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How To Create A Marketing Plan For Social Networking

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By Mitrovman Mitrovski

Need to Build a Marketing Plan for Social Networking? That’s not an easy task. Many of us have difficulties in understanding what it is. Let alone making one from scratch.

Simply put, every action you take on social media should be part of a broader marketing strategy. This means that every post, response, like, or comment should be guided by a plan directly geared toward achieving business goals. That may sound complicated, but if you take the time to build a comprehensive social networking strategy, the rest will come naturally. Anyone can do this if they properly approach that matter.

What is a social media marketing plan?

img source: hubspot.com

It summarizes everything you plan and hopes to accomplish in your business by using social networks. The plan should include checking your orders, where you want them, and what tools you will use to achieve this. In general, the more accurate you are in creating a plan, the more effective you’ll be in implementing it. Try to be concise. Do not make a plan that’s so broad or demanding that it is virtually unattainable. The plan will guide your actions, but it will also be a measure to determine whether or not you are moving towards success.

You can follow this simple plan to create your strategy.

1. Create your social network goals

img source: martechtoday.com

The first step in any strategy on social networks is to set the business goals. When you define goals, that allows you to react quickly. Especially if the campaign you are running doesn’t meet your expectations. Without goals, you don’t even have the means to measure success or proof of return on investment (ROI). The goals should be aligned with your broad marketing strategy. That way, the efforts you make on social networks go directly to the realization of your business ideas. If your social media strategy is proven to support your business goals, you are more likely to pay back and make new investments. Go beyond benchmarks such as likes or retweets. Focus on advanced metrics like leads, conversion rates, and web referrals. It would be a good idea to keep track of your goals by using the SMART backbone. This means Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound.

2. Check your social networks

Before creating a marketing plan for social networks, you should evaluate their current benefits and the way you use them. Therefore, using Content, Strategy & Branding literature is a fantastic read.

This means you need to find out who you are connected to, then what social networks your target audience is mostly using, and what your social media presence is like compared to your competition.

3. Create or improve your accounts

img source: jakpost.net

When you’re done checking your accounts, it’s time to refine your online presence. Choose the one that best fits your business goals. If you still don’t have an online profile that you should focus on the most, create one having a wider audience and goals in mind. If you have one, maybe it’s time to update and improve it. This will give you the best possible results at the end. Remember that every social network has a unique audience. Therefore, each of them should be treated differently.

Profile optimization helps you generate more web traffic to your online business. Cross-promotion of accounts on social networks can increase the reach of a post. Profiles should be completely populated, and images and text should be optimized for the particular network.

4. Create a content plan and an announcements calendar

img source: fireflydigital.com

Good content is certainly essential for success on social networks. Your social media marketing plan should also include a content marketing plan, consisting of content creation strategies and the announcements calendar. Your social network content plan should answer some of these questions:

  • What kind of content are you going to post online?
  • How often will you post content?
  • What is the target group for each content type?
  • Who will create the content?
  • How will you promote the content?

Your announcement calendar will include the dates and times when you intend to post on Facebook, Instagram, Tweeter, etc. Create a calendar and schedule announcements, so you don’t have to do it every day.

5. Test and analyze your marketing plan

img source: courses.aiu.edu

To find out what adjustments you need to make in your marketing strategy better, you must constantly test it. Use every opportunity to test the actions you take on social networks. Analyze both successful and unsuccessful campaigns. That way, you can tailor your marketing strategy to your goals. Research is also a great way to measure success. Ask your followers for their opinion on your work. This kind of direct approach can sometimes be extremely effective.

Feature Image Credit: villagebriefing.com

By Mitrovman Mitrovski

Sourced from Chart Attack

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Four arguments why B2B marketers should spend more on brand building

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By James Wood

B2B marketers can be very focused on the short term, and who can blame them? Sales are putting on the pressure for a constant stream of leads and business leaders have quarterly targets to hit to keep the shareholders at bay.

It’s this short term thinking that means the majority of activity produced by B2B marketing teams is below the line, bottom of the funnel, sales ‘activation’ activity (call it the boring stuff) and not the bigger, fame and brand building advertising activity that the majority of B2C brands seem focus on (the glamorous stuff).

Now, couple this with the fact that the average tenure of a CMO is now just 43 months (and that new incumbent wants to shake things up and make their mark on the business), and it’ll come as no surprise that only 4% of B2B marketing teams measure impact beyond six months.

But a new report from the B2B Institute and LinkedIn, packed with research from Advertising Effectiveness stalwarts Les Binet and Peter Field, says this short-sightedness is damaging the growth potential of B2B brands.

According to ‘The 5 principles of growth in B2B Marketing’, in order to grow, B2B marketers need to start shifting efforts (and budgets) towards a 50/50 split between short term activation activity and long term brand building (the stuff that makes you famous).

However, it’s pretty clear we are starting on the back foot. B2B marketers are incredibly sceptical about the value of brand building and many have a misconstrued view of the effect brand building has on the business.

Just 30% of B2B marketers, for example, believe advertising has an effect on pricing power and only 50% believe reach is a strong predictor of success. It’s pretty clear businesses need to start thinking differently about longer term brand building. But as with any shift, there has to be a strong reason to do so.

So, we have distilled the findings from the report into four arguments you can take to your board/sceptical CMO to convince them to put more budget into longer term brand building, B2B advertising and fame defining campaigns and activities.

Argument one: “Look! You can’t argue with the facts – brand building will build our market share and our bottom line.”

Let’s start with a fundamental rule. The share of voice rule. A rule that has been known and stayed consistent for the last 50 years. The rule goes thus: brands that set their share of voice (share of all category advertising expenditure) above their share of market, will tend to grow.

This has been well known in B2C, but Binet and Field have shown the trend is true in B2B – a 10% extra share of voice, for example, will lead to a rise in market share of 0.7% per year.

Put simply: shout louder than the competition in a way that gets you noticed and you will expand. That alone is worth the investment.

Argument two: “We can kill two birds with one stone with this! Not only will brand building attract new customers, but it’s a great way to reassure our current customers they have made the right choice and feel proud about being our partner.”

Put simply, brands grow in two ways, either by gaining more customers, or by selling more to current customers. In B2B, the focus is often put on the latter thanks to new customer acquisition costs being high. But this piece of research shows us that actually the best way to achieve real growth is to acquire new customers, meaning more has to be put into activity to attract them.

But shifting budgets to attract new customers doesn’t have to come at the cost of current customers – putting money into brand campaigns also helps reassure existing customers they have made the right choice (and means they can show off to their mates in the pub about working with a cool, well known brand.)

Argument three: “Don’t trust me, trust Danny Khaneman! We need to be the brand that is the easiest to choose when a potential customer is shopping around.”

While everyone seems to think B2B buyers are purely rational beings, the truth is just like anyone else, many of the decisions they make are not made on purely rational thoughts or processes but on brands, products and services that are the most ‘mentally available’. As the economist Daniel Kahneman says, “the brain is largely a machine for jumping to conclusions”.

This is due to the Availability Heuristic – a rule that says given the choice between several options, people prefer the one that comes to mind most easily. It’s the reason that when you are shopping you are most likely to pick up Fairy washing up liquid and Kelloggs cornflakes, rather than unknown brands.

Maximising mental availability, or being the easiest brand to choose to buy, is just as important in B2B as in B2C and the best way to do this is to build fame through brand building campaigns.

Argument four: “A suit isn’t a shield for emotions! After all, Business people are people too, they just happen to be at work. So we need to use the power of emotion to ensure people engage with our brand. And guess what? The best way to do that is long term advertising campaigns.”

As a marketer, one of your key aims should be to make people feel positively towards your brand, even if they can’t say why. That comes from creating emotions and feelings around your brand and positioning yourself in a way that becomes more firmly embedded in a buyer’s memory than functional product messages.

This will translate into real business results, thanks to the fact that if we like a brand (or feel a positive emotion towards it) we are more likely to hold positive beliefs about its benefits. And it shows in the results – emotion based, fame building campaigns outperform rational ones by a margin of 10x. Even the tightest CFO can’t say no to that.

B2B marketers need to need to take off those short term blinkers and start thinking about how we build brands that grow, become famous and build the business over the long term. While the short term activation activity is still key, we need to start readdressing the balance and we hope this starts today.

A big thanks to The B2B Institute, LinkedIn, as well as Les Binet and Peter Field, for their excellent research on which this whole article is based. You can download the full research report here.

Feature Image Credit: Building B2B brands

By James Wood

James Wood, head of Earnest Labs, the innovation arm of Earnest

Sourced from The Drum

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Emotion: The Super Weapon Of Marketing And Advertising

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By Valentin Saitarli.

Conventional marketing tactics usually lead to typical outcomes — what if we try something different? I’m sure each of us has a dress, shoes, a tie or a bag that we bought only because a salesperson in the shop was kind to us, or just because we were in search of positive emotions. Most of us strive to be happy in our personal lives, so we often seek ways to feel good and are willing to pay for them.

Emotional connection plays a significant role in the choices we make as consumers. As reported by Psychology Today, “functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) shows that when evaluating brands, consumers primarily use emotions (personal feelings and experiences), rather than information (brand attributes, features, and facts).” So as marketers, why not aim to trigger the right feelings and make an emotional impression to attract attention to your product or service and boost sales?

I’ve worked with many clients on fixing some of the major issues with their marketing. Some of these clients were delivering an outstanding product to the market that, unfortunately, failed. And it was because their marketing strategy never emotionally engaged their target customers. Many companies seem to have a really hard time understanding how their particular product can make their clients happy. They forget that even though we’re in the age of digital marketing, there are still real people — a real Jake, Melissa or Jessica — on the other side of the screen, and those people care, laugh or cry the same way that we all do.

As a result of this tendency, when our team brings emotional marketing to the table, we’ve found that 80% of our clients seem to doubt the strategy — until we deliver results. For example, 10 months after bringing one client’s medicine-related app to the market using the emotional marketing strategy, the app doubled its revenue and our client saw a significant increase in brand recognition. We helped another client, a skincare company, hasten their sales growth and attract new investor funding by concentrating marketing efforts on triggering customers’ emotions.

So just how potent is it, this magical emotional connection? American poet Maya Angelou is often quoted as having said, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Emotional engagement inspires a potential customer to notice and remember your marketing campaign if you do it right.

Research further illustrates the power of emotional advertising. Fast Company reports that “in an analysis of the IPA dataBANK, which contains 1,400 case studies of successful advertising campaigns, campaigns with purely emotional content performed about twice as well (31% vs. 16%) as those with only rational content (and did a little better than those that mixed emotional and rational content).”

Some brands seem to organically make emotional connections with consumers, while others have to work at it. But in my experience, any product can evoke an emotional response. So where do you start?

First, recognize that you can’t always aim to evoke happiness with your marketing. Research from the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of Glasgow found that we have only four basic emotions: happy, sad, fear/surprise and disgust/anger. So determine which feeling you intend to inspire. This will give you the right insights for copywriting, graphics, photos, music, etc.

Then, to get in touch with your customers’ emotions, identify their critical motivators. We strongly recommend putting more effort into research to discover the sole critical motivators that are typical for your niche and target audience. It’s crucial to provide customers with what they genuinely need, though they may not always be able to say what that is. Try to figure out what your customers care about, whether it’s standing out from the crowd, well-being, freedom, a sense of belonging or the environment. And make sure to leverage that. Their motivators may be secondary to the underlying emotions that drive them, but take them seriously. They can provide you with a more in-depth understanding of your customers’ emotions.

Once you understand what drives your customers, use these insights to create a broad marketing strategy based on making emotional connections. This strategy should include every link in the chain, from product launches and sales to marketing and service. Storytelling can be an indispensable tool here. Stories can be compelling and easy to share. They can help trigger the emotions you may need to get your desired outcome.

Dale Carnegie once said, “When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion.” Emotional connections in the marketing field are not a secret strategy anymore — but they can be a real advantage. To be successful, find out how your customers feel and what they need and be able to identify what motivates them. This customer-oriented attitude and strategy can help you inspire customers’ devotion.

By Valentin Saitarli

Managing Director at Exclusive PR Solutions, overseeing Brand Strategy and Marketing. Read Valentin Saitarli’s full executive profile here.

Sourced from Forbes

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Instagram Stories Branding: Marketing That Benefits Your Business

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Are you using Instagram Stories to its fullest potential? Want to make your stories more consistent and engaging?

To explore how to use Instagram Stories for your brand, I interview Sue B. Zimmerman on the Social Media Marketing Podcast.

Sue is an Instagram marketing expert and author of The Instagram Strategy Guide. Her online course is called Ready, Set, Gram.

You’ll find tips and techniques for using Instagram Stories to help your business stand out, and discover how to use the new Create features that just dropped.

Click HERE for the remainder of the article.

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Sourced from Social Media Examiner

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Why are mobile conversion rates lower than desktop?

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By Graham Charlton

Smartphone traffic now accounts for the majority of visits to retailers, but mobile conversion rates lag behind desktop. We take a look at the reasons for this.

A decade on from the release of the first iPhone, mobile shopping is massive. Much of this is thanks to Apple, and the many smartphones which followed, but there are still obstacles for retailers to overcome.

According to stats from Monetate, smartphone traffic worldwide to retailers is at 56.2%, and 34.5% for desktop.

However, this mobile traffic is converting at less than half the rate of that on desktop, at 2.25% compared to 4.81% for desktop. Even tablet fares better, converting at 4.06% on average.

We’ve seen the same pattern in our own stats. Around half of all visits to retailer’s sites come from mobile, but just 36% of purchases take place on mobile.

It seems that people are happy to browse on mobile, but many still prefer to buy on desktop, so let’s look at the reasons why.

There are several reasons why people prefer to buy on a laptop or PC. For one, it can be easier to navigate around the site and view images on a bigger screen, so some shoppers may browse on mobile and select products later on.

People are also more likely to buy on desktop when purchases are more complex. Travel purchases are generally more expensive and complicated – only 18% complete bookings on mobile.

Much of the issue comes down to checkout. Indeed, the add to cart rates shown above suggest this. While mobile conversion rates are less than half that of desktop, add to cart rates aren’t so far behind.

Even in sectors where shoppers are more likely to use mobile, such as fashion, mobile conversion rates still lag behind desktop.

Fashion sites attract a greater proportion of sales on mobile. In fact, this is the only sector to attract the majority of its sales from mobile shoppers (51.39%).

However, data from our recent Fashion Ecommerce Trends Report finds that fashion conversion rates are almost twice as high on desktop when compared to mobile.

Mobile usability on fashion sites has improved greatly, but some customers are still reluctant to convert via mobile devices.

The average mobile add to cart rate is 10.4%, compared to 12.9% for desktop. This implies that people are adding items to their cart at similar rates, but many more are bailing out during checkout.

The biggest issue behind lower mobile conversions is the checkout. So how can checkout be made easier? Here are three ways to do this…

People hate registering before they begin a purchase, and it seems like hard work for mobile shoppers, so providing a guest checkout option is one way to improve conversion rates.

It’s a barrier for customers, and one that isn’t necessary, as they can complete registration after purchase anyway. Streamlining forms makes checkout easier and faster, reducing hassle for shoppers, and removing sources of friction where people might abandon checkout.

Sites can allow users to autofill address and payment details saved on their phone’s browser, or postcode lookup tools to reduce the number of steps customers need to take.

Small details matter, such as defaulting to the most appropriate smartphone keyboard, like the numeric version for entering payment card details. It’s about making it easier for customers through marginal improvements.

Payment methods matter too, and providing alternatives can make it easier for mobile shoppers. Card details take time to enter, but PayPal and digital wallet options like Apple Pay can make payment fast and smooth.

Mobile is a challenge for retailers, but now that customers have shown they’re willing to browse and buy on mobile, it’s all about making the payment process smooth and easy for shoppers.

Feature Image Credit: Photo by William Iven on Unsplash.

By Graham Charlton

Graham Charlton is editor in chief at SaleCycle

Sourced from The Drum

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Two Important Lessons Learned From Spending $70 Million On Marketing

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By Joy Gendusa

I spend about $100,000 every week marketing my company to businesses nationwide. Spending that much per week on marketing may strike many business owners as excessive. And for some businesses, it is.

Obviously, I wasn’t spending $100,000 on marketing when I first started out in 1998. I didn’t have much working capital back then (just a $5,000 credit card, if you can call that capital), and I bootstrapped everything. I paid myself a minuscule salary for years in order to invest as much as possible in marketing. As a result, I’ve closely tracked my marketing returns — and failures — from the beginning.

Here are the two biggest, most business-defining lessons I’ve learned since spending my first dollar on marketing.

Lesson 1: Any decrease in your overall marketing can have a similar effect on your revenue.

I learned this lesson early on. Back then, my only marketing strategy was sending 1,000 postcards per week to businesses around me.

As those 1,000 postcards brought in new leads and those leads turned into revenue, I started to increase the quantity of my weekly outflow — first to 2,500 and then to 5,000. Each time I increased my weekly marketing expenditure, leads and revenue followed after about four to six weeks, like clockwork. Since then, I haven’t missed a mailing in 21 years, and we mail about 180,000 postcards each week.

My point is that your marketing sets a pace for leads and revenue. This includes cutbacks. I learned this in 2008. The housing market crashed, and I lost virtually all of my mortgage clients, who made up 46% of my entire client base.

I was advised to cut my marketing budget midway through 2008, and I reluctantly agreed in order to avoid layoffs. Shortly after, incoming leads started to slip. At the close of 2008, gross revenue was down 7.2%.

That was the first and last year our revenue ever decreased. In early 2009, I returned our marketing budget to its rightful place. By the end of that year, we had regained all lost ground and then some with a 14.5% increase in revenue.

How much your business should allocate toward marketing will vary, but it typically will be a percentage of your gross annual revenue. From what I’ve seen, larger businesses hover somewhere between 5% and 25%, with an average of about 12%.

Small businesses, on the other hand, often spend a significantly smaller portion on marketing. In fact, 50% of small business owners don’t even have a marketing plan. And the majority (55%) spend less than 5% of their annual revenue on marketing.

If you’re a small business owner reading this and want to increase leads and sales and grow your business, I recommend increasing your marketing budget by at least 3%.

Finding the right number for your business will require testing and (most importantly) close tracking and monitoring.

Lesson 2: If you have any competition whatsoever, you likely need a unique selling proposition (USP).

Your USP can set your business apart and give prospects a reason to choose you. Without one, you’re effectively surrendering to the buying process and relying on luck (or worse — being the cheapest) to attract new business.

I learned this lesson not long after founding my company. To compete with other direct mail companies, and ensure that we wouldn’t become another commodity racing to the bottom on price, we had to develop a USP.

Now, a real USP goes beyond merely positioning your business and actually offers something unique and tangible. Let’s say you’re a dentist. It’s the difference between statements like “We put dental health first with excellent board-certified care and attention” and “We put dental health first — if you develop a cavity within six months of your last appointment, we’ll fill it for free.”

The first merely positions the dentist as an expert. The second offers a real and tangible selling point: “No worrying about cavities as long as you’re with us.”

To develop your USP, start with competition research. Blind shop them. That means going through the entire customer journey, from new lead to buyer. Along the way, note what you like about their processes and what could improve.

Then, repeat the process within your own business. Compare notes to see what differences emerge, and analyze those differences. Do any stand out? Would any actually sway someone to choose you?

For my business, back then, the answer was no. Sure, I could say we did this and that better, but every business claims that. You need something real.

At this point, I suggest listing the pain points in your industry. What do consumers dread about your industry? If you can eliminate that from their experience with you, you can really stand out.

For my business, a marketing agency, consumers usually dread wasting money and getting zero results. I addressed that apprehension with our USP. We created a new position (our results manager), whose role is to compile results from our clients and train staff on successful tactics to ensure expertise from top to bottom.

Formally, we came up with this USP: “PostcardMania is the only marketing company to create your campaign based on the results of thousands of small businesses.”

Not only is this still our USP (though the number of businesses is up to 87,537), but we’ve outlasted and outgrown many of our competitors. So if you’re facing commoditization, don’t wait — run toward a USP for your business now.

There you have it: my two biggest marketing lessons. Hopefully, you’ve gained some insight to help you grow your business with smart, well-spent marketing dollars.

By Joy Gendusa

Sole Founder/CEO of PostcardMania. Joy bootstrapped her business to $59 million in 2018 with only a phone, a computer and postcards.

Sourced from Forbes

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The Four-Part Formula For Marketing Success

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By Udi Ledergor.

I spend a couple of hours each week helping less experienced chief marketing officers (CMOs). They usually seek my advice looking for quick wins, tips and hacks.

By now, I’m used to their sigh of disappointment when I share with them what I’ve found to be the four-part formula for marketing success. It includes no hacks, trickery or sorcery. Just four, time-tested elements I’ve found you absolutely must get right to build a successful marketing operation: strategy, execution, people and creativity.

Strategy

Here’s what it’s not: pulling together an odd mix of campaigns in hopes of them coming together. They won’t.

Strategy can be difficult to achieve but should always be simple to articulate. What’s “the big idea?” If you can’t easily explain it, you probably haven’t found it yet. I’ve found it useful to have a “big idea” for my overall strategy and for smaller components of it, like trade shows (why will people line up at our booth?) or content (what will make them download it?). There should be a simple way of describing what success will ultimately look like. Then reverse-engineer your tactics to get there.

Different is better than better. I explained one aspect of this in my recent article on the unwritten rules of business-to-business (B2B) branding and why you should break them. Now I propose being different in your overall strategy. Unless you want to be a “me too” company, you’re probably better off choosing a strategy others haven’t tried rather than attempting to be 10 times better than another player already using the same strategy.

Plan for galactic scale. You don’t need to understand all the details just yet, but you should be able to grasp the big picture of what your success will look like in one, two and three years. You’ll likely change a few things on the way — maybe even big things. But without a firm grasp of what future success looks like, you’re unlikely to put the right wheels in motion to get you there.

Execution

Open-water diving lessons often start with “Plan your dive; dive your plan.” The same truth holds for your marketing. Execution excellence starts with detailed planning and key performance indicators (KPIs).

How detailed should you be? Our events manager is measured on the number of event-driven opportunities we create and tickets sold to our annual event. Our weekly marketing team meetings start with reviewing every KPI we’re tracking this quarter. How well are we doing? How much have we advanced since last week? What bottlenecks do we need to solve for? We currently have 10 quarterly KPIs, each with an owner whose compensation is tied to this number. That’s how we create accountability.

I’m a big believer in the “fail quickly and learn from it” approach. Constant experimentation is the basis for fast empirical learning. We could argue until the cows come home on which subject line will perform better, but a simple A/B test gives us the answer and allows us to move on. Does someone have an ad creative idea? Great! What time can it go live? If it works, we scale it. If it doesn’t, we kill it. Rinse and repeat.

People

Hiring mistakes are painful to correct. We’re all human. So when things don’t work out for a new hire, we’ll give them another chance. And then a performance plan. And a final warning. By the time we’ve come to the conclusion things aren’t going to work out, we’ve wasted nearly 12 months we’ll never get back.

Don’t compromise. Hire the best people you can. You’ll need to reach out to the best candidates because they might not be actively job searching. This is hard work, but in my opinion, nothing else you do will yield higher returns. Candidates for junior positions are often surprised that I take the time to interview them. I respond that there’s no better use of my time. If we hire them and it works out, they’ll make our company millions. If we hire the wrong person, we could lose millions. Once you look at hiring through this lens, you’ll quickly realize the resources you need to invest in the process.

If your company is growing fast, hire overqualified people. Within a short time, you’ll promote them to fuel your growth. They’ll evolve from individual contributors to managers. It’s far easier to promote the people you have on your team than to parachute external managers.

Hire people better than you in at least one key skill the team needs to succeed. I struggled with this in the early stages of my career. I felt that I needed to be the best at every skill my team needed. I eventually realized how crippling that approach was and started hiring amazing people who were much better than me at their craft. That’s when things really took off.

To run an amazing marketing organization, you don’t have to be the best marketing operations person. You don’t have to be the world’s greatest writer. You only have to know how to hire, motivate and coordinate the efforts of amazing people who can do all those things.

Creativity

Don’t wait for your muse. Get systematic about your creativity. We hold regular creative brainstorming sessions on everything from our next event’s swag to our social media videos. Some of the best ideas have come from team members who don’t regularly get to flex their creativity muscles.

You never know where your next brilliant idea will come from. Get everyone involved. Make it fun. Follow up on the good ideas to motivate everyone to contribute more. There are no stupid ideas at these meetings and nothing gets knocked down. We list everything on the whiteboard, then prioritize by voting and taking into account production considerations. Some of our best work was created this way.

Marketing teams fail in many different ways, but the best ones I’ve seen or experienced firsthand always got these four elements right: strategy, execution, people and creativity.

By Udi Ledergor

CMO at Gong, the leading Conversation Intelligence Platform for Sales.

Sourced from Forbes

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Ad revenues remain a bright spot for Amazon as profits falls flat

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By Rebecca Stewart

Amazon‘s profits might have fallen for the first time in two years, but its advertising revenue outshone its overall sales growth in the most recent quarter – showing brands are taking it seriously as a challenger to the Google-Facebook duopoly.

During its most recent earnings call on Thursday (24 October), the e-commerce giant revealed that sales were up, but profit had slumped year-on-year for the first time since mid-2017.

The business reported a third-quarter profit of $2.1bn, a drop of 28% on the previous year, which was put down to investments in shipping and warehouses to help its core retail business maintain its edge.

Over the past three months, the businesses has garnered $70bn in revenues; up from 24% on on the same quarter last year.

Advertising revenue growth was a bright spot in the company’s results, with ‘other revenue’ (which principally refers to Amazon’s ad business) hitting $3bn over the three months to the end of September, up 45% on the same quarter last year.

Driving ‘relevancy’ and looking beyond search

The firm’s chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky said it was “very happy” with its ad sales progress and that it was now focused on helping brands deliver more targeted ads within the Amazon ecosystem.

“We continue to focus on advancing advertising experiences there, [making them] helpful for customers and helping them to see new products. We want to empower our businesses to find attracting and engage these customers and it’s increasingly popular with vendor sellers and third-party advertisers,” he added.

“It’s still early and what we’re focused on really at this point is relevancy, making sure that the ads are relevant to our customers, helpful to our customers, and to do that, we use machine learning and that’s helping us to drive better, better and better relevancy.”

Earlier this month it was reported that Amazon was eating into Google’s search dominance, with eMarketer forecasting that Amazon’s share is expected to grow to 15.9% by 2021, with Google’s expected to contract to 70.5%.

However, Dave Fildes, Amazon’s director of investor relations said that increased adoption among brands was pushing the company to expand its video and OTT offerings.

Pointing to the ad-supported movie streaming service it recently launched on IMDb and live sporting deals, Fildes said it planned to ad more inventory to the latter and across its Fire TV apps via Amazon Publisher Services integrations.

“[We’re also looking at] streamlining access for third-party apps and really just making it easier for advertisers to manage their campaigns and provide better results,” he continued.

Aaron Goldman, chief marketing officer, at self-service ad platform 4C Insights highlighted how quickly Amazon is ramping up its ad platform.

“It has the unique ability to close the loop from purchase intent to sales and allow brands use that data for ad targeting and measurement,” he explained, saying clients using 4C’s platform had upped their spend by 250% in the past year.

Feature Image Credit: Advertising revenue growth was a bright spot in the company’s results / Amazon

By Rebecca Stewart

Sourced from The Drum

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5 Simple But Effective Ways To Market a Services Business

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In the ever-changing world of marketing, businesses are always on the lookout for new, and innovative ways to sell their products to a broader audience. At times, service-centric companies find themselves overlooked in a sea filled with organizations advertising products.

Well, simply put, marketing a service is no easy feat. The most obvious problem being the lack of physical evidence – how do you promote something that isn’t tangible? How do you convince an individual to invest their time and money in an object that they can’t see or feel? The grey area that lies between selling the invisible is precisely where the great conundrum of the marketing world lies.

However, to make the process of advertising promising and ideas a tad bit easier, we’ve compiled five excellent tips that’ll catapult any service-selling business onto the thrones of success. However, before we get into that, let’s talk about why you need to market a services business differently than your standard run-of-the-mill product business.

Why should you market a services business differently?

Perhaps the most critical mistake service vendors can make is to utilize the same techniques used to advertise businesses with products. If you’re trying to convince a customer to buy your service, the golden word you need to keep in your mind is ‘trust.’

When it comes to marketing a service, consumers need to be assured of the fact that they can rely on you, since a service can’t be returned if it turns out to be faulty. If things go awry, the initial investment that the customer made goes stale, and any chances of fostering a healthy customer-supplier relationship go to waste.

To prevent angry customers from ruining any glimmer for your organization to make it in the services industry, try to instill in your mind the fact that service-based businesses require different marketing strategies.

Moreover, aside from the regular 4P’s of marketing (Product, Price, Place, and Promotion), service-based businesses require 3 additional components, which are People, Physical Evidence, and Process. Keeping in mind the vitality that these principles bear, we’ve compiled five brilliant ways to market a services business, starting off with sending a clear message.

#1. Send a clear marketing message

While coming up with ideas to market a services business, try to be as clear as possible with the message that you’d like to convey. When it comes to selling services, many business owners and marketers find themselves surrounded by an arsenal of ideas and perspectives, which leads them to fail to commit to one.

The most important advice a service-vendor could get is to choose a simple yet clear message to send through a marketing campaign. An essential aspect of your marketing campaign should be to create a vivid experience for any potential consumer.

To indulge an individual in experiencing the service you offer, try creating adverts that highlight how your service works to alleviate pain points, and offer comfort. The primary challenge for you as the service vendor lies in creating a convincing experience that captures the attention of any prospects immediately. Once the message is decided on most service-vendors utilize a variety of marketing techniques to promote their content, which focuses on turning prospects into customers.

The most frequently encountered problems faced by companies range from generating organic traffic to securing the best executive sponsors, as shown below:

Company's Top Marketing Challenges to market a services business

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The ads you send out aren’t the only thing that bears witness to your marketing message. From the way you interact with clients to something as subliminal as the color palette of your website – all of them are key contributors in getting your marketing message across.

#2. Find a way to make your business stand out

To demonstrate what it means to make your service-centric business stand out, let’s consider an example. Imagine a man named X, who’s in dire need of marketing services to promote his content. However, after going through countless websites and testimonials, X proceeds to do the job himself, since nothing he came across had grabbed his attention.

Unfortunately, most customers share the same plight as X, with too many services being marketed in the same boring and predictable way. With that being said, most service-vendors find it challenging to distinguish themselves from their competition, which is when a thorough self-analysis comes in handy.

Service-based businesses should compare themselves with their competitors’ marketing strategies and devise a list of differences that make them stand out the most. Later on, a service-centric organization should base their primary marketing message around what sets them apart from the competition. Using the medium of video can also set you apart, while increasing revenue since many consumers prefer quick videos, instead of reading a brochure.

Video content is preferred for brands for market a services business

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#3. Focus on increasing value for your customers

If you’re a service-vendor, get one thing straight. Your job is to sell value, not price! Unlike product marketers, who compete primarily on price, to market a services business is heavily reliant on value.

While brainstorming for marketing strategies and ideas, try to focus on increasing value for your customers, rather than mindlessly decreasing the price of the service you offer. Moreover, any organization that provides a service cheaper than its competitors is usually considered to be the black sheep of the bunch.

An easy and effective method of increasing value for customers is to bundle two or more services together, which serves as the next best alternative to lowering your price. Most service-centric organizations combine an arsenal of useful features and amp up the value for consumers and treat consumers like actual people instead of a number.

Personalization to Winning Business to market a services business

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The fun thing about increasing value for customers is how creative you can be with it. Furthermore, the way you add value can also help distinguish your organization from the competition. Alternative ways to add value to services include:

  • Increasing delivery speed.
  • Providing customers with expert opinion/advice.
  • Improving the customer care you offer.

#4. Continuously revise your marketing strategy

This point may seem a bit redundant, but analyzing and updating each aspect of a company’s marketing strategy is the first stepping stone to success.

An effective marketing strategy doesn’t revolve around how you’re going to market your service; it delves deep into every nook and cranny of the process. Simply put, a marketing strategy amalgamates the goals you have for your company with the actions you take to achieve them.

Several newly-found businesses make the error of etching their marketing strategy on to stone. As the marketing world around you evolves, your marketing strategy should evolve with it. Try to revise your marketing strategy as much as you can, keeping in mind that the goals you set to achieve are SMART:

Revising your marketing strategy for market a services business

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#5. Work on improving existing client relationships

Perhaps the most crucial aspect of marketing service-based businesses is that the sale isn’t complete at the cash counter. Unlike companies selling products, when marketing services, you’ve got to be there for the long run, which includes delivery and customer support.

A simple tip to keep under your sleeve is to consistently improve existing customer relationships. As a general rule of thumb, consumers that are kept happy over a period of time are the driving force behind a company’s success.

Furthermore, catering to existing clients encourages an organization to expand the services they offer and come up with new programs to entertain them. Improving current consumer relationships also yields more revenue than marketing to new prospects.

So, where do you go from here?

I hope we’ve acquainted you with some stellar marketing tips for your services business.

With that being said, now’s the time to get working on promoting your service, with these brilliant tips making the path to success a little easier!

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Alma Causey is a Freelance writer by day and sports fan by night. She writes about Fashion and Tech. Live simply, give generously, watch football and a technology lover. She is currently associated with OutlookStudios.com.

Sourced from Jeff Bullas

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Semantic content analysis will disrupt marketing – for the better

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By Jergan Callebaut

We know that exceptional content is what makes a brand. We also know that analysing our data to very specifically target audiences is crucial for great ROI. But we rarely put the two together and use the data available to actually analyse what content works – and why.

Yet knowing exactly why content works can give us that winning edge. And, luckily, the ability to see what indisputably resonates the most with our audience – and drives our bottom-line – is already in our hands.

The state of play

In the climate of the current ‘data boom’, audience targeting naturally takes precedence, with the majority (55%) of marketers saying ‘better use of data’ for audience targeting is their priority in 2019, according to Econsultancy.

It makes sense. On a daily basis, we’re faced with countless blogs, podcasts, speakers and everything in-between promising that if we perfectly optimise our targeting, our messaging will beat the daunting odds of the 0.9% CTR cited by WordStream. And so, we dedicate hours and hours every week to creating personas, hypothesising about audiences, segmenting users and running lengthy A/B tests to find the piece of content that our audience love. We add to our already-complex marketing stacks tools that tell us what messaging has been more successful, in order for us to optimise.

But when we do find that winner, do we know why it works? Do we know exactly what features caused the higher CTR? Do we know how we’re going to recreate it in our next campaign, to make it better, even?

This lack of knowledge – despite all the tools and techniques we use to offer insight – is what we at Datasine call the ‘black box’ because when it comes to understanding why, we are left in the dark. Just looking at results doesn’t give us the insight needed to truly understand content preferences in an actionable way.

Semantic content analysis

To crack open the black box, we need to start conducting in-depth semantic analysis of our content. Only then can we begin to truly understand why some content resonates and some doesn’t.

As experienced marketers, we come prepackaged with a deep understanding of – and fascination with – psychology and our audience, meaning we’ve already got the skills on paper to analyse our content. It’s simply a matter of breaking it down into parts. We’ll look at this in terms of images and text.

If you want to analyse your imagery, you can take all the image assets you’ve ever created and note down the particular elements you used in each, then check to see if there are any patterns which relate those choices to your ad performance.

For example:

  • Did you use a photo of your product outdoors? Or in the showroom?
  • Were people visible in the shot?
  • What was the size of the text, and the colour of any overlays or CTAs?

It may even be worth inviting a panel to judge your images on the emotions that they evoke, or photographers to assess the quality and composition of the shot.

You can do the same for text content, approaching this by categorising how you describe your product or service. For example:

  • Do you appeal to your product’s ease of use?
  • Are you emphasising your innovative credentials?
  • Do you use particularly casual – or formal – language?

With this process, we can see which types of content are receiving the most engagement. And we can use these features to keep creating great campaigns that we further optimise as our understanding of customer content preferences grows.

Scaling content analysis

If we have just a few campaigns on the go, content analysis is easier, but it gets harder as we scale. It stops being practical to expect humans to spend days, weeks, even months labelling what goes into each piece of content. Here’s where machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) come to the rescue.

AI models can extract all of these elements in seconds by analysing image or text semantically to look at content like humans do. That way, we can cut back on lengthy, expensive A/B testing, and get rid of guesswork once and for all – a vision we at Datasine are working toward. Our AI platform Connect (formerly Pomegranate) automatically identifies the most effective content for your audience.

By embracing semantic content analysis and working collaboratively with AI, we can feel confident in understanding exactly what content is going to work before we hit send.

Sourced from The Drum

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