and operations.

”Clients were consulted early in the process to gain their feedback and highlight the additional benefits of the businesses working more closely together.”

For Beattie, ”the important thing is: what does it mean for them? What are the benefits each client is going to get from the merger? Or is absolutely nothing going to change?”

Cook explains: ”It’s critical to reach a certain amount of your client base before it happens, so they have some trust, a heads-up and a feeling of ownership about the decision.”

He emphasizes the need ”to communicate clearly what you’re doing and why you’re doing it… to communicate that nothing of the goodness of your relationship will change or go away. And to communicate the new value of the bigger company.”

”Once those assurances are in place,” says Cook, ”client partners become start to become very interested in what new capability you have that can help them move their brand forward.”

Name games

When it comes to unveiling the new combined agency, language is important. A consolidated agency’s name can broadcast continuity – as in the case of double-barrelled monikers such as Wunderman Thompson – or a new start, as in the case of Superunion, which was formed from five older branding shops.

While VMLY&R’s acronym doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, Cook argues it was important to keep the identities of its constituent parts intact. ”We have a lot of letters. I’m the first one to make fun of our long name… but in exchange, you’re not losing the heritage of either of these two brands.

”There’s no way we wanted any part of the company to feel marginalized or lesser. It was too bad we didn’t merge with a company with some vowels, because we could have made a word out of it.”

Similarly at MBAstack, Maher says the name was settled after a collective decision to retain both brands. ”We felt it was the right thing for the market. And it sounds a bit better, with MBA first and Stack second.”

For Dentsu agency iProspect, which recently relaunched after absorbing Vizeum, a new handle wasn’t deemed necessary. Amanda Morrissey, global president of iProspect, explains: ”The reason for this is two-fold… firstly, and most crucially, we wanted to spend more of our time and energy on building solutions for our clients than building our own agency brand.

”Secondly, the iProspect brand name already has a huge global footprint and is universally synonymous with digital excellence that has performance at the centre. We therefore felt that keeping the name was the right thing to do, as so much of the brand notoriety is already in place.”

Culture clashes

Definitions of a successful merger also differ. For AKQA, it’s simple enough: ”Success of the collaboration is measured by the recognized increased opportunity for both our clients and employees.” Elsewhere, success isn’t so closely tied to balance sheets. Much of the post-merger work focuses on making sure the working cultures of each agency still exist in a meaningful way.

Maher admits it’s ”a journey not a destination,” and says MBAstack will likely take six months to knit together. The business has a new website in the works, and both the Stack and MBA teams will soon be moving to MSQ’s new offices in Covent Garden when lockdown subsides. ”It’s a work in progress. We’re going to keep evolving,” he says.

Roope says that the benefits of Poke’s sale to Publicis only were only illuminated when its team reluctantly moved from its Shoreditch base to bigger premises across London. ”It was only really when we stepped into the building that network started to pay… because we were much more integrated,” he says.

True success came, he says, when Poke began to influence the rest of Publicis’ operations. ”We brought fresh thinking, a different perspective when at the time it was a monoculture that was absolutely above-the-line. We weren’t the only catalyst in that, but it reinvigorated the London side of the network,” he says.

While merging two global giants together is a complex endeavour, Cook says he was confident of success just two months in. ”We gathered 200 of our top leaders to [VML headquarters] Kansas City, from all over the world. And you could just feel a sense of unity, a sense of pride. We knew this was going to work.” By the time the team touched down at Cannes the following summer, things were coming together and business had picked up, with a 14% increase in billings in the UK.

”Walking into Cannes, we already felt we had a swagger. We were getting recognition for the work for our clients that this new company had done… that was a good message that we’re doing what a great agency is supposed to do, and that’s great work.”

A month after from her business’ rebirth as John Doe Group, Beattie doesn’t yet have the privilege of hindsight. The teams of each agency were already well acquainted, with the merger built upon an existing relationship; the two businesses already shared client work. Having avoided a direct culture clash, she’s confident the consolidation has already begun to yield results and achieve their major goal – puncturing the London bubble.

”It’s definitely already working. We’ve just won our first new account. We’ve done more pitching in the last couple of months than I did in over the whole of last year.”

By Sam Bradley

Sourced from The Drum

Read More
By
In News

Clubhouse shows us how businesses can save millions on marketing

No Comments

By Kirsty Sharman.

After launching in April 2020, Clubhouse has already been downloaded 10 million times and has around two million weekly active users. In the grand scheme of things, this might sound like a small amount — especially if you consider that Facebook has 2.7 billion active users on its platform, Instagram 1 billion, Twitter 330 million, and Snapchat 301 million.

But the amount of hype that Clubhouse has generated in its relatively short lifetime is oddly disproportionate to the number of users it had acquired. I’ve heard and seen Clubhouse references every single day for the last few weeks, which would usually be expected for an app that just hit 100 million downloads… not 10 million! What gives?

Although Clubhouse is a social network where all members can do is talk (and listen), a remarkable amount of the conversation (and attention) is actually happening beyond the app itself.

While this could be down to the fact that it has several high-profile members — I’m talking about Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Oprah Winfrey, Kanye West, and Drake, for example — its clout is being driven by the fact that it’s so hard to get into.

The FOMO is real!

[Read: Oh no… ‘Senior Clubhouse Executive’ is now a thing]

Clubhouse might have opened its doors around a year ago, but there’s always been a burly bouncer standing outside. A digital queue that feels like it never ends. And if your name’s not down – you’re not coming in. Even now, if you download the app, the best you’re going to do is be put on the waiting list… unless you are directly invited.

Clubhouse has got everyone wanting to get inside, without blowing a fortune on marketing. This kind of hype usually costs millions of marketing dollars to achieve. 🤑

How exactly has Clubhouse achieved this?

By modernizing the oldest marketing channel in the book — word of mouth — or referral marketing as we call it these days.

 

 

Word of mouth works, just ask Google 

We can go all the way back to 2004 for a great example of word-of-mouth marketing in action. Gmail is obviously now a Unicorn with 1.8 billion users around the world, but 17 years ago the name Google was not in any way one that would have been associated with email.

When it was first launched, Google only allowed a few people access to the service, offering each of these ‘beta’ users the ability to invite a few more friends and family. The referral program was so successful that invites to Gmail were up for auction on eBay at the time.

 

 

FOMO is a potent human emotion, and it can be engineered 

Exclusivity might not seem like the best way to build a business. Common sense surely dictates that you want to get as many customers as possible. But this isn’t necessarily true — it’s no good tempting millions of people onto your platform all at once if they don’t stick around.

Clubhouse’s reliance on referrals also means it’s able to attract the right kind of members in the right kinds of circles — a key ingredient to create FOMO.

It really is this simple: if a product or service is worth talking about, people want to tell their friends. By growing its membership through a referral-based model, Clubhouse is tapping into existing networks of friends, families, and colleagues. People who already trust each other and know each other’s tastes, likes, and dislikes.

This means that when your friend recommends a product, you find yourself wanting it even before you’ve clicked that link.

Referrals can save you millions 

If a company has a good product or service, customers will want to refer their friends. You just have to give them a reason to refer and make it easy for them to do so. If you get this right you could save millions on marketing. 🚀

To me, Clubhouse’s incredible success showcases the true power of referral marketing and also its simplicity. By contrast, countless businesses have spent millions on ads attempting to build that kind of trust (and noise), when all they needed to do was ask their customers to refer their friends…

It’s now easier than ever to follow the likes of Clubhouse and Google — so go for it! Easy-to-use marketing tools have made launching a referral program simple and affordable, so there really is no reason not to give it a try!

By Kirsty Sharman

Kirsty founded Referral Factory, a leading referral marketing platform that makes it incredibly easy for any business to build their own referral program. Besides being an entrepreneurial powerhouse, she acts as a growth marketer, product builder and was Listed in M&G as one of 200 Young South Africans to watch.

Sourced from TNW

Read More
By
In News

5 Ways to Make Your Marketing More Memorable

No Comments

By Martin Zwilling

Traditional marketing and media are just not enough to attract and excite today’s generation of customers.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Martin Zwilling

Sourced from Inc.

Read More
By
In News

Should Your Small Business Hire a Marketing Agency or Build a Marketing Team?

No Comments

By Tanner Simkins

Which marketing plan works best for the modern entrepreneur: outside or in-house? Here are four important factors to consider.

As your small business grows, at some point you’ll need to take your marketing strategy to the next level. While many leaders of new and small businesses are used to taking on a variety of roles, there will come a time when it makes sense to pass marketing roles on to the experts. Doing so is vital for making sure that your business continues to develop new customers, build its brand, and stay competitive in its industry.

For many leaders the realization that they need to work with marketing professionals leads to questions of whether to turn to a marketing agency or hire an in-house marketing team. There is no right answer to this question, as it depends on the business’s resources and needs. That said, there are a few issues that leaders should consider when determining whether to hire a marketing agency or to develop an in-house team. Here are a few key factors to think about.

Type of expertise

What type of expertise do you want? An in-house marketing professional offers in-depth knowledge of your business. This person (or these people) will know exactly what your team does and exactly what your team is about. Additionally, every moment will be spent on your business, and they’ll be fully invested in your business’s success.

In contrast, when working with a marketing agency, you’ll get access to an entire team of marketing professionals with an array of expertise. While you might not get the same level of knowledge and investment in your business, you will get a team on the cutting-edge of the industry with a variety of applicable skill sets. In addition, you’ll get a fresh perspective and a new look at what your business is doing. Finally, marketing agencies have the benefit of working with a variety of businesses, which means they bring a wealth of industry knowledge to each client.

In-house marketing professionals and marketing agencies both bring unique areas of expertise. When determining what’s best for your business, it’s important to consider the type of expertise your business wants and needs.

Budget

Budget is an important factor to consider as it’s generally more expensive to hire your own marketing professional than it is to work with a marketing agency. When you hire a marketing expert, you need to keep in mind that you’re not only going to have to pay their salary but also all of the additional expenses that come with hiring quality employees including recruitment costs, payroll taxes, pensions, benefits and training.

As a result, while you might think the salary of one employee is equivalent to the retainer for a marketing agency, it’s also important to factor in all of the additional costs. In most cases, the reality is that working with an agency is less expensive than having in-house marketing experts.

Timeline

Timeline is another key factor to consider. In some cases, small businesses find themselves pressured to develop a marketing strategy. This can happen if customer growth plateaus, competitors begin gaining market share, or new products are not taking off as anticipated.

In these situations, businesses need immediate action and should consider a market agency.

Marketing agencies can jump in immediately and quickly develop a marketing strategy. It takes much longer to recruit, hire and train your own marketing professional.

Communication style

Another factor to consider is what sort of communication you’d like to have with your marketing team. Having someone in-house means that you are working side-by-side, have regular communication, and can get ongoing, immediate updates.

You won’t have this sort of access if you work with a marketing agency. Generally, when working with an agency, there are a lot of in-person meetings in the beginning as a strategy is developed. After that, things shift to primarily e-mail and phone communication, and you won’t have the same sort of constant communication and access. For some leaders, this is fine, for others, it’s a major negative for working with an agency. Either way, it’s important to think through this difference and determine what’s best for you and your team.

Working with marketing professionals to develop an effective marketing strategy is an important part of sustaining and growing your business. While marketing is something that most leaders take on in the beginning, it’s a consuming job that at some point will need to be delegated to maximize results and to effectively manage your team’s time.

Marketing is never done, it is a long haul. With that in mind, it’s important to turn to marketing professionals who are fully dedicated to growing businesses. Determining whether to work with an agency or to build your own team can be tricky, but weighing the right factors will enable your business to make the right choice and to move forward with the right team.

Feature Image credit: golero | Getty Images 

By Tanner Simkins

Sourced from Entrepreneur

Read More
By
In News

B2B Influencer Marketing Strategy: 5 Questions to Ask First

No Comments

By Lee Odden

It’s no mystery that we’re big fans of influencer marketing where B2B brands engage with industry experts and key opinion leaders to drive conversations, consideration and conversions.

Marketing leaders at B2B companies large and small are realizing how much influence can play a role in virtually every customer communication. As 2021 picks up steam, the practice of influencer marketing presents unique opportunities to optimize digitally transformed B2B marketing.

That said, while the role of influence can be universally present in content and communications, the approach that will work for any given B2B brand is by no means cookie cutter. Influencer engagement is not simply an advertising buy or some kind of programmatic marketing tactic. It’s simultaneously dynamic and open to certain kinds of optimization and scale through process, operations and expertise.

Before embarking on a pilot, campaigns or an evolved always-on influencer program, it’s important for B2B marketers to answer a few key questions to make sure the rationale is sound, the approach has merit and the expectations line up with resources and goals.

At TopRank Marketing we’ve helped numerous B2B brands run their very first influencer marketing pilot projects and campaigns. Our work with B2B brands like LinkedIn, SAP and Dell over the past 9 years has taught us that there are many key questions to be answered in order to ensure

  • Influencer marketing makes sense for a particular B2B brand
  • That a specific approach matches goals, resources and expectations
  • The tactics of identifying and engaging influencers are appropriate to content formats, channels and audience
  • The program reaches expected KPIs and drives value both for the business and influencers
  • Early efforts set the stage for future success

To help B2B brands thinking about launching an influencer marketing initiative, here are 5 of the most important questions to answer:

1. What is a B2B influencer for our brand? Our customers?

Success with B2B influence means avoiding falling into the popularity trap and thinking that all influencers must have a massive following.

An influencer in the B2B world is someone that has domain expertise, is recognized by peers for that expertise, creates content or communicates about that expertise, and has attracted the attention and trust of a network.

B2B influencers are also often called subject matter experts, key opinion leaders, or simply experts about a certain topic. This differs than in B2C where popularity and being able to publish influencer-created content on their own channels to a large audience reigns supreme. B2C influencers are most often very self aware of their actual or aspirational influence and bring content creation, personality, persuasion and publishing skills to the situation.

For B2B influencers, the idea of being an “influencer” may not be a priority, so B2B brands need to find ways to activate and engage them in ways that might be new to the influencer. Fortunately, there are best practices around how to nurture both external and internal subject matter experts to collaborate with marketing in ways that can drive authentic conversations amongst a desirable audience.

There are several key characteristics to look for in a B2B influencer: Proficiency, Popularity, Personality, Publisher, Promoter.  For a deeper dive into what top B2B influencers look and sound like, check out Season 3 of Break Free B2B in progress.

Understanding that everyone has some degree of influence is as important for a new influencer marketing effort as is understanding that B2B brands need to be clear about what topics they want to be influential about. Finding B2B influencers for a specific brand means identifying the topics that matter to customers in the context of the B2B brand’s marketing narrative. Topics of importance to customers relative to the B2B brand’s key messages, products and solutions helps us understand whether a particular influencer has the attention and ability to influence their network. We do that by using software that helps evaluate a given influencer’s audience for topical relevance, resonance and reach.

There are different types of influencers to engage according to the type of influencer marketing project being implemented. Some programs might call for celebrity level “brandividuals“, others might focus more on those with industry analyst level expertise, or niche influencers that have deep product expertise and specific media creation skills that align with the content preferences of a B2B brand’s audience. At the same time, some influencers might already be fans of your B2B brand and others might be strong advocates of ideas that align with your brand but not be advocates yet.

The opportunity in identifying what a B2B influencer looks like for your brand starts with understanding the topics of influence that matter to your customers and that are most relevant to your solutions. That topic understanding can be extended to the creation of an ideal influencer profile and the matching of influencer types to the expectations and experiences created for customers.

To answer, “Where can I find B2B influencers?” marketers need to look beyond their own opinions and experiences and towards data. Influencers that create evidence of their expertise through digital content can be identified with influencer marketing software or social media software. However, keep in mind that many B2B influencers do not focus solely on social media to proclaim their expertise and more in-depth research into industry associations, special interest groups, events, publications, email newsletters and emerging formats like Clubhouse should be conducted.

2. What can we expect to achieve working with influencers?

Virtually all B2B brand communications with customers is a consideration for including 3rd party expertise for credibility and help with distribution.

Fundamentally, influencers can create value for B2B brands in a few different ways:

  • Add credibility to brand content
  • Help brand content reach new audiences through promotion
  • Provide B2B brands with advisory services
  • Perform as a brand advocate through ongoing content engagement
  • Help create content for thought leadership and demand gen purposes
  • Add signals of credibility to content for SEO
  • Facilitate content distribution and brand social network growth
  • Provide expertise for earned media, events and marketing content

In our research as reported in the State of B2B Influencer Marketing Report, we found that the measurable benefits for B2B brands to work with influencers included:

benefits working with B2B influencers

What’s important for B2B marketers to understand when it comes to what’s possible with influencers is that we’re talking about partnering with people, not simply using them to some brand end. Rather than thinking of influencers only as a means to an end or a tool for content creation and distribution, it is more valuable for all when B2B brands think of influencers as partners they can work with to achieve mutual goals. That partnership can turn to authentic and enthusiastic brand advocacy more quickly than a transactional approach.

For more specific ideas, check out this list of 25 B2B influencer marketing campaign and engagement ideas.

3. What are some good influencer engagement models?

Many early stage influencer programs start with micro-activations as part of a nurturing effort to develop relationships between brand and influencer. In many cases, an agency is tasked with creating these connections because they have unique expertise at influencer outreach and/or may already have the desired influencers in the agency network.

The right engagement model really depends on the approach.

For a pilot influencer content marketing campaign designed to create a business case for potential expansion of an influencer marketing program that has some lead time, it might be best to develop quick rapport with influencers by recognizing their expertise publicly. Then follow up and invite them to collaborate on small asks with great exposure. Through these early micro-activations, the right influencers can be sorted for a larger contribution to the pilot content project. See this case study on how LinkedIn has taken a relationship building approach to their always-on influence program working with sales and marketing influencers.

Alternatively, if there is not much lead time for organic relationship building with a pilot, then professional influencers can be engaged for their services to contribute to the pilot. The cost and perceived authenticity of content disclaimed as sponsored may be worth it to get a pilot out quickly. Or some combination of organic relationship building and paid influencer engagement might be most appropriate.

Understanding the right engagement model can be helped in part by reviewing solid B2B influencer marketing examples and case studies to understand what goes into successful B2B influencer marketing campaigns.

Also, it’s important to understand that working with influencers for an industrial or manufacturing business might be a bit different than how influencer marketing for tech companies might work. The topics of interest to customers and of most relevance to influencers and the brand will help identify the right influencer program approach, influencer identification and engagement.

Many pilots lead to sequences of campaigns which may engage the same influencers or different influencers each time. Lack of engagement in between campaigns will make securing influencers more difficult. B2B brands that are more mature in their influencer marketing efforts engage in always-on influencer programs. In fact, the State of B2B Influencer Marketing Report found that 12X more B2B marketers using an always-on approach were very successful with their influencer marketing compared to those marketers that implementing periodic campaigns.

Working with a small group of influencers can be a great place to start, but that small group should be backed by a much larger list of researched candidate influencers. As relationships develop through the course of different collaborations, B2B marketers will refine and find the right influencers. A VIP group of influencers might be created as Adobe has with its 60+ Adobe Insiders being activated at individual, small group or large group levels depending on the situation.

4. How does “dark influence” fit in our mix?

Understanding the channels where customers are spending time discovering, consuming and engaging with content is central to identifying sources of influence. But not all B2B influencers are social media rockstars. To understand where and how the right experts are influential to the customers of a B2B brand, thoughtful research must be conducted to identify customer preferences for content and people that they trust, subscribe to and are influenced by.

In some cases, the social media connection to B2B influence is indirect. While many business people are doing business during their 9-5, increasing numbers of business people are following industry experts on social channels. They access those channels before and after work as well as periodically during the day.

For those influencers and customers that are not engaging via social media, content discovery, consumption and engagement preferences research will reveal the email newsletters, publications, associations, events, groups and even search terms they use to connect. These non-social media channels are opportunities for influence as well. B2B marketers need to do the research to map these sources of engagement and identify influencers that might be good partners for those channels.

Another consideration is the role that LinkedIn plays in terms of influencer performance tracking. Since the vast majority of LinkedIn is not public nor do they provide easy access via API, the social data cannot be crawled in the way that Twitter, some Facebook content and other social networks are. Influencer engagement on LinkedIn may require use of tools made available from LinkedIn like Sales Navigator. Here are some ideas on how to engage influencers on the LinkedIn platform.

Working within the world of dark social for influencer marketing means connecting with influencers that use these channels and engaging them on collaborations where they exert influence.

5. What are the most important operational considerations for a B2B influencer marketing program?

For large enterprise organizations, there is often a debate about how much influencer marketing should be centralized in the organization vs. with business units, divisions and regions. When influencer marketing is new to an organization, there is centralization and programs are dictated as such. Some influencers may be universally relevant across and organization but within each market where a B2B brand operates, there will likely be more niche influencers specific to those markets.

How an influencer marketing program is defined will often include both the universal truths that are relevant for the brand overall and specific programs with unique goals, topics and measures of success.

Some of the most important operational considerations for an influencer marketing program include:

  • What department owns influencer marketing?
  • What processes will be used to to perform the functions of influencer marketing to ensure consistency and quality?
  • What software will be used to identify, engage, communicate with and measure influencers?
  • What budgets, staffing and external resources will be needed short and long term?

Beyond measures of success, software and ownership with the B2B brand of an influencer program is how to work with a specialist B2B influencer marketing agency to help develop strategy and planning, influencer identification and recruitment, collaboration and creation of influencer / brand content assets. In the State of B2B Influencer Marketing Report that surveyed hundreds of B2B marketers, the top tasks handled by agencies included:

  • Identifying influencers 79%
  • Managing influencer relationships 76%
  • Developing the strategy 71%
  • Measuring effectiveness 66%
  • Integrating with other marketing efforts 63%
  • Implementing campaigns 60%
  • Managing influencer marketing technology 44%

While there are many B2B marketing resources out there to help brands with everything from research and strategy to planning, implementation and measurement, there are simply not that many B2B influencer marketing agencies that have:

  • Established influencer marketing strategy frameworks based on years of experience
  • Extensive relationships with a network of B2B influencers in various verticals
  • Tried and true tactics for accelerating B2B brand and influencer relationships
  • Content creation and repurposing capabilities that are unique to influencer collaborations
  • Influencer marketing measurement and reporting expertise
  • Savvy on how to maintain ongoing influencer relationships in between campaigns

The good news is that the number of B2B influencer marketing agencies with legitimate skills and experience is growing as awareness grows around the role of influence across the entire customer lifecycle for business customers.

There are certainly more questions than these to be considered as well as variations on the questions that have been listed in order for B2B marketers to gain confidence that their particular approach to an influencer marketing effort creates the expected value for all involved. In many cases, marketing missteps can be avoided by ensuring the fundamentals are solid and that’s what this list of questions is meant to do – cover the bases that are essential for a thoughtful, meaningful and productive influencer marketing effort.

Influencer marketing is a relationship focused business and that means it’s dynamic and there are no silver bullet answers.

Remember, influencer marketing is a relationship focused business and that means it’s dynamic and there are no silver bullet answers. B2B brands that stumble blindly into an influencer engagement effort may experience disappointing results without the “been there, done that” and “we do this every. single. day.” type of expertise that is rare, but available through specialist agencies and consultants.

By Lee Odden

@LeeOdden is the CEO of TopRank Marketing and editor of TopRank’s B2B Marketing Blog. Cited for his expertise by The Economist, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal, he’s the author of the book Optimize and presents internationally on B2B marketing topics including content, search, social media and influencer marketing. When not at conferences, consulting, or working with his talented team, he’s likely running, traveling or cooking up something new.

Sourced from TopRank Marketing

Read More
By
In News

Programmatic: Why building a curated marketplace should be a priority for buyers in 2021

No Comments

By Michael Feeley

Anyone working within programmatic advertising is likely to hear the phrase ‘curated marketplace’ a lot in 2021 – but what does ‘curation’ really mean in this context and why should it be a key priority for media buyers over the next 12 months?

Michael Simpkins, Marketplace Commercial Lead at Xandr explains, as the programmatic landscape has become increasingly cluttered and complex over the past decade, many people now assume that media buyers operating their own ‘curated marketplace’ are simply looking to work with fewer partners in the advertising supply chain. However, this is only the first step and barely scratches the surface of how curation can help improve the effectiveness of a media strategy.

Going back to basics

With the rapid growth of the programmatic industry, the supply chain became fragmented, resulting in a loss of control and transparency for both buyers and sellers. Buyers are also facing increasing pressure to justify return on ad spend, but siloed spending, rigid metrics and a convoluted supply chain make it hard to prove marketing impact on business outcomes.

As a collective, the industry has matured in the past few years to take a step back and simplify the complex landscape. Direct relationships between buyers and sellers are being rebuilt and big steps are being taken to improve supply chain transparency. Marketers, now more understanding of the supply chain, are seeking to regain control not just over their ad spend but over their campaign performance too and, with the deprecation of the third-party cookie, these objectives take on even greater importance. On the other hand, with the proliferation of header bidding, publishers want to make sure their most important media buyers are still able to reach and value their inventory effectively. It is important for companies to deliver unique value across the advertising ecosystem from consumers, buyers and sellers. One of the ways we at Xandr are able to do this is through our curation offering, which brings buyers and sellers together on our platform, offering buyers a simplified and dedicated workflow to easily build out their own curated marketplaces from the supply available on our premium advertising marketplace.

Regaining control of the supply chain

By building out a curated marketplace, buyers gain control within the SSP (sell-side platform) and can apply macro business rules to supply before it hits the DSP (demand-side platform) for targeting, significantly reducing risk in a diverse supply chain.

Through curation, buyers are able to maximise their investment by having full control over supply decisioning and ensuring all media is run across brand safe environments and eliminating non-essential pass throughs in the supply chain. Costs can also be reduced as buyers streamline supply sources, campaign workflows and operational complexity while also having the ability to negotiate price and priority within publishers. Buyers are able to receive regular reports on supply-side fees and auction dynamics, strengthening cross-industry relationships and supporting our industry’s quest for supply chain transparency.

As collaboration becomes even more important in 2021 and beyond, curating a marketplace on a single platform can reduce the risk even further. With fewer partners you’re able to work together on market and regulatory changes, niche audience targets and specific campaign needs together.

What is curation?

Today, we are used to a two-party transaction with a buyer using a DSP to purchase inventory and a seller using an SSP to surface their inventory to the buy side. Curation moves us to a three-party transaction where we now have a curator that sits between the SSP and DSP and works alongside the publishers to decide what inventory is allowed into their marketplace and then packages and merchandises that inventory via a curated multi-seller private marketplace (PMP) to make it available to the buy side to trade in their DSP.

Creating your own curated marketplace does not have to be a huge undertaking – in fact, it involves just four key steps:

  • Identify what you want to get out of the curated marketplace. Is it fee and auction dynamic transparency? More control on your supply paths? Performance gains? Setting a clear objective and strategy for the curated marketplace will make the process clearer for all parties involved.
  • Establish who you want to partner with to build out the curated marketplace. Pick a technology partner that has the supply coverage, tools, expertise and service models to implement a successful curated marketplace.
  • Work with your technology partner to understand what supply to bring into your marketplace and how to work with the publishers to do so. A curated marketplace should bring buyers and publishers closer together, not act as a blocker.
  • Optimise your curated marketplace. These marketplaces shouldn’t be static and should constantly be optimised based on performance, market changes and pricing.

As consumers continue to access media content across numerous devices, their attention becomes increasingly difficult to capture and hold. To catch their audience wherever they are viewing content means marketers are having to reconsider their strategies for planning, buying and measuring advertisers. We have to introduce an option for those who want to buy advertising and access to consumers on all devices and formats in one place, and that option is curation.

By Michael Feeley

Sourced from The Drum

Read More
By
Load More