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6 Dynamic Tactics For Solving The Post-Pandemic Marketing Rubik’s Cube

September 9, 2020 No Comments

By Lane Ellis.

What will successful B2B marketing look like in a post-pandemic world, and what can marketers do today to be ready?

B2B marketers are facing daunting and unprecedented challenges — not unlike a Rubik’s Cube — during the global health crisis. Each impediment, however, also offers valuable lessons that can help us as we transition to 2021 and the future opportunities that await.

Let’s begin unraveling the mysteries of the post-pandemic marketing world, with six dynamic tactics B2B marketers can use today to prepare for the future business landscape.

1 — Influencer Intensification: Subject Matter Experts

Post-pandemic marketing will likely feature a noticeable intensification when it comes to the use of B2B influencers. As one of the most pandemic-proof marketing practices during the global health crisis, B2B influencer marketing is poised to continue growing in 2021 and beyond, due in part to the value industry experts bring to everyone involved.

“Traditional marketing channels are drying up and even trade shows are imperiled in 2021,” Mark Schaefer, chief operating officer at B Squared Media observed. “The influence marketing trend will be amplified as businesses seek trusted voices to join industry conversations,” Mark added.

Mark’s prediction is among dozens of insightful influencer marketing statistics in our recent 2020 State of B2B Influencer Marketing Research Report, and the following data points speak to the strength of industry influencers and point to increased use as we move into 2021:

90% of B2B marketers expect their influencer marketing budget to increase or stay the same
78% of B2B marketers believe prospects rely on advice from influencers
74% of B2B marketers say that influencer marketing improves customer and prospect experiences with a brand, and 90% plan to increase their budget in the near future
63% agree that marketing would have better results if it included an influencer marketing program

“Digging into the results, one can quickly see a trend in B2B marketers who are optimistic about influencer marketing yet not confident about their ability to execute,” Shama Hyder, chief executive at Zen Media recently observed in her Forbes interview with our co-founder and chief executive Lee Odden, “New Report Says B2B Influencer Marketing Still Has Massive Room For Growth.”

“With the pandemic causing a loss of in-person B2B tactics — field marketing, in-person trade shows, and experiential marketing efforts, for example — much of where buyers focus for information are digital channels,” Lee noted.

“This is exactly where influencers provide valuable and trusted perspectives. Trust, reach and engagement are always challenges for B2B brands, and collaborating with trusted industry experts that have the attention and respect of buyer audiences has proven to be an effective solution,” Lee added — a sentiment also expressed by Sarita Rao, senior vice president of marketing at AT&T Business*.

“Working with credible B2B influencers helps to build brand authority through real, human conversations and interactions.” — @saritasayso of @ATTBusinessCLICK TO TWEET

According to research conducted by Forrester the pandemic has seen new opportunities for influencer marketing, as 63 percent of U.S. consumers have spent more time using social media platforms, 58 percent have noticed more content from influencers, and 51 percent have had a positive attitude about influencer content and found it valuable.

Additionally, between March and July 2020 sponsored influencer posts saw a five-fold increase in interactions, reaching 57 million in July, according to report data from Shareablee.

Among U.S. and U.K. consumers who follow social media influencers, 72 percent said they have spent more time using social platforms during the pandemic, and 64 percent also said that they are likely to continue the same level of usage during post-pandemic times, according to GlobalWebIndex survey data.

Aside from its resilience during the pandemic, influencer marketing has for some time been poised to see more mainstream B2B usage, a move that is likely to steadily increase in our post-pandemic marketing world.

To learn more about B2B influencer marketing or beginning a pilot program, here are six additional recent resources we’ve compiled:

2 — Persistent Programs: Always-On Marketing

Studies have shown the increased effectiveness of always-on marketing programs that replace one-and-done single-use campaigns with ongoing efforts that match the always-on nature of today’s consumer.

The case for a post-pandemic shift to always-on marketing programs is bolstered by compelling recent data from our report, such as:

76% of B2B marketers find that the strategy of working with influencers through always-on engagement or when combined with campaigns delivers results
75% saw increased views of brand content using always-on influencer marketing
60% saw an increased share of voice, 55% saw more media brand mentions, and 50% saw increased brand advocacy through always-on influencer marketing
89% of B2B marketers using always-on influencer programs expect their budgets to increase or remain the same, versus 73% for marketers running traditional campaign-based programs

This all points to persistent B2B marketing programs becoming more widespread among successful B2B marketers in the post-pandemic era, and it’s easy to see why, as the partnerships formed through always-on programs build ongoing brand credibility and trust that can be difficult or impossible to achieve using one-and-done campaigns.

“With brand trust at a low, it’s important for B2B companies to invest in relationships with credible experts that buyers do trust.” — Lee Odden @LeeOddenCLICK TO TWEET

If you’re looking to learn more about why always-on programs achieve better results and how you can implement them, check out the following recent articles we’ve written about a topic that will only become more important in 2021 and beyond:

“Being ‘always-on’ has allowed our team to build meaningful relationships with influencers.” — Garnor Morantes of @LinkedInCLICK TO TWEET

3 — Shifting Search: New Challenges & Opportunities

Like blowing dunes, the sands of the search technology landscape change often, and in the post-pandemic environment marketers will see a shift as Apple seeks to make inroads with its own search experience and whittle away at Google’s long-standing dominance.

Paid and organic search marketing efforts are a vital part of most B2B firms’ strategy, and pandemic or not these efforts would have continued for the majority of businesses. The global health crisis has given us a newfound appreciation of the importance of findability and how valuable a sound search plan is for businesses today, and this will continue into the foreseeable future.

Search strategies no longer involve only a website and traditional search engines, as more people than ever also search for answers and information from within social media platforms’ own often-lackluster search mechanisms, which some see as presenting new challenges, as well through the increasing use of voice search.

66 percent of B2B chief marketing officers said that their 2021 budgets would see an increase in spending on search engine optimization (SEO), with the same percentage also planning to boost spending on paid search, according to Gartner’s annual CMO spending survey.

I expect a growth in importance and usage of structured data, an increase in predictive search features, and a shift to a more technical SEO ecosystem. @aleydaCLICK TO TWEET

Recently I took an in-depth look at why search is more important than ever, in “SEO Strategy: 5 Reasons Why It’s More Important Than Ever For B2B Marketers,” and we’ve also explored other aspects of SEO in B2B marketing in these articles:

4 — Virtual Variations: Social VR Landscapes

This year the world has spent more time using both traditional social media platforms and social virtual reality worlds, and when our lives return to some semblance of normal, all flavors of VR will seek to capitalize on an audience that — although no longer captive at home — has come to know and expect that brands use the technology.

51 percent of U.S. adults have increased their use of social media during the global health crisis according to eMarketer, and nearly a third have spent an additional one to two hours of time on social platforms during the pandemic, leaving more time for audiences to explore the new virtual worlds being created by social firms, such as Facebook’s Horizon VR experience.

“The convergence of both the physical and virtual worlds will create new opportunities in the future in the way friends, families, and even colleagues connect,” Cathy Hackl, author and futurist recently noted in Forbes.

By 2022 some forecasts predict over 95 million augmented reality (AR) users in the U.S. alone, including over 60 percent using VR with more than 30 percent using VR headsets, a trend that savvy B2B marketers are keeping a close eye on for post-pandemic marketing spending.

Other survey data has shown that 39 percent of B2B professionals expect to install new AR and VR technology in the next 12 months.

With in-game, AR, and VR marketing opportunities seeing greater interest in 2021 and beyond, B2B marketers can learn more about the importance of experiential storytelling in the following pieces we’ve written about these and related subjects:

5 — Evolving Marketing Events: In-Person & Virtual

How will marketing events change in a post-COVID19 world?

There’s no question that in-person marketing events are win-win experiences for the many parties involved, from speakers and attendees to exhibitors, sponsors, and others, yet during the pandemic creative new takes on virtual conferences have presented viable alternatives that are likely to be with us for good, continuing to augment in-person events once the health crisis ends.

The pandemic has seen Facebook begin offering paid event options for businesses, with direct in-stream purchases available for eligible Facebook business pages in 20 countries including the U.S., offering digital marketers new monetization and event marketing options.

Virtual events help traditional in-person conferences expand their reach and gain new online audiences — people who may eventually also attend an organization’s physical events.

Similarly, in-person events such as marketing conferences may — in post-pandemic times — serve as good examples for some of the purely virtual events that have come into existence this year out of necessity, pushing them to begin their own new physical events.

92 percent of marketers have said that they believe putting on successful virtual events will be important until the pandemic ends, and some brands have already chosen to postpone or cancel their events all the way through the middle of 2021, including major players Facebook and Microsoft.

73 percent of B2B event organizers have had to cancel a physical event because of the pandemic, and 81 percent have provided virtual alternatives, according to survey data from The Center for Exhibition Industry Research (CEIR).

The time is bound to arrive when in-person events return, however, and smart B2B marketers will be prepared to incorporate both virtual and physical conference experiences for learning, networking, and selling.

Having an influencer marketing strategy makes sense for taking full advantage of both virtual and in-person events.

“Partnering with influencers is more important now than it ever has been,” our president and co-founder Susan Misukanis explained. “Targeting the right influencer communities can be the best way to expand virtual event attendance and reach into a broader audience — who may not have planned to travel to your live event or conference,” Susan added.

Partnering with influencers is more important now than it ever has been. Targeting the right influencer communities can be the best way to expand virtual event attendance and reach into a broader audience.” @smisukanisCLICK TO TWEET

To level-up your event game for both virtual and physical conferences, here are six articles we’ve published to help:

6 — Delivery Diversity: New Communication Channels

The pandemic has both driven us apart and brought us together in new ways, and given us creative methods to both tell and hear compelling digital stories.

New communication channels have arisen, such as the virtual worlds of Facebook’s Horizon and others we’ve already explored, along with the huge rise in online video communication through Zoom, Slack, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and others.

The mass turn to video conferencing has also helped drive a large increase in both mobile app usage and advertising spending, highlighting the importance of making mobile a part of any well-rounded B2B marketing strategy.

Engagement among mobile ads has climbed by some 15 percent during the global health crisis according to survey data, and despite an overall drop in ad spending for the year, mobile ad spend has fared the best, as its 15 percent decrease was less than the 25 percent seen for desktop ad buying, according to additional data.

Business app opens saw a 26 percent year-over-year increase from March through June, report data shows, as seen here.

“We’re all the same size rectangle on the Zoom screen.” — Vanessa Colella of @CitiCLICK TO TWEET

A rare pandemic silver lining is how we’ve all found new ways to communicate and — more importantly — the stories we’re telling. Storytelling will be key in the post-pandemic marketing landscape, and to help you weave authentic messages that audiences will remember here are six recent articles we have available on this important topic:

Don’t Forget Your B2B Marketing Gravity

via GIPHY

The post-pandemic world will see intensified use of B2B influencer marketing, the growth of always-on programs, shifts in the world of search, more social VR, the evolution of events, and new communication channels, and we hope that by exploring these areas here your future marketing efforts will achieve newfound success — even if you’re no closer to solving that Rubik’s Cube.

Succeeding in any of these areas takes considerable time, effort and experience, which is why many firms choose a top marketing agency like TopRank Marketing.

Contact us and find out why firms including Adobe, LinkedIn, AT&T, 3M, Dell, Oracle, monday.com and many others have chosen us for award-winning marketing.

By Lane Ellis.

Lane R. Ellis (@lanerellis), TopRank Marketing Social Media and Content Marketing Manager, has over 36 years’ experience working with and writing about the Internet. Lane spent more than a decade as Lead Editor for prestigious conference firm Pubcon. When he’s not writing, Lane enjoys distance running (11 marathons including two ultras so far), genealogical research, cross-country skate skiing, vegetarian cooking, and spending time with his wonderful wife Julie Ahasay and their three cats in beautiful Duluth, Minnesota.

Sourced from TopRank Marketing

In News

Two-thirds of consumers will continue using social media to the same extent post-lockdown

September 8, 2020 No Comments

Sourced from The Drum

A report published by Influencer and GlobalWebIndex has found that two thirds of consumers think they will use social media to the same extent once restrictions are lifted. This comes as the report also finds that 72% of consumers who follow influencers in the U.S. and the UK say they’re spending more time on social media per day since the outbreak of coronavirus.

The news proves that the coronavirus outbreak has shifted the social media landscape in a potentially permanent way. The trends that the marketing industry has seen in recent months are set to have long lasting impacts, with consumers suggesting that their interaction with influencers is here to stay.

The report from Influencer offers custom research on influencer marketing alongside existing research on the coronavirus to dig into the impact the outbreak has had on consumers’ behaviors. The survey taken in May 2020, defined their audience as internet users who say they follow content creators/influencers on social media. This definition rendered a sample of 1,056 (UK) and 1,038 (U.S.) internet users aged 16-64.

The goal of the report was to unearth the effect that coronavirus has had on influencer marketing and consumer behaviours, as well as consumer relationships to content creators. This report is being used as a guide post for brands concerned with how to successfully work with creators moving forward.

Influencer’s findings proved that consumer media use has increased over the coronavirus period, largely because people have been restricted from doing their normal day-to-day activities. The report confirmed that content consumption has risen, showing that 72% of consumers who follow influencers in the U.S. and the UK say they’re spending more time on social media per day since the outbreak of coronavirus.

Gen Z already use social media at high levels, however, the research by Influencer has shown that this has increased to 84%. It was found to be only a little lower for baby boomers at 68%, showing that time spent on social media has increased across all age groups. People are using social media at higher levels across the board, and crucially, they see this as something that they will continue to do.

One of the key findings of the report was that two-thirds of consumers who follow influencers say they’re likely to continue using social media to the same extent once restrictions are lifted. The report showed that baby boomers are more inclined to say they’re likely to continue using social media to the same extent than Gen Z; 69% of boomers say this compared to 57% of Gen Z.

The findings have proven that social media use is at an all time high, and this high is set to continue into 2020 and beyond. Consumer perceptions of social media are shifting, as more people become comfortable with consuming content on social platforms.

Read the full report here: The Age of Influence: How COVID-19 has propelled brands into the era of influencer marketing

Sourced from The Drum

In News

SaaS Marketing: How to Get More Quality Leads for Your Brand

September 4, 2020 No Comments

By Brent Csutoras

Discover three tactics that can help your SaaS brand become more discoverable and exponentially grow qualified lead volume.

Many SaaS marketers are working diligently but they are just not seeing the marketing qualified lead (MQL) growth they’re striving for.

On August 12, I moderated a sponsored Search Engine Journal webinar presented by Garrett Mehrguth, CEO, Directive.

Mehrguth explored:

Actionable ways to make SaaS brands more discoverable on search engines.
Strategic methods to build brand impressions.
The actual math behind why the current marketing funnel is financially broken.

Here’s a recap of the webinar presentation.

SaaS Marketing: A Differentiated Approach

Have you ever felt helpless to grow your pipeline?

Are you working hard, but not getting results?

You aren’t alone.

Many marketers are experiencing the same things – for a plethora of reasons.

But one of the biggest reasons is that things have changed with the funnel.

In the old funnel, marketers needed to do top of funnel awareness campaigns because consumers can’t
discover the brand without them.

But then websites like Amazon and Yelp started to grow by aggregating people’s opinions of a product.

And now, people are able to get their own interest in something, evaluate their options, then become aware of what exists, and so on.

In this new funnel, what’s so so important is understanding the reality you’re playing.

So how do we adapt to this new reality as SaaS marketers?

The Big Idea: Your Brand Is Better Than Your Website

The big idea that we need to embrace here is that your brand is now more important than your website.

This isn’t to say your website doesn’t matter – it’s just that it matters less compared to your brand.

Bottom of Funnel: Websites Are No Longer Ranking

If you look at the B2C query [best day trading software], you’ll find four ads above the fold:

Here, your click-through rate doesn’t widely vary from the fourth spot to the first spot.

Mostly your CPC does OK.

Down below, there are SERP features and then different third-party review sites.

What’s really interesting about this is that individual websites and their core pages are no longer ranking – and that’s for a B2C query.

Now, if you look at a B2B query for [best accounting software], you’ll see SERP features at the top, four ads, and then PCMag.com, Capterra, and other review sites.

QuickBooks, one of the most popular software companies among business owners for accounting have a very strong market share, yet you won’t see their website anywhere in the organic listings for this query.

It’s not that QuickBooks has bad SEO.

It’s that the search engine results pages have changed.

If consumers have expressed that they want to hear what other people are saying before they buy a $5
burrito, then they will surely want information before they buy a $20,000 software.

And so what Google decided to do here was put their searcher first.

They realized that these searchers want unbiased information.

So if you aren’t showing up on these queries, you’re missing out on up to 30% of your market share.

SEO is no longer about trying to get your website to rank for bottom of the funnel queries because it can’t – Google won’t allow it.

Another thing is that some third-party and review sites are starting to bid.

This is driving up the cost per click, decreasing the profitability, and it’s cutting competition.

This new reality is happening and we need to be aware of it.

Organic CTR

Almost all SaaS marketers still universally default to advertising at Google Ads.

The truth is, that’s not necessarily the best option.

If you advertise on Google Ads, you’re going to average a 2-4% click-through rate.

Let’s say 100 people are searching for that accounting software query.

If our plan to advertise the people with purchase intent on a search engine is G0ogle Ads, we’re only capturing 4% of the total addressable market.

While the number one organic result is now a listing on a third-party website.

This means you can be a start-up accounting software company, build a great product, and get some raving fans (i.e. 10-15 users compared to the millions on QuickBooks).

Immediately, you’ll look like a true competitor to QuickBooks by simply paying to be X, Y or Z on a review site.

When you change your fundamental and understand how you can position your brand in a strong spot, you’ll have the chance to capture the number one spot and get up to 32% of market share.

With this, you almost have complete discoverability and that is an important part of being able to drive marketing qualified leads (MQLs).

Across millions of dollars of spend across multiple SaaS clients, Mehrguth’s team is averaging a 4% CTR.

You don’t necessarily want too high of a click-through rate because ideally, you want to use your ad copy to pre-qualify your clicks.

In other words, if you are required to do X amount of seats or X amount of price, a really great way especially if you’re a mid-market or enterprise organization who doesn’t win on price but instead on quality, you can include
base fundamental pricing in your ads.

Then you’ll essentially be able to disqualify the wrong clicks, qualify the right ones, and lower your cost per
acquisition (CPA).

Many SaaS companies have been brainwashed that the lower your CPA, the better.

What they do is they take your most expensive terms and they stop bidding.

Unfortunately, sometimes your most expensive terms are also your most valuable.

Even though third-party sites, such as Capterra and Software Advice, have much higher CPCs, they have much better close rates and cost per opportunity.

This means you are getting more qualified leads.

Financial Model

How SaaS owners decide to allocate capital is the most important part of marketing.

Simply reallocating where you spend your money can help grow your business significantly.

To do this, you can follow what’s called LTV:CAC modelling where you are going to understand the actual lifetime value versus the customer acquisition cost of all of your marketing channels.

There are two ways to proceed with this.

LTV:CAC SaaS Non-Trial

If you have a SaaS firm and you don’t do a free trial, here’s the spreadsheet you can use.

You also have a budget template where you can model out different scenarios and then look at each of your channels in real time.

It also allows you to put in all your numbers (i.e., at the product level) and calculate it.

You can run through any type of scenario and see what’s most efficient.

This is helpful because the second you start modelling this out, driving budget, and working on these types of elements, you’ll get much better alignment from your CFO and build trust with the CMO.

LTV:CAC SaaS Free Trial

If your SaaS offers free trial, you can use a simple but awesome model where you can see how much your team costing, software costing, ad spend, how many customers you want, etc.

And then it’ll compute your LTV:CAC ratio, as well as months to recover.

You can start to use it as a log to get better at forecasting budgeting.

Validated Tactics

If you’re the CMO of a mid-market to enterprise SaaS firm, here are a few validated tactics to consider if you want to increase your marketing qualified leads.

Paid tactics

Google Ads
Podcasts
LinkedIn
Review Sites
Terminus
Sponsored Webinars

Organic tactics

SEO
Content
Partner Marketing
PR

One thing you need to have in place before you get too deep in your tactics is to make sure you have the foundation right.

You may have all sorts of templates or tools to use, but that’s codependent on how people move through your funnel.

Ideally, anyone on your team should be able to go into your marketing platform, get the data they need, and be effective.

Nothing is more powerful than your team having the information they need when they need it – and being
able to actually do it themselves.

So now that you have your spreadsheet right, you’ll also need your data.

What’s next?

With revenue being such a big gap, you should also be thinking about OCT, or offline conversion tracking.

That would entail integrating SalesForce into your Google Ads.

The reason this is so important is because Google has come a long way and you can now trust Google Smart
Bidding.

Directive’s paid search team rebuilt all their accounts in Q2 and migrated away from the old-school way of thinking of single keyword ad groups and started bringing their clients into target CPA.

Now the issue with target CPA is how do you determine it if you don’t know your LTV:CAC ratio?

So this is why using the budget modeling template is really helpful.

1. Smart Broad Campaigns

The way Smart Broad campaigns work is that you’re going to “trust” Google’s engine.

You’ll want to integrate it with Salesforce using offline conversion tracking and then run broad keywords.

You can’t just let your account run wild so negatives are super critical.

Daily management is also extremely important.

2. Conversation Ads

One of the issues with SEO and PPC in the traditional sense is that you can’t control firmographic data.

Google has rolled out some white-label reports with industries and employee size, but the data’s not there yet.

But LinkedIn always had this phenomenal ability to give firmographic data.

For instance, you can target demand gen marketers with x amount of employees in these industries.

You can use “single persona ad groups or campaigns”, write essential one asset, and advertise to a specific target audience.

Now that conversation ads are here, it gets even better.

Conversation ads allow advertisers to “start conversations with professionals and business decision-makers via LinkedIn Messaging.”

You can use this to book a discovery call, leverage gift-giving as an offer, and so much more.

Mehrguth’s team has been working on this and saw exceptional results across the board.

3. Content Marketing with Partners

Content marketing is tough especially for SaaS companies that don’t have a brand.

Producing content is useless if you don’t have a distribution plan in place.

This is why your content marketing needs its promotion buit in.

PR is tough because you are trying to be the guest. Let’s simply reverse the roles.

Consider these ideas to boost your content marketing campaigns:

Sour interviews.
SaaS marketing competition.
Friday roundtables.

Empowering People

Marketing starts with your team and needs to bubble up into your vision at a boil.

Create a culture where your team can submit new ideas and has their own model.

Share this Financial Model for Submitting New Content Ideas to your team members to encourage them to make a business case.

All of a sudden, you’ve just given your team rocket fuel.

They can now drive strategy, have complete alignment, know if a campaign’s going to be successful, and be fully empowered.

Q&A

Here are just some of the attendee questions answered by Garrett Mehrguth.

Q: You talked about branding. I often find it difficult to justify ROI for spend done behind branding. Have you ever come across such a dilemma?

Garrett Mehrguth (GH): A lot of times, people think about how much money they need to spend to grow.

What I’ve found is that in B2B, we have really long sales cycles.

It’s always challenging to get funding from finance to spend at the top of the funnel. We often get money for the bottom of the funnel because it’s easy to prove ROI quickly.

However, we know that the bottom of the funnel is co-dependent on brand, but it seems like the “results” come just from the bottom of the funnel.

However, time goes by, and you start to wonder why you haven’t built a brand.

So when you think about brand advertising, try to set your budget up to spend just enough, so you never stop, so that eventually you can prove it out.

From there, start to grow that budget slowly.

A small budget used strategically, that you let run its course, with incremental growth is a wise way to change your financial modelling and get more approval.

Q: Our SaaS is dipping our toes into marketing. What are the 1-3 tactics or channels I should focus my attention on so I can get some immediate wins and maximize my small budget?

GM: Review sites, Google ads, and case studies.

By Brent Csutoras

Managing Partner at Search Engine Journal and a Digital Marketing Consultant, providing consulting, training, and coaching services at an hourly … [Read full bio]

Sourced from Search Engine Journal

In News

7 Ways to Generate Unique Web App Ideas for Your Startup to Consider

September 2, 2020 No Comments

By Sagar Sharma.

Execution of an idea is easier than generating the one. The idea will remain the same for web app idea creation and implementation. If you are a startup, then it is important for you to introduce web applications with a unique idea or less popular concepts. Companies are exploring all possible horizons to introduce new solutions almost every day.

It seems quite challenging to stay competitive by launching a unique idea when a high competition out there. Moreover, it is difficult to find the untouched one when the online platform has plenty of web app ideas.

Actually, it’s tough, but not impossible. All you need to do is to go the extra mile to analyze your different business aspects. It helps you to identify the gaps and fill them by launching the right web solution.

Here are a few practices that you can consider to generate unique web app ideas.

7 Ways to Generate Unique Web App Ideas

1 – Analyze Yourself

Your Company/Business

Whether you own a well-established company or startup, to stay competitive it is very important to find out and nurture the new web app ideas. For that, you need to closely analyze the challenges and needs of your business that create hurdles in the path of your success.

Nobody understands your company better than you. So, first of all, start exploring who your company has developed to be. You need to identify the strength and weaknesses of your company.

Moreover, define the unique capabilities of your company in terms of product, service, or technology that make you different from other companies like you. Analyze the other business aspects and identify which affect or disrupt your business development.

Your Employee

Another most important aspect of any organization is its employees. Spend time to understand your team members. Allow them to be part of the software development process. Collect the different perspectives and ideas shared by your team.

You will realize that everyone gives a different yet unique point of views if you allow your employees to be part of your business plan. They provide you many of the idea that you would never ever think of it and a large number of resources that you have missed while generating the idea.

Here are a few questions that you have to ask yourself to generate a potential web app idea.

What are the weaknesses and strengths of my company?
What field does my company operate in?
What does help my company to win over my rivals?
What values does my company attempt to uphold?
What is disrupting my company’s development?

2 – Listen to Your Customers

The key crux for identifying the excellent web app idea is to stay in connection with your target audience to whom you need to serve. You need to learn many things from your customers. All you need to do id just listen to them and observe their behavior. Here is how you can do it.

Focus on where your customers spend most of their time
Identify how customers interact with your products/services and brand
Analyze the journey of the customers while using your product

Moreover, you can learn about the great web app ideas by analyzing the pain points and issues your customers are facing and develop a web platform that resolves their challenges. Interaction with your customers helps you to generate more web app idea.

For example; if your customers are facing challenges related to customer services, then you can consider adding a chat section in your web application or website. It allows customers to have a quick chat with your executives and resolve their issues. Customers find this a more convenient way to contact your company.

To understand the needs and challenges of your customers, you can schedule calls or send a questionnaire to them in order to collect their suggestions. This will help you to know what you should do next.

3 – Analyze your Business Strategy

For either the startup or the established firm, a business roadmap is very essential. While defining your plans define your long term and short term goals, clarify your vision and mission, and create strategies for future development.

Utilize your experience and current knowledge base to evolve new solutions to attain your future business objectives and plans. The next step would be to find out the way to execute them through a robust web solution. Define the design, features, functionality, and support that your web application needs to achieve your business goals and drive success.

Before designing a business plan for your organization, you should ask the below questions to yourself.

What are the long term goals of my company?
What are the short term goals of my company?
How will I achieve the goals of my company?
Have I attained any goals since I have started my company?
Which operations of my organization the web application amplify?

4 – Analyze Your Marketing

Have a close look at your marketing processes and analyze if you can transform any manual activity at the web application.

Identify the marketing activities that require a huge investment. You should investigate how to reduce such expenses by transforming marketing activities to a web platform.

For example; you can consider the web application for your loyalty program that helps you to eliminate the expenses of the printed material for the product or service marketing. It is proven that digital material has a wider reach than the printed one. You can engage more target audience by transforming your marketing activities to the web platforms.

Here are a few questions you should ask yourself before shifting your marketing activities to a web platform.

Will the web app be supported to add a new revenue stream?
Will the web app help accomplish your business goals?
What operations of my business can shift to web applications?

5 – Analyze Your Industry

To generate new web app ideas, it is very essential to watch the changing industry trends closely. Get profound insights into the changing beliefs and expectations of your target audience.

Today, there are plenty of resources available that you can refer to understand the latest trends of your domain. You can keep referring the websites like Entrepreneurs, Springwise, and Trendwatching.

All these platforms cover the global trends so it will be difficult for you to evaluate and identify the trends that are relevant to the local target market of your business.

6 – Analyze Your Competitors

Competitors are technically rivals but many times they help in achieving business success. They apply different strategies to outshine you. To stay competitive, they continually check the latest trends, explore new and innovative methods, and copy any of your ideas to boost business growth.

You can go with the react approach if you find your competitors’ business grows due to the implementation of certain strategies, you should adopt it. You do copy but copy smartly. Don’t simply implement their strategies as it is. Twist the strategies as per your business needs and nature.

Here, I don’t nor want to encourage you to copy the ideas. All I mean is to consider the competitors’ strategy as a base platform. You need to break it down into different components and apply reverse engineering to create your own strategy for success.

The invention of new ideas or mechanics is not the only way to generate fresh web app ideas. You can identify the gaps that your competitors are not able to fill and build a solution that brings that gap.

Questions you need to ask yourself while analyzing your competitors.

What strategies has your competitor implemented?
What strategies help them to attain success?
What strategies have not delivered them potential results?
What faults and gaps do you identify in your competitors’ strategies?
How to create your own strategy based on the experience you have learned from your competitors?

7 – Analyze the Businesses Outside Your Industry

Just like you, the business of different domains focuses on their industries. They spend considerable time in defining the best practices for their sector. Eventually, they all end up by creating a similar type of experience in the long term.

Please understand, considering an identical idea and adding a new coating over it is not the only way to identify the new concept for our web applications. Sometimes, bridging the gaps between the two different concepts and industries also helps you in creating a unique web app idea.

Stay different from the crowd by merging more than one concept from irrelevant industries in a single web app. This will definitely spark a unique idea.

List of questions you should ask yourself while analyzing the irrelevant industries.

Can I consider different concepts from multiple industries to create a robust strategy for my business?
Can I break out of the industry I belong to and discovering outside influences?

Final Thoughts…

Generate potential web app ideas by following the above mentioned ways. You can discover, develop, and implement it to stand out from your industry crowd. Along with helping you stay competitive, it helps you deliver value to your domain and target audience by addressing unresolved issues and unfilled gaps.

Once you are done with the idea generation, you need to connect with reliable web development service providers that help you in bringing your idea to life by developing the exact web applications as you expected.

By Sagar Sharma

CTO @Credencys Solutions Inc.

Sagar holds the position of Chief Technology Officer at Credencys Solutions Inc., a Mobile App Development Company. He is responsible for all the technical operations, as well as leading the company’s revolutionary offerings. He is helping companies navigate the Digital journey in an Agile environment. Share your app idea at [email protected]. Sagar has two main areas of focus – Technology and Processes. He has worked in leadership positions in various Fortune 500 companies and has been instrumental in driving success through digital transformation. He is also an enthusiastic Agile Coach.

Sourced from readwrite

In News

Digital marketing is accelerating – so what’s next?

August 28, 2020 No Comments

By Julio Taylor.

In 2019, Hallam, Google’s Premier Partners Growing Businesses Online 2019 award winners, published one in a series of eBooks: The Future of Digital Marketing: 2019 and beyond. Covid-19 has ground the world to a halt, but has accelerated digital marketing, taking it down paths that have not been ventured before.

The team at Hallam recognises that and we’re at a stage where there is even more to add to this eBook. The Future of Digital Marketing 2.0, contains interviews with several industry experts and aims to break down exactly what the future of the industry looks like, and highlights what businesses and brands need to be prepared for ahead of digital marketing’s next big shift…

An introduction from Julio Taylor, CEO at Hallam

The latest change to digital marketing is something we have been building towards for some time now, and there are several factors behind that.

There is a massive generational change in the workforce, with 70% now millennial or younger.

We’re living in a world where, for the first time in history, the vast majority of the population is born into a digital world as standard. Digital transformation, for me, is the absolute priority and the audience is demanding it.

Because of that, there is a huge amount of complexity when it comes to digital marketing and the skill required to deliver deep and meaningful impact. You need expertise in all areas to make that happen, whether that be UX, SEO, PPC, PR, advertising, content marketing, strategy, or technical.

There is also the pace of change to consider. Factors like technology, automation, and user expectations are moving incredibly quickly. The things that were groundbreaking just a couple of years ago are now old news. Some of the topics that were hot just four years ago are now expected.

Within that, the demand for privacy is growing exponentially – partly because of the Cambridge Analytica situation, and partly because audiences are just getting smarter with it.

That has led to changes in legislation, which is restricting the use of third-party data and cookies but has also led to changes in browser design and the technology of devices – meaning it is more difficult to advertise to people, compared to how it was a couple of years ago.

Everybody is advertising, so it’s going to be about what makes you and your brand different from everybody else. That is going to be determined by the creative and the experience.

For me, it’s about precision and persuasion. That’s something we always talk about, and both are important. They are two sides of the same coin. They are extremes. But we’re heading towards an age where both need to be applied effectively.

There is so much more to this topic than the six we have outlined. We will be updating and re-releasing our Future of Digital Marketing eBook very shortly and these six key themes give you a flavour of how much our industry is going to be changing…

ePrivacy will shake the industry up

Arianne Donoghue, our strategic consultant, says: the reality is that advertising has become so focused on data and being able to target users easily that it’s really hard to see how it is going to change.

The issue now is that it may be forced to. What impact will there be if cookies disappear? Cookies, by no means, are the only solution.

There is a technique out there called browser fingerprinting, which takes so many elements of data from your browser like the fonts on your machine, the time zone and the screen resolution. It even looks at little things like the emojis a user uses.

All that data can be pulled through to form a digital fingerprint of who you are. It’s more reliable than any cookie out there. For those interested, there are a number of different sites you can use online to have your fingerprint assessed to see how unique and traceable you are around the internet. This data can also be tracked through your VPN (Virtual Private Network).

The whole point of a VPN is to store your internet history so it is harder to find and track you, but a browser fingerprint can circumvent your VPN. While somewhat terrifying, a lot of this is covered under GDPR and the ePrivacy regulation that is likely to come into force in 2021.

What does that regulation mean for digital marketing?

If cookies disappear, the industry as it has worked for the last 20 years, will just fall over. The reliance there has been on targeting users is not going to be available anymore.

So, for marketers, it is about figuring out what is next. There have been discussions about how contextual advertising is yielding good results in the market space dominated by big players, but we’re not seeing that filter down to the average advertiser.

I’m sure Google and Facebook have a plan and maybe we will see the first steps of that when IOS 14 is released later this year. It feels like we’re waiting for the ‘big five’ to lead and the rest will follow.

A zero-click and visual change to the future of search

Strategy director Ben Wood believesGoogle wants to give the best possible results. But they also want to give the best possible experience on their platform, which is essenially their search results page.

What we will see is that it is going to get more difficult to gain clicks from search because Google is wanting to bring everyone’s content on to their results pages wherever possible.

Take holiday bookings, mortgage calculators, or finding recipes, as an example. Zero-click search will be much more impactful in these areas because you will be able to book flights or tables on Google, demolishing the traffic those websites would otherwise be getting.

Others, like B2B software, will be totally different because Google won’t be able to replicate everything that is on their website. The levels at which clients will be impacted by some of these trends will vary depending on the industry but these features just go to show how susceptible businesses are to the evolution of Google’s search product, and highlights the importance of a diverse traffic acquisition strategy.

Something else we need to be wary of is visual search, which is still not being taken as seriously by SEO’s in the way that I expected.

Visual search has been on the rise for years with platforms like Pinterest evolving their features with a focus on lens technology. Google has latched on to that idea and invested in piloting Google Keen – a new visual way of building boards to track interesting topics.

What I think will be a game changer for many industries is lens/image recognition technology, which allows you to take a picture of something and search for it. Visual search is much easier than manually typing out and, as a service, I think that will continue to improve especially in retail, fashion etc.

Visual search and optimisation should be considered as a key part of SEO and right now, that’s not the case. We will see that grow a lot over the next two years and for more SEO’s to take image optimisation seriously and invest in adapting web usability to cope with new features such as visual search functionality for ecommerce just like larger retailers such as Macy’s have started to do by partnering with Pinterest to use their lens (visual search) technology.

Development is no longer just for building websites

Jon Martin, our technical director, says that one of the big things taking shape right now in the digital marketing community is the programming language, Python.

Only a few years ago it was all about PHP because it was open-source, anybody could use it and you didn’t have to pay to learn it. Python, however, is now becoming the go-to tool because it’s nice to work with, easy to learn, and is allowing SEO professionals to do what they want to really quickly.

Developers and SEO professionals need to have a strong understanding of Python, but also have a holistic view of the landscape and understanding of SEO and PPC. Certainly in the future, developers are going to be important in helping businesses and brands automate things that were previously manual.

UX is becoming a ranking factor, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you need a new website

Joe Powell, our creative director, explains thatUX is one of the most important elements of digital marketing and underpins everything we do as an agency. The demand for UX consultancy has been increasing through the need for user-ability testing from our clients to validate their theories and mitigate risk before making a decision.

User testing allows us to learn where things have gone wrong, so we’re not making the same mistakes again. A typical flaw of businesses is that they have objectives they want to achieve, but they don’t consider what impact that will have on the consumer. It’s a delicate balance between representing the stakeholder and the users’ needs.

The less resistance you add to the user experience on any platform – whether that’s in-store, on a digital interface, website, or even a book – the easier it is to use, the more intuitive it is, and the higher the probability that it will convert into a sale or enquiry.

There’s a common misconception that improving UX means you need a new website build. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. UX can be practised on a single page or a website and you can make conversion-focused enhancements to existing websites.

There are other options, however. If you’re happy with your current website’s design, but want to increase engagement, then our advice would be to review the experiences of certain areas and make ad-hoc changes to those sections to improve the offering.

A lot of sales teams are interested in getting new websites, but sometimes smaller changes can make the world of difference to CRM.

UX is an immensely important thing to get right. It’s not something that can just be picked up. It is acquired through years of experience and moving through different disciplines, like brand, design, copywriting, development. Every decision has to be made with one question in mind; does this add value? If it doesn’t, it’s not worth pursuing.

SEO and PPC are evolving and will face some challenges

Charlotte Tomlinson, media director, explains:SEO and PPC, for a long time, have been very separate disciplines. There has been a big effort across the industry this year to address that because the results, when the disciplines are combined, are clearly better.

What we’re going to see is SEO and PPC come together to form integrated search and shared data campaigns, which will, ultimately, save money for businesses and brands in the long run.

A great, but simple, example of this is taking the data from a business’ paid campaign to make decisions around what SEO should be optimising in order to drive conversions.

What we’re seeing, quite often, is that what businesses didn’t think was important is actually becoming more so, allowing the teams to pivot accordingly to target audiences and keywords that hadn’t been considered before.

The relationship between businesses and their PPC agencies is also going to change significantly, and that is down to the growth of automation. PPC is going to become very strategic, creative, and consultancy-focused, rather than manual.

There needs to be an education piece around that. Google is at the forefront of that automation and PPC professionals will face a lot of questions by clients when it comes to value for money. It is down to us to deliver that value that in-house teams simply cannot get.

Again, though, that comes back to down integration; design teams and PPC working together to create awesome creative that is going to make advertising more successful than it has been before.

Headless will be the future of web development for the next decade

Martin says that while it has been around a while, Headless, including its various platforms, including Ghost, is a concept that lets you decouple the back and front end of a website.

For example, this allows you to have a WordPress driven website, but your front end looks completely different and you’re not reliant on the WordPress templates to do that. This gives you a huge amount of flexibility when coding, but the big benefit is around speed, performance, and usability of the site.

Essentially, you’re cutting a lot of the time that would be spent loading up WordPress and, instead, focusing on these small, nimble, pages that take far less time to load. This is predicted to be the future for the next decade of web development in the same way responsive web design was previously.

We’re only touching the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the influence of AI

Kieran S-Lawler, head of marketing, explains: This is a topic that gets spoken about a lot. AI has got a big role to play in the forecasting of data-driven content. It is still learning – doing so at a supernatural rate – and it will get to a stage where it’s finding patterns and analysis far faster than we ever could.

That forecast might not be 100 percent accurate, but it will give you insight into what life for a particular sector could look like. It’s also got a big role to play with interactive content, too, and how marketers use AI systems to engage and interact with customers.

We’re seeing it with bots already. Bots are not AI, but it gives you a flavour of what we can expect from AI in the future. On the flip side, there’s a general feeling that marketers and content creators are going to be redundant because of the advanced technology, but, for me, that’s far from the case.

Someone is going to be required to feed that AI and inform them what is right and wrong. It will make our life easier and provide us with data and insight that we would otherwise have to spend multiple hours trying to find.

I think we’re only touching the tip of the iceberg with what is achievable with this technology. There’s a lot more to come. Right now, it’s not totally accessible and it isn’t in a format that is easily digestible for marketers to truly use and understand.

Final thoughts

Just as marketers are only touching the tip of the iceberg for AI, we’re also only touching the tip of what the future of digital marketing looks like. The industry continues to develop at a rapid rate and from the future of Google and privacy, to the next steps in platform advertising, data, automation and content, it will all be covered when Hallam releases its new eBook, The Future of Digital Marketing 2.0, this autumn.

By Julio Taylor

Sourced from The Drum

In News

Not Your Mother’s Marketing: 5 Ways Social Media Changed Marketing Forever

August 26, 2020 No Comments

By Molly Townley.

The marketing landscape has been in a constant state of change for decades – from print ads and billboards to radio, television, and then moving online to digital marketing. It seemed like all there was to say had already been said, and then – social media popped up on the scene.

It didn’t take long for marketers to realize its huge potential. These platforms reached millions, and connected everyone to…well, everyone. Anything you had to say was visible, available, accessible, and sharable to everyone else in a matter of seconds. Then came the true marketing revolution.

Here are 5 ways social media changed marketing forever.

A wider reach than ever before

There are 3.8 billion users on social media, according to recent statistics. That means 3.8 billion people that one can potentially reach through social media marketing.

Never before have brands been able to capture an audience this size, or their audience’s attention for as long as they can now. Marketing used to be limited to opportunities for it – ads in a magazine, on a billboard, on TV, in-person sales pitches – and the limited amount of customers were exposed to it sporadically, only under certain circumstances.

Nowadays, social media practically allows for non-stop marketing, all day, all the time. According to statistics, people spend, on average, just over 2 hours on social media every single day. That’s 2 full hours that marketers have a user’s attention throughout the day. Imagine how many TV ads a viewer would have to watch to achieve the same kind of impact.

The marketing never stops because it’s always there, with every use, and regardless of platform. Whether it’s a post on Facebook, an image on Instagram, or video ads on YouTube, marketers can reach their huge audience at any point, and on any platform.

Unique opportunities for engagement

The most effective way to get someone’s attention and create an emotional response to your brand is to engage with your audience. Since the advent of social media, it’s easier than ever before to connect with customers and followers.

The more you engage with your audience, the more you can grow user engagement on your page. That is going to achieve a couple of things. First, it establishes a degree of relatability that people enjoy in a brand. It allows them to form an emotional connection to a company and its marketing, which in turn, creates brand loyalty.

Second, it helps tremendously with “shareability” – i.e. how likely people are to share your content with others. When you’re responsive, insightful, witty, creative – that gets people’s interest, they appreciate it, and they share it. That increases your audience and your reach.

The ability to target specific audiences

In the past, targeting audiences was still possible, but more limiting. Ad placement during certain TV programs and movies was – and still is – common, to capture the attention of certain audiences. Say, running ads for beer during the Superbowl, or pantyhose during daytime soaps.

Social media helps make this type of specific targeting easier, more precise, and more sophisticated. It’s possible to target specific demographics according to the platform they’re active on, the groups they’re part of or even the hashtags they post in.

A company will know that if they are targeting Boomers, they need to place on Facebook, if they want Millennials, they go to Instagram, and they use Snapchat or TikTok to capture the attention of Gen Z. They can even access interest-specific groups, like wedding groups on Facebook, in order to address users directly.

Seamless marketing

And speaking of non-stop, very precise marketing, marketing on social media also enables one to do so in a very seamless way.

Ads

Traditional ads are still present on social media, but they’re integrated into the user interface in such a manner that they look like regular posts. You can pay for actual ads, but there are other, more subtle ways to market, as well.

Posts

You can also make your own social media posts marketing your product or service. The bigger your audience and your reach are, the more users will be exposed to your messaging.

Influencer posts

Otherwise, you can take advantage of so-called “influencers”. Over the last decade or so, marketing has transformed thanks to the rise of influencers.

They are an exceptional marketing opportunity because the content they produce is not an overt ad. It’s framed as a review or opinion coming from real people that used the products or services and are offering their genuine opinions and experiences.

To gain exposure, a brand may send PR samples for consideration. Or they may pay for a sponsorship. Influencers have large followings of loyal, trusting users, so exposure on a platform like this can be very valuable and lucrative.

More effective tracking

Marketing online and via social media also has invaluable advantages when it comes to tracking and measuring effectiveness. You are likely to see the effects in real-time, by taking a look at the interest and engagement you get on a post, as well as receiving and listening to customer feedback.

You can also track what is being said about your brand specifically, to gain awareness of audience opinions and interests. Following and tracking data this way is called social listening, and it enables you to pay attention to what audiences – and competitors! – are saying and incorporate it into your marketing to increase effectiveness.

In addition, you can plan posts according to what is likely to get maximum engagement and conversions, based on the data you’ve been able to collect, either actively or passively.

Tracking clicks, conversions, and revenue on social media is much easier than with traditional marketing avenues, such as billboards or print ads. You can use tracking software for a detailed breakdown of who is exposed to your marketing, for how long, or how effective your campaign is, and adjust your marketing efforts accordingly.

Final thoughts

Social media took the world by storm in a million ways and changed the way we socialize, and the way we market. Marketing has been made easier, quicker, more effective, more precise – and its full potential has not yet been reached.

Both social media and marketing are constantly changing. Every new platform or feature brings innovation and new opportunities for marketers to leverage and create clever, inspiring, effective campaigns. You have to keep up to stay relevant and retain the valuable attention of your audience.

By Molly Townley.

(email: [email protected])

In News

REFLECTING ON SOCIAL MEDIA SPEND: WHEN TO SHAKE UP THE MARKETING MIX

August 25, 2020 No Comments

By Ricky Ray Butler.

This year has ushered in a period of upheaval and recalibration. As consumers explore the societal issues surrounding them, a social reckoning has begun. Consumers are setting new standards for employers, brands and public figures and are closely watching who adheres to these expectations.

Simply sharing a statement is not enough. Instead, brands must promote change by putting their money where their mouth is. In some instances, this means significant donations or investments in diversity and inclusion within the organization. For others, it means re-evaluating partnerships with companies or individuals who have become complacent in the fight for social justice.

The #StopHateForProfit movement on Facebook is the latest example of this. On July 1, Business Insider reported that more than 500 brands had committed to the #StopHateForProfit movement, pausing ad spend on Facebook and Instagram in order to voice their concern over the spread of hate speech and misinformation on the platform. As of August 11, that number had more than doubled.

From my perspective, this movement is incredibly powerful and stems from the simple truth that companies today vote with their dollars. Where and with whom they spend their money exposes more about their social ethics than what they say. And paid media is arguably one of the biggest driving forces for how brands show up and support our digital world today.

This movement has aimed to inspire change within Facebook as a business. My company’s work with content creators and in influencer marketing has shown me, however, that some content creators could be negatively impacted as well. Aside from pausing ad spend with Facebook directly, I’ve observed that many brands have also stalled or pushed out influencer marketing campaigns, which has inadvertently affected content creators whose livelihoods depend on sponsored content.

There’s an important differentiation here that brands should consider: Most influencers today operate as small businesses, and Facebook is not a part of the transaction between brands and creators. So pulling money away from holistic digital marketing campaigns in this manner doesn’t end up affecting Facebook’s bottom line — only the creators’.

As we collectively work to adjust how platforms combat hate speech, from Facebook and beyond, I encourage brands to consider whether they can continue supporting and empowering creators who are spreading positive messages and bringing communities together on a daily basis. Influencer marketing offers an incredibly diverse ecosystem of backgrounds, interests, talents, lifestyles and audiences for brands to tap into. If you’re working with creators who align with your brand’s values, you can create a natural dialogue among consumers and products or services and tie it to the world around them.

Today’s content creators also have the power to drive awareness and action around pertinent societal issues and have the audience engagement necessary to incite real change and shape a better tomorrow. Yet, while the industry is on track to be worth up to $15 billion by 2022, I still run into the same misconceptions about how only certain brands are a fit for influencer marketing, how complicated the process can be and the ultimate return on investment.

At a base level, every brand is a fit for influencer marketing campaigns, as long as it’s partnering with the right creators. Although it’s mostly touted as effective for direct-to-consumer brands, there are a multitude of options for creators and platforms to reach even the most niche audiences, whether it’s small business and entrepreneurship tips, auto repair or human resources software solutions.

For more unconventional brands looking to pursue influencer marketing, it’s important to start by really understanding which channels your audience is on and partnering with the relevant creators from there. A younger audience looking for how-to videos might call for YouTube, whereas an entrepreneurial audience might call for LinkedIn or Twitter.

Another major benefit of influencer marketing is closer visibility into who is seeing your message and the content it’s integrated within. With automated advertising on social media and the internet more broadly, there aren’t enough checks and balances to ensure that your advertisements aren’t being placed against content that is deemed unsafe or unsuitable for brand safety guidelines. From my perspective, influencer marketing can help mitigate that fear because the message is integrated into the content directly and shared with a specific audience that is already tuned into that particular channel.

At the end of the day, I believe a campaign focused on disseminating helpful, timely information with the appropriate content creators is still a viable option for brands interested in partnering with influencers. This type of marketing gives brands the opportunity to bring together diversity in background, thought and interests. Instead of having a few blanket advertisements for different audiences, brands can leverage influencer marketing to communicate with audiences through the authentic voices of creators.

That said, when pursuing an influencer campaign, it’s essential to execute it thoughtfully. This will allow you to uplift the creative process for the content creators, as well as ensure that your brand is truly engaging with audiences in a genuine way and never forcing or disrupting the content itself.

Amid all the uncertainty, 2020 has inspired immense societal change and re-evaluation. Social media giants have work to do in mitigating the spread of misinformation and hate speech, and influencer marketing offers brands a powerful antidote by putting resources behind creators who are inspiring lasting, positive change.

Facebook is but one example of a platform on the wrong side of a controversy. These moments have happened before, with YouTube and “Adpocalyspe,” and I believe they will continue to happen in the future. Such challenges are inevitable — when the cards are on the table, brands must evaluate their responses and take decisive action.

For brands that have participated in influencer marketing in the past, I see now as the time to invest in more variety, support the small businesses and entrepreneurs we call content creators, and foster creativity and dialogue where we can.

Feature Image Credit: GETTY

By Ricky Ray Butler.

Sourced from AdAge

In News

3 Steps to Improving your Marketing Intelligence Strategy

August 12, 2020 No Comments

By Leah Pope,

As businesses work to reopen and adjust to the “new normal”—navigating changes across customer preferences and the economy—marketers continue to employ agile strategies to contend with the shifting environment. Marketers are working to stabilize their operations by becoming radically efficient with time, resources and budget while simultaneously planning for future growth and transformation.

With a marketing strategy founded in marketing intelligence, they are fully equipped to tackle this seemingly daunting journey. Yet each marketer and marketing team is at a different stage in establishing their marketing intelligence strategy. To best understand where to improve and shift focus, it is important to assess your maturity when it comes to the three main pillars of marketing intelligence:

1. Data integration

How connected are your data sources and how seamlessly and quickly can you access them?

Today’s marketers are using a vast number of channels and platforms to reach their customers, with high volumes of siloed data stemming from each. As a result, data integration—the process of unifying and connecting marketing data—is a challenge for many. In fact, 57 percent of marketers spend a week or more trying to unify their data.

Without accessible, consistent data and a holistic view, it’s difficult for marketers and their stakeholders to see which new tactics and campaigns are working and which are not. To fix this, marketers need to harmonize their data and structure their taxonomy. With these processes in place, marketers are able to see any data– such as social, search, display, programmatic, web, email and CRM data– all in one place.

2. Analytics and insights

Next, take a look at your insights—how are they being generated and what actions do they inspire?

With landscapes shifting faster than ever, marketers need to act more nimbly in order to keep up. Marketers need to gain insights from their data swiftly in order to engage customers with relevant and helpful content and ensure they are using valuable budget efficiently and effectively.

With all the information in one place, marketers can quickly gather insights at scale. The power of artificial intelligence (AI) can also provide marketers with always-on insights into important KPIs and suggested actions for optimizing campaigns. Currently, 80 percent of marketers don’t have access to daily or real-time reports, but marketers are keen to expand their use of AI tools, with 47 percent of marketers planning to do so in the next year.

With consistent reporting and insights across channels, marketers can identify where to spend and move budget across marketing campaigns and channels in real time. They can also adjust messages, content and tactics to account for any changes across customer behaviours to drive better customer experiences and impact long-term loyalty and brand health.

3. Alignment and collaboration

Marketers are constantly working across multiple brands, business units, teams and regions, and a majority of companies are now contending with remote working environments. Marketers need to understand whether they’re operating cross-functionally in a successful manner. Is the entire business aligned to a unified marketing strategy? Does everyone agree on KPIs, goals and benchmarks? Are key stakeholders receiving the information they need, when they need it?

With a single system of record, marketers can build customized data visualizations, personalized to different stakeholders. This way, each stakeholder will receive the exact data and insights they want to track, all in real time. With all teams working from the same set of facts, KPIs and taxonomies, the data-driven culture across the organization will become elevated, leading to smarter decision-making that impacts the customer experience and business success.

Marketing intelligence allows marketers to power true business transformation. But this doesn’t happen overnight. No matter where you are in your journey, now is the time to assess your maturity when it comes to current capabilities, progress and goals for the future. Marketers and their teams have the opportunity to reflect on these three key pillars and understand their marketing intelligence maturity—where they might be able to improve and rethink processes and maximize efficiency and impact.

Feature Image Credit: iStock

By Leah Pope

Leah Pope is a seasoned world traveller and marketing executive. Acting as chief marketing officer, Leah leads all strategic marketing activities at Salesforce Datorama, a global technology company that provides a marketing intelligence platform for enterprises, agencies and publishers. Leah has more than 15 years of executive experience successfully delivering software products and services to market, having held positions of worldwide marketing leadership at Synthesio, IBM, Lombardi Software and Inquisite. An accomplished writer, speaker and blogger, Leah also sits on the Forrester Marketing Leadership board. Leah holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology, Marketing and History from Boston University.

Sourced from AdAge

In News

Putting Story At The Heart Of Marketing

August 12, 2020 No Comments

By Ethan Stine

The first time I told a room full of white-collar professionals about my ex-colleague’s near-kidnapping while we were promoting prize fights in Istanbul, I learned the real power of storytelling. And you’re paying attention now too, aren’t you?

It’s a true story that I’m usually excited to tell (mostly because we got him back in one piece), but what I came to understand from the first few times recounting the tale was that ignorance and boredom are potent poisons, and stories contain the antidote. So much of our lives are spent in routines and, when a window opens up and we get to peek through someone else’s lens, we can’t help but look. We want to understand, and we want to be entertained.

The Evolutionary Power To Move People

Whether or not it registers on a conscious level, for most people, stories are part teachers and part entertainers. They define our understanding of the world around us, functioning as a sort of series of dress rehearsals to help us build comprehension about things that we’ve never actually experienced. They’ve become so evolutionarily critical to us as a species that our brains have developed to release a series of chemicals in response to a good, character-driven story: Cortisol makes us sit up and pay attention, while oxytocin builds empathy and connection, and dopamine rewards us for keeping engaged with the narrative.

Let’s pause for a minute to consider the awesome power of that. We can convey information in a way that can move people to action. Without raising a finger, human beings can compel other human beings to feel and think in certain ways, and it’s because we’re programmed by evolution to do it. The ethical considerations are enormous. Despots frequently rise to power by positioning themselves as the leading characters in the story of our connected lives, portraying themselves as messiah figures who can “right the wrongs” of society. Good storytelling can be extremely dangerous when used by bad-faith actors.

Assuming you’re not a bad-faith actor, however, and looking at this through the lens of a communicator, is there anything more noble and powerful to learn how to do? Stories create new opportunities for us to learn from each other, and they motivate us to be better. They teach us about ourselves and serve as our escape from the mundane. A well-told story can be an enormous force for good, a vehicle to drive positive change and introduce innovation in our world.

An Industry-Agnostic, Evergreen Skill Set

Two years ago was when I really registered the pervasiveness of my hopeless addiction to stories. I was neck-deep in field interviews, collecting dozens of customer stories to feed to hungry sales and marketing teams at a newly minted business-to-business (B2B) unicorn, and suddenly it dawned on me: “I can’t get enough of this stuff.”

I was working alongside a team of delightfully qualified consultants, kicking whichever doors stood between us and a juicy narrative, documenting anecdotes and uncovering how some of the biggest and most innovative businesses in the world were using technology to overcome their prickliest challenges. How did a Fortune 500 cosmetics business shave weeks off the time it took them to get cash in the door from their biggest customers? What organizational shifts were happening among Europe’s largest manufacturers in response to the global demand for green energy? People I used to work with in the entertainment business asked me if I was bored in the corporate ecosystem, and I found myself surprised to tell them, truthfully, no. I was constantly learning and endlessly entertained. I was hooked on the story.

Today, I’m building out a fledgling (but supremely talented) marketing team at a series A venture that’s focused on supercharging productivity in the building industry, and you wouldn’t be surprised to know that the stories in this industry are also incredible. I’ve been fortunate in my career to have encountered a surplus of interesting people, and the stories I’ve heard from the folks creating our skylines from glass, steel and imagination are already contending for some of the coolest. Who wouldn’t want to go to dinner with the people who built the tallest towers in London and New York and hear about the challenges they surmounted along the way? Who wouldn’t want to meet the people building our skylines — universal symbols of human creativity, capability and progress?

The point is, there’s always something interesting worth knowing and sharing, no matter which industry you’re working in. The ability to get people to open up and translate their narratives into something that moves people is a totally evergreen set of skills that will serve any marketer for a lifetime.

The Power Of The Story-First Marketing Organization

When my team and I connect with customers, we proudly tell them that we’re a story-first marketing organization, and we tell them that we want to know their story. Our success as a team is dependent on more than just having successful customers — it’s contingent on us being able to unearth and understand their tales of struggle and success, and then our capability to shine a light on the good work they’re doing. We spend time thinking through media formats and delivery mechanisms. But without a good story to tell, a cause simply cannot be successful.

The imperative for those of us in marketing and communications roles? If you want to be successful in moving people, first always ask, “What’s the story?” Once you have the answer, put it at the heart of your marketing.

Also, don’t wander off with friendly strangers in Istanbul, but that’s a story for another time.

Feature Image Credit: GETTY

By Ethan Stine

Startup veteran, story purveyor and Global Head of Marketing at Disperse. Read Ethan Stine’s full executive profile here.

Sourced from Forbes

In News

Marketing has the power to change the world

August 5, 2020 No Comments

By Emma Mulcahy

Marketing holds a unique place in the modern world; it has the ability to challenge and shape perspectives, to inform culture and to kickstart movements.

Now, in a time of global crisis, we see more clearly than ever the industry’s ability to effect real change, by driving positive messages and offering platforms to those that need it.

It is in the spirit of this fundamental belief that The Drum and Facebook have teamed up to launch the ‘Marketers Can Change the World’ global initiative, which aims to unite and support the industry across three areas: EMEA, North America and APAC.

At its heart, Facebook exists to help create and sustain communities, even from a distance. Now, during Covid-19, that distance is felt more than ever. Pledging to donate $100mn to 30,000 small-to-medium size businesses (SMBs) across these markets, Facebook will support established and rising marketing leaders to rethink how these businesses are run and how we can make them more resilient in times of struggle.

Discussing the exciting new initiative and how marketing can effect positive change in the world is; General Mills marketing head- culture & brand experience (Europe-Australasia), Arjoon Bose, Bombay Sapphire brand director, North America, Tom Spaven, Facebook global industry relations and intelligence lead, Sylvia Zhou, and The Drum associate editor, Sonoo Singh.

What steps have been taken?

“You’ll have seen the Coronavirus Information Centre located at the top of your news feed from the start of the pandemic,” says Zhou. “This was introduced so that our users are up-to-date with news and developments, from a source they can trust.” Facebook has also offered free ads to public health authorities such as the W.H.O, created Community Help where people can support their peers and recently launched Facebook Shops to help users pivot their business online.

Spaven speaks of Bacardi’s commitment to their consumers during this trying period: “The bar and events industry was particularly impacted by Covid-19, so we wanted to give back to the businesses that have continually supported our business.” The project pledged $3mn in financial aid to bars and bartenders facing difficulty during this period, as well as offering up their platforms and marketing expertise for those that need it. For Bacardi, it was a case of serving those that serve them; an idea also seen at General Mills. With the enforcement of lockdown, Bose understood that it was essential to reiterate the kitchen as being the heart of the home and to promote the everyday products needed by families.

What more can bigger brands do to provide support?

“Now is the time to be bold and responsible,” Bose responds. Marketing has always been at the forefront of significant change. He argues that during these difficult times marketing gives consumers a reason to spend and a reason to hope. Now is the time to reiterate brand identity.

Spaven believes that going back to basics is the surest way to engage your consumer base. “The fundamentals of marketing, as well as of human behavior don’t change, only budgets and resources do.”

What are the objectives of the Facebook project?

The ‘Marketers Can Change the World’ global initiative supports small-to-medium size businesses (SMBs) across EMEA, North America and APAC and will focus predominantly on those run by immigrants, senior citizens, or women. “Statistics show that businesses run by these marginalized groups encounter more difficulties in acquiring resources and financial funding,” Zhou shares with us. The project will give rising stars in the marketing industry the opportunity to collaborate with senior mentors with vast experience in the field. Working together on a prescribed brief, the teams will create business policies that give value for the people and communities they impact. Facebook will provide essential training and access to tools that will allow these businesses to thrive both during and after the pandemic.

What knowledge will the mentors be able to impart?

Both Arjoon Bose and Tom Spaven express their sincere gratitude at having been asked to take part in the initiative as mentors. “This is a great opportunity to listen and learn from others, and to experience situations in a new way,” Spaven says. These views are echoed by Bose, who recognizes this opportunity to collaborate with different people and teams, as a teaching moment.

“I hope to be able to provide a fresh perspective to the team members and ask the right questions,” shares Spaven. This initiative lets teams combine the quick thinking of big brands with the even quicker movement of smaller, more centralised businesses.

At the heart of this, is our consumers- and their needs are changing rapidly. How are brands able to keep pace with this?

“Brands have to always be open to change,” states Bose. “Whether that’s remaining open to rethinking your retention strategy, trying out new tools or reprioritizing your products in line with consumer needs- we must be agile.”

Similarly, for Spaven businesses should always be thinking about their brand experience and how this meets customer needs. “Purpose is so important for every brand, but that doesn’t mean they all have to save the world,” he affirms. Understanding your brand’s mission and ensuring you deliver that, ethically and responsibly is enough.

Spaven adds that diversifying the industry needs to be a top priority if we are to truly meet the demands of today’s consumer; “It’s not about ticking a box, it’s about benefitting your bottom line- it’s just good business sense.”

Zhou agrees: “This mission is at the core of what Facebook wants to achieve in this initiative. By channelling our every effort into increasing the visibility of these groups, we want to create a ripple effect throughout the industry. This project will reveal the true power of marketing to influence for good and change the world for the better.”

By Emma Mulcahy

Sourced from The Drum