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Back to Basics: Email Marketing For B2B

November 9, 2018 No Comments

In the B2B space, we can sometimes get lost looking for the newest shiny objects and forget about the basics of digital marketing. Don’t let that happen to email. There’s a reason it’s tried and true – it still holds the highest ROI.

It’s time to go back to the basics.

The Basics of Email Marketing

For most B2B organizations, email is used in every aspect of their business. Your sales guys send emails. Your marketing team sends emails. Your customer service team sends emails. For most organizations, email is the number one touchpoint for communicating with customers. Your customers likely receive more email from you than they ever receive phone calls or in-person visits. So, the content and context of your email marketing should never be taken lightly.

That said: why do we think about email so little in our organization? We’re going to dive into three areas of our business to determine how to best use email to reach our goals.

Sales Team Emails

As I mentioned, your sales team should be sending a lot of email. The reason they do this is because with the advent of email marketing and CRM integration, you should be able to send a lot of emails that cut down a lot of time and increase productivity. But we still get asked this question often: “What kind of emails to our sales team be sending?”

Well, it’s a good question. The reality is that email offers more of a challenge for sales guys than it does for any other department. (If you’re a sales guy, you can quote me on that.)

The reason why it’s much more difficult is that you’re expected to be both personal and automated at the same time. In other words, you need to get a lot of emails out, but it can’t be willy-nilly, because your potential customer is looking for personal attention and customization. They want to feel that you’re paying attention to them – and so does everyone else. The problem is that you’ve only got so much attention to give.

Marketing helps with this a bit, but it can’t totally fill the role of “personal attention” for the customer. Yet, without that, the prospect can feel funneled, or herded, which would detract from the impact you are trying to have.

This means that from a sales perspective, an intelligent CRM-based email marketing with high customization is an absolute requirement. If you’re sending out templated emails but you are not using a system like HubSpot or Infusionsoft, you’re probably spending a lot of time doing it. Or, if you’re not, you’re definitely not doing it well.

If you’re just getting started, the key is to start slow and find the biggest bottleneck. Then, work to find the areas where email automation can have the biggest impact – places where it can really help you save time and increase your productivity. Create those templates first, and find easy ways to automate them. If you’re not using HubSpot Sequences, for example, this could be a real leverage point for you in the organization.

Marketing Emails

Marketing is the act of positioning your product or service within the marketplace. Advertising is the expression of that position to the targeted customer. So your goal, in a marketing context, is to continually position your firm or service within the mind of your potential customer.

When you think of a channel such as email, this could include such tactics as an email newsletters and drip campaigns, but on a bigger level, you should push thought leadership. The marketing message should focus on the unique differentiators of your firm or service within the market. This means you need to drive the value of your firm’s service every time you send an email.

So if you are a professional services firm, this positioning should include your expertise, which is really the summation of all your experiences being applied to a customer problem. Don’t just send your latest project; send some of the thinking that made your latest project successful.

The success of your communication will directly correlate to how well it helps customers solve their problems. If you’re constantly talking about yourself or your products and services without a correlation to your customer, or if you never tie in how your product or service will solve their problems, you’re just creating noise.

There are too many product and service emails that simply talk about what’s being offered without ever considering the benefits that the end customers actually care about.

For example, you may have the highest-rated service on Yelp, yet that means nothing to me if you don’t address my pain points specifically.

This is a high-level review of marketing email, but hopefully it provides direction toward where you should push.

Customer Service Emails

The communications you have with your customers over requests, service calls, or even the day-to-day management of an account are sometimes just viewed as inconsequential. But how could we leave these major touch points to chance?

What’s most important is that every email that’s sent out of your firm is thought through in terms of how it affects the customer experience.

Have you reviewed your customer service rep’s email sent box recently? Think about what kind of information you could find in there. If they’re being polite, if they address the customer concerns, if there’s terseness – frankly, there could be a whole array of challenges or wonders inside of that email box in terms of who is winning and losing accounts when it comes to customer service.

Since every firm and company is different, let’s talk about this from a conceptual standpoint. You should determine your email communication standards from a customer service perspective on day one. This could include response times, response context, and other technical standards, all the way down to the signatures and closing remarks of emails.

A good email customer service strategy may need to be broad to encompass all situations; it could also be very narrow in terms of an escalation or communication policy around particular issues. If you’re setting up a meeting, for example (which seems minor), you could have templates for emails that are sent out to make sure all the details are covered. The alternative is to just ad hoc it, sending an email saying, “Hey we got a meeting tomorrow here’s the agenda see you then..”

Yikes.A properly thought-through strategy could include some reminders on directions and the more formalized greeting, for example.

Don’t Take Email For Granted

All this to be said, every email from your firm or your company is a piece of communication to your customer. Don’t leave it to chance.

Email should be thoughtful, purposeful, and measurable to make sure it’s having the best impact. The emails you send will be a large part of the communication experience your customer has with your firm.

ByTobin Lehman

Sourced from Business 2 Community

In News

What’s all the fuss about FOMO?

November 6, 2018 No Comments

By Sophie Katsali

When was the last time you saw a queue outside of what you would call a fairly ‘ordinary’ restaurant? Or an ‘exclusive’ concert? Perhaps a pop-up that gives away gluten-free bread outside of a tube station? Quite recently, I suppose.

People love queues, don’t they? That uncomfortable feeling of standing on your feet for ages while thoroughly investigating someone’s back just to get access to something…special. Well, not really. This is not something people particularly enjoying doing. But the fear of missing out (or ‘FOMO’) is so frantically embedded in our DNA that it is a far greater ‘discomfort’ for us to miss out than to waste some time in a queue.

How does this tie into social media marketing? Social media is nothing more than our world under a microscope. Sometimes marketers are too close to their own profession and don’t quite remember that it is as simple as that. They treat “social media users” as a different group of people altogether. This doesn’t particularly help since they sometimes fail to tap into human psychology 101.

Take your average Facebook ad. How often do you see a call to action that truly lures you in? In 2018, 69.95% of ads have included a CTA – a great jump from 2016’s 51.54% – but what do the rest of the ads (the 30.05%) include? They probably have some nice imagery. However, even if a picture is worth a thousand words, words (or in our world, “copy”) can elevate your ad to drive conversions. How? Enter FOMO.

The power of FOMO

How do you incorporate FOMO in your marketing efforts? Essentially, it’s about coming up with a “FOMO” proposition around your brand/product/service that’s too strong to pass.

There is a reason why ‘limited offers’ work. It’s all about framing what you offer in a timeframe. AdEspresso recently conducted a Facebook ad experiment to test three of the most popular CTAs; “Sign Up”, “Download Now” and “Learn More”. The “Download Now” CTA outperformed the other two by more than 40% in terms of cost per lead. Time-sensitive words like “now” and “today” work successfully because of the urgency they call out. You also want to make sure you call out your customer. You want to make it personal. According to Hubspot, personalised CTAs perform 202% better than basic CTAs. Words like “you”, “your”, “yours” make your copy instantly more approachable. All of a sudden, the ad is about them! They stop and listen.

What are people going to miss if they don’t join/download/buy/sign up to what you offer? This is a question that you can only answer after going deep into your social data and understanding who your audience is and where it lives on social. It could be a case where you discover that your main audience is more outgoing and sociable than the average social group. This comes with the assumption that they probably have a lot of friends they care about (and subsequently, care about their opinions) so you make it about their friends. You run a Facebook ad that is targeting people whose friends have joined YOUR Page and you go in with the hard sell: “Your friend is already part of [enter brand/product/service here]. Isn’t it time for you to join today?” This is one way to take advantage of our hardwired urge to not miss out on anything.

Common-sense marketing tells us we need to exaggerate about whatever we are selling. As a result, we focus too much on the specifications of the end-product and how well our brand compares to others. We make the sale about us. However, if you change the narrative and flip the mirror, a more persuasive argument is helping people see that if they don’t join you they will miss out on an opportunity that hasn’t been presented to them before.

By Sophie Katsali

Sophie Katsali is lead strategist at Wilderness

Sourced from The Drum

In News

8 Ways to Justify Your Social Media Marketing Program

October 22, 2018 No Comments

By Dom Nicastro

Demonstrating value and ROI from social media marketing campaigns has been challenging since marketers first began using the platform to target prospects and customers. But should ROI even be a major social media justifier? Some say social media marketing success means looking beyond ROI, while others adhere to the age-old advice that says your company’s business objectives prove social media worth. “Social media actually goes beyond ROI,” said Hariraj Rathod, social media analyst at Numbertank. “It helps in achieving good branding effect on audience and also helps to showcase products and services by segmenting and targeting the correct audience. Social media marketing also helps a brand understand how well their products are being consumed or liked by certain demographics.”

Is social media even worth it for your organization? If it is, where should your focus be as a marketer? To answer these questions, we caught up with digital marketing pros who offered a number of social media marketing tips that can help you make the most of your social programs.

Understand Younger Generations and Their Growing Mistrust

Deciding which metrics matter isn’t the lone challenge for marketers using social media. Some say it’s deciding whether to invest energy and resources into it in the first place. After all, marketers face a growing mistrust of social media platforms in light of data breach scandals like Facebook-Cambridge-Analytica and shrinking social media audiences.

Shama Hyder, CEO of Zen Media, a marketing and new media consultancy, noted in a Forbes article last month that Millennials and Gen Z are annoyed with brands taking up space in their social media feeds, and a third of them have deleted their Facebook account.

Know Social Media’s Place in Your Digital Ecosystem

Using social media is a thing of the past, according to Hyder. Companies should shift from a mindset of “using social media, to a mindset of adapting and thriving in an ecosystem where a highly connected, social, empowered consumer is now the norm, and traditional econometrics and data are no longer adequate to measure and track the success of content and campaigns,” Hyder wrote.

ROI is not the be-all and end-all for measuring success, she added. It’s more effective that metrics match the “complexity, ambiguity and dynamism” of a customer’s journey, she said. Integrate social data and metrics with other KPIs from web analytics, CRM, etc. and view social media platforms beyond just a “marketing channel, and leverage it instead as one prong of a larger strategy and source of customer insight.”

Support Engagement and Education, Not ROI

Belinda Alban agrees. Alban, the founder of Your Virtual Assistant Service, said the focus of social media should not be on ROI but on growing your following to increase brand awareness, engaging with your customers to create raving fans and educating your potential customers about the benefits of your product. “The bigger your platforms are the more opportunities you have to do this,” Alban said.

Social media may or may not lead to an increase in sales, but it will give you the opportunity to build relationships with your audience and deliver “amazing” customer service. “On the back of the relationships and trust and confidence your brand has built with social media you should see an increase in the reputation of your brand,” Alban said. “And it is your reputation that can make or break a company.”

Know Thyself, Know Thy Company

As long as your brand matches its social media playbook to its company objectives, you’re on the right track, according to Maria Burpee, a B2B marketing consultant for MB Consulting. “The ROI — and the metrics — comes from the board and company objectives,” Burpee said. Do you want to be the most well known or favorite brand or build a community or movement? Social media, even if it doesn’t lead to sales, is key. Are you looking to generate leads? Social media listening is key. Are you trying to create high loyalty and referrals? Cultivating social media “love” and responsiveness is important. Do you want to have the best customer service and hang your hat on that as a differentiator? Social media can be part of the mix. Social media metrics wouldn’t be found in a high-level executive dashboard, Burpee added, but rather the metrics are important to support a broader KPI dashboard.

Consider Using Unique URLs

One way to capture and track ROI on social media is using unique URLs. “Any time we post content that includes a link, we use a unique URL so we can track where the traffic is coming from and not for social media in general, but each channel specifically,” said Tiffany McEachern, social media specialist for PSCU, which provides solutions for credit unions. “Each social channel has a unique URL so you can see where your clicks are coming from and spend your time and efforts on those social media platforms,” McEachern said. “Even if social media isn’t giving your company a strong ROI, it builds brand awareness and in today’s day and age, companies are expected to be on social media.”

Assign Specific KPIs, A/B Tests

James Bray is a social media marketer who works for the Equal Opportunity Community Initiative (EOCI), a nonprofit that relies on donations received from fundraising activities. Bray said his Board takes spending decisions more seriously than most, whether the costs are incurred by outright paid advertising or through the staff’s efforts to create and manage social media content. “The return on our social media marketing investment is therefore calculated in terms of engagement: profile views, click-throughs to the website, email subscriptions and volunteer recruitment,” Bray said. “These measures are a great deal more important than, for example, simply counting the number of Instagram followers, because they reflect the degree to which someone is interested in partnering with us.”

To ensure the nonprofit receives a return on its social media investments, Bray said the team needs to be clear about its objectives and how much time it can afford to devote to each. It then attaches KPIs to those goals to ensure they are met. “The EOCI’s communications team is constantly A/B testing its social media strategies, using a combination of each platform’s own insights along with Google Analytics to determine what sources constitute the best outreach and result in the most beneficial conversions,” Bray said. “Based on these results, the EOCI Board feels that our social media engagement strategy has a positive effect on our ability to connect with our target audience and reach our objectives.”

Listen on Social, Execute in Customer Service Channels

Clair Jones, chief strategy officer and co-founder of Witty Kitty Digital Marketing, said monitoring how your audience is talking about your brand through social listening is vital. You can use the data to inform your customer service programs. “You can learn so much about how to improve customer service and experience, tap into audiences you didn’t know you had, and hone your branding and messaging,” she said.

Balance Between Organic and Paid Social Efforts Matters

If your organization is going to invest in social, consider the aforementioned tips and also strike a balance between paid and organic social media marketing. “Advocate for smart social that communicates the organization’s mission and engages the audience,” said Maria Mora, content director at Big Sea Design. “And layer a strategic paid social plan over that for a stronger return and more targeted presence on social platforms.”

Feature Image Credit: Shutterstock

By Dom Nicastro

Sourced from CMS Wire

In News

Modern tools & techniques to bolster top-funnel, 3rd-party demand gen

October 8, 2018 No Comments

By Scott Vaughan

Inbound marketing has dominated many brands’ strategies recently, but contributor Scott Vaughan explains how technological advances are enabling better outbound efforts.

The B2B marketing world is shifting, and that means we must look for new strategies and techniques to adapt to changing customer, selling and marketing requirements.

A generation of marketers has grown up on inbound-driven demand strategies and tools. You know the process: buy and drive traffic; put up a landing page on your website; get somebody to fill out a form; and then nurture, score and send to sales once they’re qualified. Things have progressed from our days as pure brand marketers, and this has been a solid way for marketing to contribute to revenue.

Digging deeper

As B2B marketing and sales organizations prioritize more precise ideal customer profile (ICP) targets and account-based marketing (ABM) strategies, traditional inbound marketing tactics alone aren’t generating the demand needed to hit increasing pipeline and revenue goals for many B2B teams.

We simply can’t expect all our target decision-makers to find our website and fill out a form. Nor can we keep buying “lists” to populate our expensive databases, especially in a permission-based marketing world. And we can’t direct endless amounts of precious budget at media to drive low-converting website traffic just to have sales and marketing resources chasing down unqualified “leads.”

“In today’s reality, it’s crazy to think all your target accounts are just going to show up to your website,” Jennifer Pockell-Dimas, CMO at Egnyte, told me when I spoke with her earlier this year. “With ABM and the precision that’s required, you must go where your prospects are.”

To meet today’s mandate, we need to get our content and messages in-market where our audiences (ICP and target-account decision-makers) are doing their research.

One marketing strategy that is being re-imagined, modernized and used more aggressively is third-party demand gen — top-funnel contacts generated by third-party channels or sources, rather than through your own website or landing pages or your own social profiles.

A few examples are:

Content syndication: Distributing your content (typically branded) to target audiences via third-party sites and social networks; purchasing leads on a cost-per-lead (CPL) basis.
Product- or service-review sites: Buying leads on a CPL basis from product-focused or crowd-sourced sites that capture contact info from individuals researching relevant products and/or services.
Shared-lead campaigns: Running lead gen campaigns with partner brands/channels where leads are captured on third-party landing pages and provided to multiple companies.
External webinars: Sponsoring webinars organized by a third party to acquire audiences and generate contacts that fit your ICP.

Many of these approaches may look familiar. The difference today is the modern techniques, tools and data that are providing smarter ways to generate more precise top-funnel, third-party demand that works in tandem with your inbound effort.

Here are a few ways marketers can modernize their top-funnel, third-party strategies, as well as the tools needed to make these strategies work.

Use tools to manage multiple providers and tap into fresh audiences with precise targeting

Many B2B marketing teams have applied a “set and forget it” mindset to third-party demand. You sign a contract with a provider, and you use the same providers every quarter or even sign an annual contract. This approach rarely works in the mid- to long-term because there’s no way to quickly vet low-performing partners nor adapt your plan as business needs dictate.

With today’s top-funnel automation and demand orchestration solutions, you can use tech to manage multiple providers at the same time, continually testing each to identify the sites, providers and programs that deliver the quality you need. And you can validate the data and fix any bad lead data before it hits your marketing automation or CRM systems.

With accurate data, you can route to the right nurture track or sales pro for immediate follow-up. These modern tools allow you to scale by using and measuring multiple top-funnel providers and sources at the same time.

Rescript the follow-up and follow-on process

One of the biggest mistakes when using third-party demand providers is the follow-up. It’s critical we don’t follow up on third-party leads with the proverbial, “I saw you downloaded x white paper, attended y webinar” or, worse, “are evaluating z solution.”

This is not engaging. It simply provides a sure-fire way to turn your prospect off — on the phone, via email or on chat. (By the way, the same applies for inbound leads.)

Rather, marketers report finding more success using a different approach that uses program data and taps into contact or account data in their MA or CRM systems. For example, you may adapt the follow-up script to something more conversational, such as: “It looks like you and your team may be doing some research around x; how is that going? …”

This approach drives a more meaningful dialogue and leads naturally to a discovery conversation about your prospective account and the buyer’s needs and pains. It will also quickly tell you if they fit your ICP.

From here, you can learn more about their initiatives and share additional educational content in the right context. This approach also allows you to qualify the buyer and the account for next steps, including sending the lead to sales with actionable information.

Apply intent data monitoring to identify and prioritize accounts in the market

Increasingly popular is the use of intent data monitoring with these top-funnel programs. These solutions allow you to prioritize and target those companies that are showing increased activity around a given topic across the web. An emerging group of martech and third-party media providers are monitoring their sites and the broader B2B web to understand which companies — in aggregate — are interacting with which content/subjects by topic. For example, if you sell cloud storage solutions, it’s valuable to see which companies are doing research on these solutions.

With a list of active companies — identified by domain — you now have a more targeted list to reach out to with top-funnel programs. You can then prioritize your outreach efforts, targeting the right personas and roles at these companies using your branded content. These techniques increase the effectiveness of your investment when working with third-party providers and sites.

Third-party demand generation is an effective top-funnel marketing strategy when done right. It requires planning, management and more precision, which in the past has caused some marketers to shy away from it. However, the recent advent of several key marketing techniques and technologies has helped with all this, making third-party demand gen far more efficient and effective than it was just five years ago, especially for today’s ICP and account-based approach.

By Scott Vaughan

Scott Vaughan is CMO of Integrate, a marketing technology software provider automating top-of-funnel marketing for B2B marketers to enable demand marketing orchestration. Scott leads the company’s go-to-market and growth marketing strategy. He’s passionately focused on unlocking the potential of marketing, media, data and technology to drive business and customer value.

Sourced from MARTECH TODAY

In News

Push or Pull Marketing – Which Drives Better Brand Consideration? [Infographic]

September 25, 2018 No Comments

By Angela Southall

Research recently undertaken by Mention Me in conjunction with OnePoll discovered that consumers have a clear preference for certain types of marketing when it comes to discovering new brands.

By a significant margin, consumers prefer “pull” types of marketing over “push” methods – in fact, 71% expressed this preference. In simple terms, “pull” marketing are those methods which enable a consumer to discover the brand for themselves, such as search engines or recommendations, while “push” techniques seek to create consumer demand by advertising directly to the individuals through methods like email and direct mail.

In addition, the research highlights a mismatch in terms of the newly emerging marketing channels, such as Influencer marketing, and consumer trust. While many retailers are spending considerable time and effort building influencer strategies, it appears that those efforts could be better placed focusing on other forms of endorsements – namely, reviews and referrals.

According to respondents, these options are trusted 3x more than endorsements by bloggers and YouTubers.

The media preference varied by sector, but showed similar patterns, as shown in this infographic – Push vs Pull Marketing.

By Angela Southall

Follow Angela Southall on Twitter

Sourced from Social Media Today

In News

P&G – not the first brand to attempt WTF trademarking

September 14, 2018 No Comments

By Katie Deighton

P&G has filed to trademark LOL, WTF, NBD and FML

Procter & Gamble’s attempt to connect with a millennial audience by trademarking acronyms such as WTF, LOL and NBD has raised eyebrows, but the practice of laying brand claim to everyday slang is not as unusual as it may seem.

P&G has filed to trademark LOL (laugh out loud), WTF (what the fuck), NBD (no big deal) and FML (fuck my life).

Initially reported in AdAge, the news has drawn the attention of global outlets such as the BBC and Bloomberg, which have questioned if owning such colloquialisms will really end entice a younger customer base.

However, the conglomerate is not the first company to attempt to brand everyday slang.

“Trademarking colloquial language is nothing new – McDonald’s somewhat depressingly trademarked Maccy D’s, for one – and other than it being an interesting headline, I’m not sure there’s not much to see here,” said Rich Leigh, founder of Radioactive PR.

“A quick search of the US Patent and Trademark Office shows that there are multiple other live trademarks for the term ‘WTF’, for instance, across a handful of goods and services categories, including hand tools and fashion.”

Indeed, there have been 246 trademarks filed for LOL or phrases containing LOL, 147 for WTF and its offspring, 71 for NBD and 61 for FML. Many of the files have been labelled as ‘dead’, meaning the application was ‘refused, dismissed, or invalidated by the office’ – all potential outcomes of P&G’s attempt.

Leigh added: “I can understand that the suits at a big corporate entity like P&G even being aware of slang is jarring, like when your mum asks if you’d like to be in a selfie (and then asking somebody else to take the ‘selfie’), but bless them, they’re trying. Whether it helps them hoover up all that sweet, sweet MilleXZial cash remains to be seen, but that’s no doubt their intent.”

David Born, director of entertainment licensing firm Born Licensing, agrees that P&G’s interest in the acronyms is driven by a millennial targeting strategy that a number of brands are actively undertaking.

“This also appears to be the reason why we are seeing emojis almost everywhere we turn, whether on product or in advertising,” he said. “We recently worked with Just Eat who licensed emojis as part of their Real Reviews campaign, and have a number of other advertisers that have shown interest in using emojis as a way to communicate with their target audience.”

Melissa Robertson, chief executive of Now, is cynical that the tactic will work, however: “WTF P&G! They must have a GSOH if they really think they can claim ownership of generic text language IMO. WTF is going on when marketeers become that greedy? Are they going to sue our Whatsapp groups for using their owned language?

“FWIW, I think it’s ridiculous. Don’t make me LOL.”

Feature Image Credit: P&G has filed to trademark LOL, WTF, NBD and FML

By Katie Deighton

Sourced from The Drum

In News

Let’s Keep Influencer Marketing Accountable

September 11, 2018 No Comments

By Katie Paulsen

One of the top challenges facing influencer marketing is one common across the entire arena of digital marketing: brand safety.

At this year’s Cannes Lions, Unilever’s Chief Marketing Officer Keith Weed warned that influencer marketing has an integrity issue. The proliferation of fake followers, aided and abetted by a lack of transparency and proper measurement reporting, threatens to destabilize the entire industry.

Weed warned that the industry must take “urgent action now to rebuild trust before it’s gone forever,” and he pledged that Unilever’s brands will never buy followers nor work with influencers who buy followers.

Any brand conducting influencer marketing programs should heed the call to ensure greater transparency and integrity.

The relationship between social media and influencer marketing is at a crossroads. To be clear, the challenge is not one of growth: According to a recent study by the Association of National Advertisers, 75% of brands use influencer marketing, and almost half are planning to increase budgets in the next year. However, in order for influencer marketing to continue to thrive, brands will need to improve their campaign strategies.

Brand safety is of paramount importance in the development of influencer marketing tools and in ongoing campaign monitoring and management. Campaigns – and the technologies that support them – should be designed to track telltale signs of suspicious activity such as sudden bursts in followers or suspicious letter replacements in profile names, such as the use of “1” to replace the letter “I.” More sophisticated algorithms can flag dramatic shifts in performance and unanticipated engagement patterns.

In addition to ensuring transparency and integrity, influencer marketing campaigns should focus on authentic engagement. Influencer marketing is inherently social; when implemented well it can be an open (but directed) conversation that is amplified to the masses. This is why it is vital to focus on follower engagement.

While metrics like volume are of course important (e.g., follower count, posts per day/week, etc.), engagement may have the biggest impact on meeting or even exceeding KPIs. One of the highlights of influencer marketing is the opportunity for a brand to leverage an influencer’s unique voice. That unique voice has a big impact on the type of content an influencer can produce for brands — and it is that unique, authentic voice that ultimately drives consumer engagement with the branded content.

For brands, a trusted environment is one of the most effective places to engage consumers. Passionate influencers who authentically weave branded stories into social platforms that consumers trust are the ones who deliver powerful results.

Whether it is a story told through a blog post, video, a picture, or any combination of these, working with influencers can bring brands and products to life with engaging, custom content delivered to the right audience — amplified through the channels that has the potential to make the greatest impact.

But to help ensure that this marriage between influencer marketing and social not only survives, but thrives, it is up to everyone in the industry to work to ensure that engagements remain authentic, honest, transparent, and measurable.

By Katie Paulsen

By Katie Paulsen, Vice President of Influencer Marketing, RhythmOne

Sourced from MediaPost

In News

RIP Snapchat: Marketing Experts Reveal What Works in Social Media — And What Doesn’t

September 7, 2018 No Comments

By Jennie Bell

Snapchat is over. Influencers are oversaturated. And content is everything.

Those were some of the takeaways from a panel discussion about social media marketing held Tuesday at the FN Platform trade show in Las Vegas.

The participants included Rollie founder and CEO Vince Lebon, Sam Edelman marketing director Lizzi Bickford, Chinese Laundry marketing manager Alle King and Karen Bueno, Blowfish Malibu’s VP of marketing. FN’s women’s editor, Nikara Johns, moderated the conversation.

FN Platform Social Media Panel — (L-R): Karen Bueno, Alle King, Nikara Johns, Vince Lebon and Lizzi Bickford.

CREDIT: Jim K. Decker

All four executives agreed that the strongest social platforms for brand marketing right now are Facebook and Instagram — particularly Instagram, thanks to its highly visual format.

“With Instagram, we focus on brand awareness and engagement, and there we’re able to build a visual around who the brand is,” said Bueno. “With Facebook, it’s more of a VIP feel, and with those people, they give us their true feelings about [Blowfish Malibu]. That’s been helpful for us in finding out what customers like about the brand and what they don’t.”

Bickford added that gauging the effectiveness of the programs is twofold: “We measure success through engagement, and conversion is also optimal. We’re seeing a rise year over year of about 170 percent on a swipe or click-to-shop [tool]. Those features have definitely enhanced the platforms for us from a brand side.”

As for platforms that don’t work, the executives said they have all abandoned Snapchat completely and use Twitter sparingly. “The biggest result we’ve had with Twitter is if a celebrity or influencer is wearing our shoes and tweeting about it,” said King. “For me as a consumer, I only pay attention to big people and what they’re saying.”

When it comes to working with online influencers, the marketing experts recommended a careful and strategic approach. “Go in with a plan and make sure you’re aligning with the right people. Influencers are great, but the market has become really saturated,” said Bickford, who noted that she likes to meet — or at least speak with — every influencer who works with the Sam Edelman brand. “I want make sure that we vibe and they understand our messaging.”

King noted that microinfluencers have proved to be highly effective at driving online buzz for Chinese Laundry.

But Blowfish’s Bueno advised always checking the numbers before signing a partner. “Look at the engagement of their followers. They may have 2,000 likes on an Instagram photo but no comments,” she said.

For Rollie, while the label does work with social influencers, Lebon and his wife have become increasingly visible in its marketing. “When I first launched the brand, I tried to keep myself separate. But a brand is not what you say it is; it’s what they say it is,” said Lebon. “We found that people connected with our story. So now we’re putting up more photos of me and my wife, and we’re starting to document us living our bucket list. Because we want to empower our community, and the only way is by living what you say. We’ve become the face of it — not by choice, but it feels honest.”

Overall, the executives stressed that in today’s environment, it’s challenging to keep up with changing technologies and to stand out in a noisy digital landscape. But what is essential is having a strong identity.

“Make sure you have a voice, your tone is consistent, and make sure you have a story to tell,” said Bickford. “People want authenticity and content that they can learn from.”

And in the end, brands also need to be realistic about expectations, explained Lebon. “There’s no quick fix,” he said. “We would look at these big influencers and think, ‘If only we could work with them.’ And then you’d get them, and it wasn’t massive. Accept that and stop chasing. Just work on great content and add value to people’s lives. Instead of looking for that one influencer, create something where everyone you touch is inspired and they retell it and then become your brand advocators.”

By Jennie Bell

Sourced from FN

In News

Making the most of a post privacy world

August 29, 2018 No Comments

By Tom Goodwin

A generation of people have now grown up seemingly constantly broadcasting their lives on Instagram, sharing their innermost thoughts on Twitter, intimate details of life on Facebook and yet the world seems shocked that we’ve lost any sense of privacy. We now live in an age when it seems every Instagram user wants to be an influencer, to be popular and envied and to not have anyone know anything about them.

Ever more apps continuously ask us to share location data, software updates ask us to share our personal details, messaging apps want to scan the most personal communications we can imagine and access our friends lists too. And all in an era where security breaches are common, where nefarious companies seek to sway elections, where our data seems to be used to target us with ads that are designed to be as personal as possible, but never creepy, and yet haunt and chase us in on online lives.

Our homes are now wire tapped, not secretly and against our will, but we pay money and eagerly await delivery of connected smart speakers. We now volunteer all manner of information to Google, our location, photos, our calendar invites, our intentions are known by a global sentient network, more than our own selves.

It’s easy to think this is all a relentless march towards the dreadful future where our personal lives are invaded, where privacy is dead, where we can’t escape the filter bubble, where personalized ads follow us around like Minority Report, with few marketers aware it was a film about a dystopian future, not what should be done.

While we may hate personalization, the only thing we dislike more is irrelevance. We hate it when we phone up credit card companies and they don’t immediately know it’s us. We can’t imagine a world without Google offering us better search results based on our browsing history, we like that our weather is automatically shown in our location. Most people would happily swap mesothelioma class action lawsuit TV ads for a well-made commercial for some trendy new jeans.

The marketing and business world has long tip toed around the edge of the privacy debate. We take as much data as we can, whenever we can, we store it badly and hope to never awake the beast that is the customer. If we were to work around earning data from people, by giving them trust that we will use it wisely, not sell it, keep it massively securely and offer clear value in exchange, then life would be very different.

I’d love to see the world embrace privacy trading. How do we maximize the value offered to people in return for storing limited and intimate data about people in a transparent and trusted manner?

Uber knows that the only way for the app to work is to know where you are precisely and in real-time and we understand that and allow it. We know Google Traffic knows our location but uses it anonymously to process all traffic conditions and we’re fine with the net benefit. Dating apps track our location because sharing that is a small price to pay for life or evening long romance.

I like the thought experience of a post privacy world. Maybe I’m naive but if my airline knew exactly where I was at all times then it would be able to serve me better, to come and find me if I’m in the lounge and keep the plane from leaving without me. If my credit card company knew the same could it stop declining payments because I’m abroad and didn’t tell them? If my TV set knew I was in the market for a new car, new auto insurance and I liked leather manbags, is that a terrible world to live in? What if retailers had my face stored on file and I could pay for things with a smile? What if Uber could access my calendar and offer me cars when I’m running late? What if a hotel company could tell from my voice on phone calls I’m stressed and suggest a spa for me? What if a burger joint could tell I was hungry and not been there and entice me in with a special offer? What if a clothing retailer knew my size?

It’s easy to use the slippery slope argument against this and to assume that we can’t control a precise level of privacy. A company knowing you’ve bought a TV is one thing; knowing your blood test results or genetic code is absolutely another. If health insurers, for example, could ever access some of this information, we’d have absolute mayhem.

Yet the privacy debate is rooted in paranoia. It assumes companies want to know everything and not merely enough and likely in an anonymous way. It assumes advertisers want to build rich personal files and harass customers near endlessly. And given this has been so far how we’ve acted it’s easy to see why.

I’d love a discussion driven less by technology and language like targeting, and one driven by empathy and about serving people better. I’d love to see how we can start the process of asking permission, clear opt ins, clear trust, world class security protocols, and above all else a way to maximize the value exchange over a lifetime for all. Privacy is a recent invention, it’s perhaps the ultimate luxury for the future, but will it matter. Will our kids miss something like privacy, a concept they’ve probably never known.

Feature Image Credit: online information being given freely – picture from Pexels

By Tom Goodwin

Tom Goodwin is head of innovation at Zenith Media. A writer and speaker, Goodwin is the author of Digital Darwinism: Survival of the Fittest in the Age of Business Disruption. Previously, he has spoken at leading conferences and industry events around world, including Cannes Lions and CES.

Sourced from The Drum

In News

Amazon crashes just minutes into Prime Day

August 28, 2018 No Comments

By Kyle O’Brien

Amazon Prime’s extended Prime Day (really 36 hours), didn’t get off to the start the online retail giant may have expected. According to several reports, the website either crashed or had trouble loading pages.

DownDetector.com reported over 24,000 problems just minutes into the sale. It noted that website problems accounted for 46% while log-ins affected 34% of those reporting, and check out had a 19% problem. The site said stated that problems started at 3:04 pm ET, four minutes into the sale.

TechCrunch reported that the landing page for Prime Day didn’t work correctly, and that when some links were clicked users were sent to error pages, which sent them back to the main landing page.

While direct links to product pages worked correctly, some users reported errors when completing a purchase as well.

As of 45 minutes into Prime Day, most problems seemed to be fixed, though the pages loaded slower than usual, but it’s still a problem for a retailer that has hyped the day for weeks and received plenty of media coverage.

Social media was on fire with people reporting the issues, with many noting that cute dogs won’t solve the problems or frustrations.

Prime Day also encountered several problems last year, including issues with Alexa, and web slowdowns.

The latest news also came on a day that found that research on Prime Day launched by global eCommerce consultancy Salmon, a Wunderman Commerce Company, showed Amazon’s retail domination (particularly over Google), where they start and finish the consumer’s shopping journey.

Amazon’s retail dominance, particularly over Google, found these stats: 35% of all UK online spend goes through Amazon, 52% in the US; 51% of shoppers start their journey on Amazon (compared to 16% on Google) and 55% purchase their goods on Amazon, showing where you start is usually where you finish your shop. Also price (64%) and free delivery (54%) is considered more important than brand (39%) for consumers.

Feature Image Credit: Amazon Prime Day has technical glitches in first 15 minutes

By Kyle O’Brien

Sourced from The Drum