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What’s next for social ad spend as one third of brands plot hate-speech boycott?

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By Rebecca Stewart

As brands continue to add their name to the growing list of companies boycotting Facebook, fresh research from the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) has painted a sobering picture of how marketers view the social network and its rivals.

Volkswagen and Mars are the latest corporations to halt ad spend with Facebook over its handling of damaging content and misinformation. The car marque and food giant join Levi’s, Coca-Cola, Unilever and more in signing up to the ‘Stop Profit for Hate campaign’ which is backed by civil rights groups including the NAACP, Color of Change and the Anti-Defamation League.

The coalition has been calling on major corporations to put a pause on advertising on Facebook for the month of July, citing its “repeated failure to meaningfully address the vast proliferation of hate on its platforms”.

Some brands have gone further, pulling the plug on all investment for the foreseeable future across all social networks.

The WFA’s research has revealed a diminishing faith in not only Facebook, but also its bedfellows, to address the issue at hand.

What did the WFA’s research find?

  • The WFA’s members control nearly $100bn in global ad spend. Following on from the news of the Facebook boycott, the trade body asked members about their policies on social media ad spend. The WFA’s research asked advertiser views on all social media platforms.
  • 76 responded, representing 58 companies and $92bn in marketing dollars.
  • Almost one-third of these marketers (31%) said they will, or are likely to, suspend advertising on social media over platforms’ failure to police hate speech. A further 40% said they were also considering doing so.
  • 17% said they were unlikely to withhold spend. 12% said they had no plans to withhold spend.
  • Brands were also asked which other actions they’d taken or had considered. 53% said they’d already had direct conversations with social platforms about hate speech. 48% said their main approach was to work through industry bodies to deal with the issue. 32% said they weren’t taking action for now and 13% said they were taking other actions.

What does the data show?

  • If anything, the survey shows how divided the industry is on how to handle the issue. Some brands are set on pulling spend, where others remain undecided.
  • The WFA also released some anonymised qualitative responses as part of the research. Again, these are a mixed bag: one marketer laments that it’s “simply depressing” how much the platforms are still falling short and says they would “appreciate support with identifying and viable alternatives for investments”.
  • Another pointed out that neither the platforms nor the advertisers propping them up are perfect: “Advertisers may pull out of these platforms,” the brand marketer continues, “but consumers will not.

What’s next?

  • Hate speech and how brands inadvertently fund it is an issue that has been on the WFA’s radar for some time. Working with social networks to find a solution to the problem is already being prioritised by the trade body’s Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM).
  • For its part, Facebook has promised “new policies to connect people with authoritative information about voting, crack down on voter suppression, and fight hate speech”.
  • Actions include labelling posts that are potentially harmful and even in violation of the platform’s policies but are not censored by the platform because they are deemed newsworthy.
  • Facebook will also add a link to its voting information centre to posts that reference voting, including those made by politicians such as President Trump.
  • Speaking to the Financial Times earlier this week, chief executive of the WFA Stephen Loerke noted how this moment feels like a turning point amid the pressure of the ‘Stop Hate for Profit’ campaign.
  • “What’s striking is the number of brands who are saying they are reassessing their longer-term media allocation strategies and demanding structural changes in the way platforms address racial intolerance, hate speech and harmful content,” he explained.
  • The magnitude of the brand exodus won’t really be clear until Facebook releases its Q3 results in October.

Feature Image Credit: Volkswagen and Mars are the latest corporations to halt ad spend with Facebook over its handling of damaging content / Unsplash

By Rebecca Stewart

Sourced from The Drum

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The Best Hack To Being Recession-Proof: 3 Reasons To Never Stop Marketing

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By Pia Silva

The past couple of months of this global pandemic have brought up no shortage of questions for entrepreneurs: “How long will it last? When can I go back to work? How can I keep working through this crisis? My cash flow has essentially stopped; how can I save money—and my business?”

I really can sympathize with all of the above, because I asked myself similar questions during the 2008 financial crisis. Back then, I was just starting to get my business footing, and when the economy came crashing down, I, like many entrepreneurs across the country, found myself staring at very slim pickings.

So this time, I want to address the elephant in the room during times of economic uncertainty: Should you keep marketing your business to an audience that may be struggling financially, and is it even worthwhile to market your services when people aren’t in a position to buy?

Feature Image Credit: “How can this be happening? I cut my marketing budget!”  STEVE WASTERVAL

By Pia Silva

I am a partner and brand strategist at Worstofall Design where we build brands that turn expertise into profit. Unlike most branding firms, we build entire brands in days instead of months, and only work for 1-3 person service businesses. Our unique process and niche positioning has helped us to overcome the hurdles we struggled with when we were starting our business, reliably attracting a steady flow of high paying clients and allowing us to enjoy the freedom that inspired us to become entrepreneurs in the first place. At Forbes, my goal is to clarify and simplify the elusive idea of “branding,” and share practical tips and tangible steps to help businesses find their unique brand voice that leads to profit.

Sourced from Forbes

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Why You Should Focus on Brand Reputation Rather Than Marketing

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By Samuel Thimothy,

When you’re building a business, your reputation is all you have. While flashy marketing campaigns or persuasive sales materials can help you close a deal, they’re not going to be strong enough to keep your customers coming back to purchase again.

As an entrepreneur, it can be difficult to separate these two ideas. If you’re putting all your energy into attracting new customers, you might forget to give a customer who has purchased from you your best work.

Unfortunately, if the customer isn’t happy with what you’ve done for them, they’ll not only move on to a competitor, but they might tell their friends, family, co-workers and acquaintances about their bad experience. If that happens too often, you develop a bad reputation — the kiss of death in the business world.

On the other hand, a great reputation can bring in new business like a marketing campaign can’t. Here’s why.

Customers remember a great experience and strong reputation.

If you have a reputation for going above and beyond your customers’ expectations, they’ll never forget. What they will forget, however, is the marketing campaign you invested in so heavily. When the ads stop running and the campaign is over, your customers will stop thinking about it.

A brand reputation is emotional. If you were there to help a customer through a difficult time or you were able to brighten their day, they’ll keep that feeling with them long after the transaction is over. They’ll also keep that feeling in mind as they continue to make purchasing decisions, extending the relationship with your business and giving you repeat purchases.

To improve your brand reputation, focus on giving each and every customer a positive, unique experience. Solve their problems. Listen to their needs, and find a solution that works well for them — even if it involves a little extra work. You won’t be disappointed in the results.

A strong brand reputation also means you can invest less in marketing overall. When you’re able to create solid connections with customers who want to keep working with you, you don’t need to attract as many new customers.

Better yet, as your positive brand reputation starts to spread, you’ll get more referrals from the customers you’ve left happy for so long.

Customers share positive and negative experiences with their friends (and online).

You’ve probably encountered it before — you’re about to order a pizza to be delivered when a friend stops you. They tell you how a few months ago, they ordered a pizza from that same restaurant and had a horrible experience. You take their word of warning and choose to order from another place.

While you didn’t experience the bad experience directly, you were influenced by the reputation of the business. Because your friend didn’t believe the business was worth purchasing from again, you decided to purchase somewhere else.

If you’re providing a bad experience to your customers, you could be creating the same negative brand reputation for your business — causing you to lose business to competitors, even if you’ve never interacted with that potential client yourself.

Now, in this same example, let’s say your friend offered an alternative pizza shop for you to order from. They claim to order from this location all the time, and they always have a positive experience.

If you choose to listen to your friend, you’re again letting a brand’s reputation sway your decisions, this time on a positive note. Since you’ve heard good things from someone you can trust, you’re more likely to choose the pizza shop that has glowing reviews.

The same goes for online reviews. If a potential customer is considering working with you, they might jump online and see that your business doesn’t have great reviews. This is a problem that no amount of marketing is going to fix. On the other hand, a number of positive reviews could be just the thing the customer needs to pick up the phone and call you or finally make an online purchase.

Build a reputation– don’t sell a product.

It’s easy to get caught up in the numbers, especially when you’re growing a business. But your number of new business deals or customers acquired isn’t always a true indication of your success.

Instead, focus on the brand reputation you’re building. Because customers tend to remember experiences (both their own and their friends’) longer, your reputation will be harder to change than any marketing campaign. If you’re not building a positive one from the start, it could mean your business is dead before it ever really gets started.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Samuel Thimothy,

VP at OneIMS.com, an inbound marketing agency, and co-founder of Clickx.io, a digital marketing intelligence platform

Sourced from Inc.

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What Makes a Good Marketing Manager?

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By Chris Porteous.

How to direct teams toward commercial and creative success in marketing.

Many marketing professionals aspire to become excellent marketing managers who can direct entire teams toward commercial and creative success. Despite the allure of becoming a marketing manager, however, it’s an immensely difficult position to master. Many marketing specialists do quite well when producing content or conducting research but lack the skills and experience needed to be good marketing managers. Business owners and marketing gurus are thus left grappling with the question of what makes a good marketing manager so great, and how to avoid making mistakes that stymie the whole team’s progress.

Here’s a review of what it takes to become a good marketing manager, and what techniques to avoid if you want your team to remain successful over the long term.

Know your role as a marketing manager

If you’re a marketing manager or are angling to become one, there’s a good chance that you possess some experience working in the lower rungs of the marketing hierarchy. Producing content, making pitches, and conducting research are all things that some marketing managers can involve themselves with, but at the end of the day, you’ll ultimately be shying away from these tasks to focus more on the overall management of your marketing community. This is because your role isn’t to be a creative guru who produces excellent copy or shapes the media narrative, but rather to be the excellent team leader who steers others toward success while preventing burnout, inter-team disputes, and costly over budgeting.

There are best practices to follow, but understand that much of this will be learning as you go. This is because excellent marketing managers can’t be churned out in a factory-like procession, but must instead cut their teeth by personally involving themselves in the nitty-gritty of running a marketing operation. Much of your work will likely involve budgeting, so upping your financial literacy is strongly recommended if you seek to become a marketing manager one day.

Not all marketing managers are financial geniuses, but those managers who want to churn out a marketing strategy that works need a comprehensive understanding of money in a way that other marketing specialists don’t. You’ll also need to become adept at explaining complex topics to your subordinates, as they may not possess the industry experience or level of education that you possess as a manager. Time and time again, good marketing managers make time for their team members and ensure that nobody is left behind. Otherwise, the entire marketing plan quickly falls apart.

The ins and outs of leading a team

If you have little to no experience leading a team, becoming a marketing manager can be an incredibly intimidating experience. This is because exceptional marketing managers understand how to set a clear vision for their team before enabling their individual team members to fulfil that vision in the most effective way possible. Sometimes, a subordinate will have a plan or approach that you yourself could not implement, and in this situation being an excellent marketing manager entails supporting them as they work to implement that plan in a way that only they can.

You should also know that leading a team necessitates taking responsibility for your failures. If the marketing manager is the person in charge, then they’re also the person who needs to take the blame when something goes wrong. Sometimes, marketing managers suffer because they’re totally unfamiliar with the common mistakes of the position. Reading up on those errors is a sure-fire way to avoid them in your own future. Many senior marketing managers feel threatened by the presence of other seasoned professionals, for example, and only hire largely unqualified candidates to ensure they remain the top dog. By depriving your team of the expertise you need, you’re acting as a bad manager.

Good marketing managers also know when to let an unproductive employee go. If your organization is failing to achieve its marketing goals, there’s a very good chance that your current team isn’t sufficiently streamlined. Lackluster content producers need to be replaced by savvy marketing managers who understand how to find replacements that can get the job done. Relying on freelancers and third parties can help you keep your budget under control, but full-time content specialists are even better in terms of the materials they churn out.

Fail to make the difficult decisions about hiring and firing as a marketing manager, and you’ll never rise high up the ranks of the industry.

Learning how to implement change

One of the most important elements of any marketing manager’s commercial success is whether or not they can implement change. Many people can recognize the need for change, but relatively few of them can actually implement it. This is because change is inherently disruptive and threatens the status quo, which in turn entrenches itself. Good marketing managers are those professionals who know how to implement team-wide changes without disrupting individual team members.

Sometimes, you won’t be able to count on the help of your team when implementing changes. This is because your content specialists and other team members may be preoccupied elsewhere, forcing you to grapple with change alone. Target Marketing has done an excellent review of how to go about implementing marketing changes in such a scenario. Marketing is ever-changing, and those managers who don’t become masterful implementers of innovation will quickly find themselves obsolete and replaced.

Sometimes, the changes you’ll be implementing have nothing to do with your team and everything to do with convincing a client to adjust their marketing strategy. In this scenario, you’ll need to rely on your mastery of finance to argue that certain changes are needed from a budgetary perspective. Elsewhere, you’ll need to potently argue that certain changes simply must be fostered if you intend to reach a target audience with a message that will resonate. Oftentimes, clients will be hesitant to implement sweeping changes that undo previous work or imperil past investments, but your job as a manager is to cut through this doubt and force through painful yet necessary innovations.

You need to take responsibility

Finally, good marketing managers need to take responsibility for their failures. This is the marketing industry – it is inevitable that you’re going to fail, as even consumers don’t always know what they want to buy. If you react to failure by melting down, blaming your team, and refusing to foster much-needed changes, you’ll continue to wallow in obscurity at the bottom of the industry. Real marketing professionals take responsibility for their failures, identify what caused a given marketing strategy to backfire, and come up with plans to do better in the future.

If this sounds difficult, that’s because it is. Being a marketing manager isn’t easy, and involves constantly reassessing your strategy to identify and expunge any flaws you find. Marketing managers can produce powerful results when they follow this playbook, though, and will soon find themselves in hot demand if they capably steer their teams toward the finish line in a timely fashion while remaining under budget. Want to become a great marketing manager? Start by improving yourself before pivoting to a position of team leadership, and you’ll be masterfully implementing marketing plans in no time.

Feature Image Credit: Morsa Images | Getty Images

By Chris Porteous

Chris Porteous is CEO of Grey Smoke Media/My SEO Sucks, which builds sales funnels and marketing workflow solutions for businesses across North America.

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

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Coca-Cola eyes streaming, real-time content production in marketing restart

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Dive Brief:

  • Coca-Cola will restart its marketing efforts soon after pressing pause during coronavirus lockdowns, according to a WARC report.
  • The brand plans for a new focus on agility and flexibility as it — and consumers — emerges from the pandemic. Real-time content production and streaming will also get a bigger focus in the beverage giant’s marketing plans in the months ahead, when Coca-Cola expects to adjust spending based on the current moment, per WARC.
  • The company had kept up its social engagement during lockdown but had pulled other forms of advertising during the pause. “The decision to be dark is not sustainable in the longer term and especially now that our customers are going back to being active,” Barbara Sala, Coke’s CEE strategic connection and media director, said at the IAB Europe Interact conference this week.

Dive Insight:

As restaurants and bars closed up shop and concerts and sporting events were canceled during the early stages of the pandemic, Coca-Cola downshifted its advertising. The brand turned its focus from out-of-home, billboards and TV to smaller digital and streaming options to connect with people looking for entertainment at home.

Now that world is slowly beginning to reopen, Coca-Cola is forging a new way forward that includes digital efforts similar to those the brand explored and employed during the pandemic.

Sala said during the conference that lockdowns showed how “digital has been very much able to, immediately and in real time, reach our consumers in many different forms … and some of them really astonished me.”

During the early days of stay-at-home orders, Coca-Cola signed on as the exclusive launch partner to BeApp, a new music streaming platform that integrates gamified and social media elements into the virtual concert-viewing experience. Coke Studio Sessions has featured a number of high-profile artists such as Katy Perry, Miguel, Steve Aoki and the cast of the musical “Hamilton.” This experimental push could signal some of the campaigns that could come as the beverage giant pushes forward.

But Coca-Cola won’t be the only company rethinking digital strategy post-coronavirus. Chief rival PepsiCo also cut back on nonessential ad spend during lockdowns in favor of consumer activations that tapped into what was becoming popular during the pandemic. This included integrations with actor John Krasinki’s feel-good “Some Good News,” a YouTube hit that recently sold to ViacomCBS and a Tostitos Facebook livestream where Bill Murray and Guy Fieri competed to make the best nachos.

Feature Image Credit: Marc Fulgar / Unsplash

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Sourced from MARKETINGDIVE

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Seven creative exercises to help you create even when you’re remote

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By Danny Bluestone

So you’re working from home, spending too much time on Zoom calls, feeling a bit frustrated and that normal creative business – design workshops, ideation sessions, design sprints – has had to pause. Time to think again. As someone who leads a remote-first agency that specialises in service design and UX as well as web application development, I know first hand that creativity and collaboration don’t just happen in person.

And I can unequivocally state that running design sprints and collaborating with clients is entirely possible, even when you’re 100% remote. It’s just different. A strong design process helps alongside a ‘design thinking’ mentality. So do the right tools and professional experience. But we all need a little fun, too, to create those creative sparks, so here are six exercises that we use with our clients to inspire our design process. See our seven creative exercises that we have been using before and during the pandemic to successfully deliver products and services to clients.

Goal visualisation

A good one to start with, usually at our kick-off workshop, is goal visualisation. In this, each participant takes a moment to think about the difference the project could make.

You can do this in lots of ways – sketching, keywords, bulleted lists or an inspiring piece of writing (I haven’t yet seen it done in interpretative dance, but that day may come). It shows each person’s perspective on what the project should achieve and helps get people excited about the project.

Stinky Fish

Great name, great exercise, especially for your kick-off workshop. In the Stinky Fish exercise, participants share any risks about going ahead with a project. (The idea is that if they’re not aired now, they might fester and become, you guessed it, stinky!)

Stinky Fish is a great way to confront any obstacles or concerns, bring them out into the open and address them. (It’s also an opportunity to check if there is indeed a good reason not to proceed.)

Crazy Eights

Crazy Eights is a fun, fast exercise that gets participants to sketch eight ideas in eight minutes. All they need is a piece of paper (that you can later hold up to your webcam) and a pen (if you’re doing this remotely, something bold, like a Sharpie, shows up well on-screen). Divide your sheet of paper into eight boxes, start the timer – and go!

Because of the time constraint, Crazy Eights is an excellent way to get people to capture their ideas without hesitation. There isn’t time for self-editing or shyness – it encourages everyone in the room to get stuck in right away!

Sketching exercises

Lots of people think they can’t draw and might find sketching intimidating. But everyone can, certainly well enough for UX design workshops. Sketching exercises are fun and by sharing their sketches onscreen with tools like Miro, reluctant participants can gain confidence in bringing their ideas to life whilst creating documentation that will help drive the project forward.

Ideas pitching

Ideas pitching gives each participant a chance to pitch their concepts and designs to the rest of the group. Participants can then vote on the best elements (using show of hands voting if you’re on Zoom), or converge solutions together or in pairs in Zoom breakout rooms.

Replay

And the last one is really handy too – a Replay exercise runs through the key goals from your kick-off workshop, or refreshes your team on the personas and scenarios that have been developed. It’s a fun and quick way to bring everyone up to speed, or to ensure they’re back on the same page – we often use it at the start of a workshop.

Remote working tools

Now that you have the seven excercises its time to ‘tool-up’! You can collaborate effectively, even if you’re working remotely, with a pen and a few sheets of paper. But there are more sophisticated tools, too. At Cyber-Duck, we use whiteboard apps like Miro and Mural to collate digital post-it notes, perform card sorting and more. Tools like Sketch Cloud and Invision help us walk clients through design prototypes and get feedback, while Airtable makes sharing research data easy. (Get a full rundown of all our favourite tools in our remote-first design sprints white paper – it’s free.)

Conclusion

We’ve successfully storyboarded, mapped personas, and developed service design blueprints, all remotely, all in collaboration with clients. That’s why I can reassure you, from a company that’s worked remote-first for some years now, that remote creative collaboration isn’t just possible – it can be really effective. You just need to have proven process, the right tools – and a good idea of what you’re doing.

By Danny Bluestone

Danny Bluestone, co-founder, Cyber-Duck

Sourced from The Drum

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Brands can turn the tide during coronavirus by building new consumer journeys

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By Shawn Lim

Brands need to focus on hyper-localisation by connecting with consumers where they are, as Covid-19 has dramatically changed consumer behaviour and altered the path-to-purchase, according to Facebook and Boston Consulting Group.

According to a new report called ‘Turn the Tide’, released by Facebook India and Boston Consulting Group, the use of micro-targeting can help brands get the first-mover advantage. This is because countries are being divided into different zones, with distinct restrictions due to the pandemic, so they need to build social connections despite social distancing, by engaging with consumers in their context

To cope with pandemic lockdown, which has caused significant disruption for communities and businesses, people are spending more time on social media platforms. This means brands have an opportunity to build stronger dialogues and deeper connections with users.

The aim of the guide, according to Facebook India and Boston Consulting Group, is to guide brands to adapt to the pandemic and ensure business continuity.

Nimisha Jain, the managing director and partner at Boston Consulting Group, says: “We are experiencing unprecedented shifts in consumer attitudes and behaviours as 80%+ consumers will continue to practice social distancing and are bringing the outside inside, over 40% of consumers are dialling up on health and wellness spends, e-commerce adoption has already advanced by two-three years, to name a few.”

“These aren’t just temporary surges, and many will last longer and become more defining traits. Our analysis reveals that only one in six companies emerged stronger in past crises. Players who show the agility to reinvent their value propositions, go-to-market plans and business models to address these demand shifts, will be the ones that set themselves apart from the pack.”

In addition, the report also shares actionable guidance for brands to build for the new consumer journeys in times of Covid-19 and beyond.

For example, brands can bring alive experiences through virtual launches and product demos as people turn to virtual experiences for every facet of their life. Facebook said it is already seeing more brands explore Facebook and Instagram ‘Live’ to connect with their followers and customers, with brands now thinking about using social media platforms for new product launches too.

Heeru Dingra, the chief executive officer at WATConsult tells The Drum the agency has modified its planning and strategy around the new consumer journeys, urging its clients to follow a simple mantra of ‘solve, serve and sell’.

She explains brands should focus on solving the problems their consumers face, serve their purpose and the result thereof could be the sale of services or products. She notes a lot of brands have understood this concept and have already started altering their approach to fit this mantra.

“We leveraged the power of gaming and re-created one of the most iconic games of all time, Ludo, for our client Tata Motors. Titled #SafetyFirst Ludo, this version aims to spread awareness about the importance of personal hygiene and social distancing amid the Covid-19 outbreak,” she says.

She also calls out work by Bajaj Allianz General Insurance called #CareWillOvercome, which salutes frontline workers, while a #ReconnectWithStarbucks campaign turned the act of baristas calling out people’s names into a digital phenomenon.

She adds: “These examples summarize how we integrated the need of the hour that is to maintain social distancing, continue to concentrate on personal hygiene and at the same time have our heartfelt appreciation for the ones who have been fighting for us day and night, into our brand approach in some way. This helps to amplify the brand message while being sensitive to the current situation, serving the purpose of extending the required communication and increasing as well as sustaining brand recall.”

The report also advised brands to look at their media mix models to drive growth by aligning to new media landscapes. According to the report, when brands, especially those with traditional product categories, start spending more online, they need to understand incremental outcomes, as well as cross-platform efficiency.

This would increase the need for digital measurement standards, such as custom mix modelling (CMM) by Nielsen, which Facebook said it had piloted last year.

Gautam Mehra, the chief data officer for South Asia and chief executive officer of programmatic at Dentsu Aegis Network observes the importance of moving away from traditional marketing metrics to real business metrics that can be measured and improved on an ongoing basis.

“With the impetus of commerce, CRM and digital transformation, I think, every company will now have a direct-to-consumer line of business and will want to bring themselves closer to the consumer, and rely less on the intermediaries,” he explains.

While most brands are dealing with huge change across many aspects of business, focusing on the changing customer journey is a good place for marketing to focus attention.

Feature Image Credit: the report also shares actionable guidance for brands to build for the new consumer journeys in times of Covid-19 and beyond.

By Shawn Lim

Sourced from The Drum

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How To Market ‘Unsexy’ Products: 15 Effective Methods

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Sourced from Forbes

The holy grail of the agency world is finding a product that “sells itself.” Unfortunately, even the most amazing products in the world don’t sell themselves. The ones that are decidedly “unsexy” by comparison might prove an even more difficult challenge.

Necessary products don’t have the same appeal as sleek, well-crafted and innovative products. So how does an agency market a less-than-exciting product? Fifteen industry leaders from Forbes Agency Council give their own opinions on the methods that an agency can adopt to market even the most “unsexy” items and make them worthy of an audience’s purchase.

1. Make It Simple And Helpful

Those “unsexy” products and services are likely necessary and often confusing. If you can make it simple and be helpful for your audience, they’ll remember you. Answer their questions without selling. Have robust, easy-to-use troubleshooting and Q&As. – Donna Robinson, Nina Hale – Digital Marketing Agency

2. Use Clever Positioning

I love when someone creates a brand from a commodity. Cutie mandarins and Yeti coolers are two great examples of genius branders transforming the ordinary into extraordinary with clever positioning and creative execution! – Daniel O’Connell, Brand Definition

3. Showcase Uses To Intended Audience

“Unsexy” products are only unsexy if you don’t need them. If you are a business owner whose livelihood depends on an unsexy product like accounting software, well, it seems pretty darn sexy to you. The best way to get this business owner’s attention is to know more than anyone else about the unsexy product they need and show them how to make better use of it. – Jeff Bradford, the Bradford Group

4. Create A Brand Story And Personality

You need to create a brand story and personality for the firm. For example, instead of defining your accounting firm as “Boston Business Tax Accountants,” you can identify a core value or differentiating edge and use that to rebrand or recreate messaging. An example outcome could be “Boston Tax Samurais” with an entire theme related to slicing down costs and taxes through wording and imagery. – Zamir Javer, Jumpfactor

5. Get Your Timing Right

The marketer’s challenge is to be the ultimate matchmaker by discovering the audience who will find the product or service alluring. That’s where intent data comes into play. Intent data can be your marketing team’s best friend and help them create information and messages that are highly personalized and delivered to the right prospects at the right time — when they need your unsexy product. – Melissa Chang, PureB2B

6. Advertise It Through Sexy People

Most of the time, you need a certain image for people to stop scrolling through their feeds and wait to see the content. Make use of influencer marketing and roll in some good looking people to promote your services and use those pictures on your ad and email campaigns, as well. A sexy campaign can make a lot of difference in your leads campaign. – Vishal Jain, Sunshy Group Of Companies

7. Challenge The Obvious

Everyone needs “unsexy” products in their life to satisfy a need, so it’s imperative to identify an insight about the target audience that your product is uniquely able to satisfy. A compelling insight enables your product to connect with customers in a meaningful, even emotional, way. Spend the time and challenge the obvious to stand out from the competition. What could be sexier than that? – Edward Hoffman, Padilla

8. Bring Back The Soaps

Bring back the soap opera. Cliffhangers, great characters, mystery and intrigue were all used to sell soap. People are looking for brands to entertain them, especially now. – Kaaren Whitney-Vernon, Shaftesbury

9. Humanize Your Brand

Humanize your product by giving it a personality. Focus on being playful and relatable on your social media channels. Give your product a personality that is fun to engage with. Share authentic stories that let your audience experience the personality behind the brand. Your consumers will associate the emotions they feel when engaging with your content with the value they receive from your product. – Benjamin Collins, Laughing Samurai

10. Bring The Laughs

Find a common everyday life problem and offer a solution via your product in a funny way, and people will gravitate toward your product. It’s a flawless plan. Think of the best-selling toilet spray who made jokes about having to use the bathroom at your new partner’s house or in the office — everyone can relate, and they’ve sold millions of bottles. Voila! – Sophie Bowman, Brand Branding PR

11. Utilize Client Testimonials

Instead of focusing on the product or service itself, revolve your campaign around the benefits that the product or service brings to the end user. For example, utilize client testimonials. Focus on highlighting the benefits, and create clean and concise creatives and copy for your campaign. The product or service most likely solves an important problem and should be positioned in that way. – Jonathan Durante, Expandify Marketing Inc

12. Make It Unique, Compelling And Believable

Campaigns are successful if they can position a brand as unique (from competitors), compelling (tap into emotion, solve a problem) and believable (faith it will deliver). It might be through humor, empathy, pride, fear or any other human emotion, but it must check all three boxes to truly succeed. – Sara Steever, Paulsen

13. Tap Into The Behavior Of Your Audience

Certain brands scream, “Creativity, start your engine!” However, many others can’t seem to get to the starting line. When faced with the challenge of creating success for a brand that seems to lack anything to latch onto, examine the behaviors of the people that use the product and why. Then, increase the ability of new audiences to adopt those same behaviors. – Roger Hurni, Off Madison Ave

14. Understand Your Clients’ Psychology

Subjective labels like “unsexy” can be challenging to any marketer. Putting the user first and understanding their psychology can reveal the attributes of a product or service that might appeal to those users and lead to effective results. Looking outside the competition and removing those industry-specific blinders can generate a lot of creative ideas on how to bring those attributes to life. – Tripp Donnelly, REQ

15. Focus On Attainable Results

In the end, we all want to see results. When creating campaigns for “unsexy” topics, we focus on the most important result that the product or service delivers, whether it’s revenue, new customers or ROI. In our experience, results get attention. It’s that simple. – Paula Chiocchi, Outward Media, Inc.

Sourced from Forbes

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ActionIQ: ‘Marketing Clouds Thrive On Noise In The CDP Space’

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This is the fifth in AdExchanger’s “Meet the CDPs” series. Read previous interviews with mParticle, Acquia-owned AgilOne, Amperity and Segment.

COVID-19 threw a wrench into best-laid marketing plans. But marketers are learning to adapt, said Tasso Argyros, CEO and co-founder of customer data platform ActionIQ.

“All of our clients have been forced to rethink their entire marketing and customer experience strategy,” Argyros said. “And they all need new data, analytics and orchestration capabilities to enable these strategies.”

Still, it’s a bit like  building railroad tracks while the train is coming. Clients are trying to acclimate while determining which changes to their business could be permanent.

Despite the question marks, brands can use this unanticipated disruption “as an opportunity to position themselves to come out of this stronger,” said Argyros, who founded ActionIQ in 2014 after selling his previous company, Aster Data, to Teradata.

ActionIQ’s clients include Gap Inc., Saks Fifth Avenue, Michael Kors, Pandora, Verizon and The New York Times. The company raised a $32 million Series C in January, and more than $80 million total. Around half of ActionIQ’s roughly 100 employees are focused either on engineering or R&D.

Argyros spoke with AdExchanger.

AdExchanger: What does it mean to be a CDP in the age of coronavirus?

TASSO ARGYROS: Companies are now trying to execute new campaigns and use cases with limited budgets and resources. For example, if you are a multichannel retailer, you need to migrate your store-only shoppers to ecom, or else you could lose that cohort for good.

I expect coronavirus to accelerate a lot of the business transformation initiatives that were leading people to work with CDPs in the first place.

Did you start out as a CDP from Day One?

It’s a tricky question, because you have to rewrite history a bit in order to answer it. The vision was always to do something really interesting and cool around customer data, and we were doing it before the term existed. But if you were to ask me about how we differentiate, I’d say the main way is in how we’re able to invest data with more scale and complexity than other vendors out there.

Can you elaborate on that?

You don’t have to transform your data or build customer or profile attributes beforehand. You just load in whatever data you want and we build profiles on the fly. Other CDPs have tables with key customer attributes, but we hold every customer interaction. It sounds like an esoteric point, but it makes a huge difference, because it allows you to be agile. Business teams can be completely self-sufficient and iterate in a matter of days rather than a matter of months.

How long does it take to onboard a new customer?

We promise to have the system up and running in three months and that the customer will see strong ROI in six months. We try to come in with strategic solutions and services to help identify low-hanging fruit, use cases and channels that could be incremental. When we push those out, it provides early value and derisks the deployment in a short period of time.

Who is your typical customer?

We focus on the enterprise level, including both B2B and B2C. Our typical customer has revenues of around $1 billion and up. We mostly sell to the CMO, although IT is often closely involved.

What data sources do you most commonly connect?

It’s mainly very large-scale data lakes, such as Google BigQuery and Amazon Redshift, and data warehouses, such as Teradata and Oracle. We can plug into any internal data source and pull in massive amounts of data which allows us to deploy quickly without having to rely on consulting or IT resources. We’re also connected to ad systems – Segment, for example, or a tag manager such as Tealium, are sources of clickstream data for us – and to ESP sources of email response data.

Will the marketing clouds deliver on their promise of providing CDPs?

The marketing clouds announcing CDP capabilities last year was the best marketing we could not afford to have done ourselves. But the marketing clouds are mostly trying to sell legacy software and present it as a CDP. Sometimes they try to sell email software as a CDP or their DMP as a CDP.

Once you’re in an RFP scenario, though, it’s easy to tell the difference. They don’t really have a product. The question then becomes, when will they have one? They say they’re building it, but when was the last time either Adobe or Salesforce built a successful product in house? Everything has been done through acquisition.

But marketers are still attracted to the marketing clouds, because they’re used to working with them.

The marketing clouds thrive on noise in the CDP space. It’s strategic for them to create more confusion, and they have the marketing dollars to do it. One of the values we offer is that we don’t force customers to be locked into any one specific marketing cloud vendor. We give them the channel freedom to plug and play the solutions they choose to work with.

Does the eventual loss of third-party cookies impact the CDP space?

The role of the DMP will be reduced to the point where we can implement almost all of the functionality of a DMP without much additional cost. The consolidation of the DMP inside of a CDP is an opportunity to simplify the marketing stack and save customers some budget.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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How To Pivot Your 2021 Marketing Strategy For A Post-COVID World

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By Rodney Laws.

It’s hard to imagine a post-COVID world right now. No one can be sure when we’ll get back to normal and what normal will look like. Trying to plan for the future feels fruitless, and yet it will feel like everything is happening at once, so you need to be prepared.

For business owners and marketing departments, this presents the challenge of how to approach advertising in a post-COVID world. Have the fundamentals changed, and what is a safe promotional route to go down? Here’s how you can pivot your strategy ready for a new world.

Be content cautious

As the reality of coronavirus and lockdown measures started to set in, a new type of marketing content cropped up on our televisions and social media feeds.

Suddenly sentimental, coronavirus-themed content was in every other ad you saw. This uplifting content generally focused on people’s sacrifices throughout the crisis, how we’re all in this together, and what businesses are doing for you in your time of need. For many, this content provides assurance and shows companies understand what people need most.

The question for marketers once this crisis is over, or at least starting to wind down, is how do you move on from this content, and will coronavirus-tinged content still be appropriate? As people assess the full impact of the virus is it right to use their situation to push them towards purchases, if it ever was?

To pivot your content direction post-COVID you need to be aware of the genuine concerns people will have in regards to making coronavirus your focus. You need to balance the fine line of being aware of the current circumstances without appearing to take advantage of them.

Creating media that captures the public mood and shows appreciation for their feelings can really grab attention and cut through the mass of competition of social media channels. People don’t mind being advertised to if they think the brand genuinely has their best interests at heart. That involves offering something back, even if it’s just a message of support.

You should also look to create content that is genuinely informative. Try and educate people within your specialism on the common coronavirus issues. Slipping in a bit of promotional while doing so is fine, as you’re providing a service. People will want to set up good social distancing measures at work, so suggest creative ways to do so. It may not directly result in conversions, but it’ll build up goodwill with your brand.

The most successful post-COVID content will likely look a lot like the best campaigns we’ve seen throughout the campaign. Let shareable content filmed through Zoom calls inspire you and make sure not to misjudge people’s emotions.

Consider your finances

It’s safe to say most people are expecting things to get a little bit tighter financially after coronavirus.

As if the toil of the virus alone isn’t bad enough, it has also led to significant economic turmoil across the world. With many businesses operating on a much stricter budget — if any budget at all — the money is unlikely to be there for extravagant marketing campaigns. Just like you can’t act like your audience has money to burn, you need to operate securely yourself.

It’s important your marketing starts slowly and tries to avoid as many costly mistakes as possible. Ideally, you can look to follow the example set by small businesses. You don’t need to start from scratch, but approaching your marketing expenses in the way a startup or entrepreneur would will help you make low-investment risks when it comes to pivoting your strategy. These businesses rarely operate with a high-risk, high-reward mentality, which can be a great guide through this tricky period.

Your first campaign after the coronavirus pandemic doesn’t need to be an all-time-great homerun in advertising, but it can’t be something you bet the immediate future of the company on. Businesses are going to be judged not just by how they responded to the outbreak, but how they continue to respond throughout the recovery.

Think small scale with your marketing. Extravagant short films about the bravery of people throughout the crisis may be great, uplifting content, but they can be costly to produce. Whereas taking a more subtle, low-key approach within the budget constraints of a smaller business can help you show support, while accomplishing the long-term promotion and converting goals of your marketing.

Focus on localization

All future marketing strategies in a post-COVID world need to take into consideration the rate at which recovery is happening not just across the world, but in individual countries.

Universal advertising will be irrelevant in the days immediately after the virus. Different messages will mean different things to unique audience. You cannot make content that looks to celebrate defeating the virus available to a region that is still suffering significantly. It is insensitive and will tarnish the respectability and perceived competency of your brand.

Either try and keep your content more general or be hyper-specific in your location. If you want to run an after-COVID paid social campaign, for example, make sure you’re only targeting areas where recovery has been successful and you’re ready to pause it should the worst happen.

While celebrating national success may sound like a great opportunity to balance showing appreciation with brand exposure, this can, especially online, backfire pretty dramatically if you’re not hyper-specific in your execution.

Stick with online services

Despite it feeling like we’re all scratching at the walls looking for an escape from lockdown, it won’t be as simple as everyone rushing back into normal life once it’s lifted.

Not only will there be significant social distancing measures in place, but people’s attitudes and outlook will have changed. People have not just considered what they value, but there will be a residual fear of the virus.

Online services, be it video chat allowing you to talk to your family or an ecommerce store that can keep you stock up throughout lockdown, have shown their worth throughout this pandemic. With people reluctant to dive into normality once again, there will still be a need for these businesses.

All of this is to say you shouldn’t abandon any online services you’ve developed just yet. It’ll be wise to continue promoting these products and services even after coronavirus. Forced exposure to them has only increased interest from the average consumer and business.

Take Zoom as an example. People may be sick of video chats by the time this is all over, but businesses will still find practical uses in it as we return to normality, now aware of a tool that allows them to better connect with business partners abroad and open people up to new types of remote working options.

Likewise, many businesses may stick with remote working for the foreseeable future. This allows you to tweak your marketing, rather than fully pivot it, to just reflect the usefulness of your products and services, rather than play into the whole lockdown and remote working narrative. You don’t need to fully re-think your strategy straight away.

Consider scheduling changes

With efforts to return to normality likely to be slow, you need to consider how you’re going to schedule your content and try and capture attention online.

Before COVID, you were able to research when people were most likely online to try and capture their attention in the most effective way. Numerous studies had been conducted across all the major social platforms, showing when someone was most likely be susceptible to a Facebook video, Twitter Poll or Instagram influencer story.

A lot of these results were determined by pre-COVID schedules. People would commute to and from work roughly at the same time. They’d relax on the couch and browse social media for a bit most evenings. They may be more likely to buy something at a weekend when they have time to sit down and consider the item. That’s all out the window now, and may not be back for a while.

Likewise, people are also going to be spending more time catching up with loved ones if they do choose to go out. There are arguments to suggest that coronavirus could be the end of abject consumerism, and that marketers will have to be more creative in their efforts to draw people away from personal connections and back to social platforms to witness content and advertising.

To acclimatize to the new reality of your customer base you need to either conduct new audience research or find new avenues to reach your base in. A post-COVID strategy will be reflective of new lifestyles, slowly easing itself back into traditional timings. Consider experimenting with new approaches in your advertising, such as Google paid campaigns that can catch search audiences looking for something specific, rather than casting a wide net across social media.

Marketing in a post-COVID world will be challenging, there’s no doubt about that. It won’t be an impossible task though. It will require more audience research and tactile reading of public mood than ever before. Be prepared to backtrack at points and be cautious when taking risks.

Feature Image Credit: Unsplash

By Rodney Laws

Rodney Laws has more than a decade of experience providing marketing advice to online entrepreneurs and businesses. He’s set up and marketed his own businesses and consulted on crafting campaigns for established companies. See what Rodney can do to help you or your business by heading over to EcommercePlatforms.io and visiting @EcomPlatformsio for even more news and views on marketing as an ecommerce brand.

 

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