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New awards ceremony honours influencers based on engagement, authenticity and creativity.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Okay so we here in Ireland are not yet at the stage where we are awarding micro-influencers. But in the U.S., they certainly are, and we could learn a lot from our fellow marketers across the Atlantic.

Marketing company #HASHOFF, which helps marketers connect their products with micro-influencers, have held a competition for the most impressive micro-influencers.

The winners and the work they do can be found on the #HASHOFF’s website.

According to a recent #HASHOFF study, the majority of influencers (52%) on the platform spend up to 3 hours creating posts. Said Joel Wright, President of #HASHOFF, “Micro-influencer marketing is a powerful medium for consumer engagement, and we wanted to honour the incredible creators we’ve partnered with to help brands spread their message authentically on these platforms. Influencers spend hours carefully crafting each post to ensure that brand integration is as authentic as possible. These are highly talented individuals and it is important for us to highlight their content and give them the recognition they deserve.”

The #HASHOFFS Award Winners:

Overall Category, the winner is Chase McNary for his post for Bud Light.

  • Engagement: In this post, Chase created an original song for Bud Light and the Broncos, which drove 121K views and engagement rates nearly 4X industry norms.
  • Authenticity: Pulling off a home-brewed jingle for a product is something worth commending.  The best creators invest a great amount of effort into creating content for their audiences.
  • Creativity: Chase is someone who truly loves the beer.  Great influencers are not actors but rather share their lives and the things they love on a daily basis.  What they like matters to their followers.

Video Category, the winner is Priscilla Gonzalez for her post for Estrella Jalisco.

  • Engagement: Averaging about 90K engagements per post, Priscilla’s boomerang for Estrella Jalisco absolutely crushed her average, with over 275K engagements, because it resonated so authentically with her audience.
  • Authenticity: Priscilla has a large Hispanic following in Los Angeles, so posting about a Mexican beer and event in Los Angeles was the perfect fit.
  • Creativity: Priscilla’s excitement to be attending the event comes through in this boomerang for Estrella Jalisco.

Food & Beverage Category, the winners are Lily & Chloe Clem for their post for Pizza Hut.

  • Engagement: Averaging 30K engagements per post is no small feat. Lily and Chloe have built an authentic and engaged fan base with content revolving around their everyday lives.
  • Authenticity: What kid doesn’t like pizza and video games? While looking for influencers with a family friendly fan base, it was obvious Lily and Chloe’s account was perfect for Pizza Hut and XBOX.
  • Creativity: Showing true excitement about a product is a large part of the creative process. Lily and Chloe’s enthusiasm shines through in every post.

Sports Category, the winner is Dale Brisby for his post for Busch.

  • Engagement: Dale received some of the highest engagements for this Busch campaign. This post received 10% higher than the normal average for video posts at the time of this campaign.
  • Authenticity: His audience is the exact audience that Busch was looking for this campaign – working class, and small town.
  • Creativity: This campaign was perfect in terms of timing.  Dale had just finished a remodel of his basement so a video about that opening for his friends was perfect.

Event Category, the winner is Michele Gonzalez for her post for Poland Springs.

  • Engagement: Showing support and enthusiasm for the activities and products you love can do wonders for engagement metrics. Michele’s followers responded positively to her post about the Brooklyn Half Marathon where she and her friend set a personal best time.
  • Authenticity: Tapping into a specific interest, like running, helps build an authentic, genuine audience. Michele’s followers are interested in running and athletics which was key in securing the right influencer for the Brooklyn Half Marathon collaboration with Poland Springs.
  • Creativity: Being creative while engaging in an event or activity can be a challenge. Michele thought hard about the type of pictures she would capture at the event as well as the copy needed to support this campaign ahead of time. The product was both creative and well planned.

Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) Category, the winner is Nick Coolridge for his post for PowerBar.

  • Engagement: Nick has a dedicated following across multiple social channels, making him the go-to influencer for those with an interest in movement artistry.
  • Authenticity: Nick is conscious about the products he consumes as his career and ambitions are predicated on his ability to perform. Nick was a natural fit for PowerBar as he personifies the major marketing pillars: active, works out in the outdoors, cares about quality supplements and snacks.
  • Creativity: Nick takes his creativity to a new level each time for brands. Most often he will be upside down in one way or another-a common theme throughout his posts.

Entertainment Category, the winner is Gabby David for her post for LiveNation.

  • Engagement: Gabby’s custom video created for Live Nation received nearly twice as many engagements as an average daily post received the following week on her account.
  • Authenticity: Gabby has a gift for inserting branded content in a highly authentic manner. For the Live Nation campaign, she created content that both appeared organic to her followers while, at the same time, conveying the brand’s messaging.
  • Creativity: Gabby was able to incorporate the premise of the show she was promoting by creating her own version of the show. This allowed her community specific insight into what they can expect when attending the show.

#HASHOFF is a pioneer of micro-influencer marketing for brands of all sizes and across all industries, with more than 150,000 influencers opted into the platform worldwide. The company say their algorithms combine keywords, geography, interest and past campaign performance to identify and activate the best micro-influencers for each brand in any given moment. “By sourcing authentic influencers to create and distribute organic content on a brand’s behalf, #HASHOFF helps brands create more meaningful relationships with consumers and drive brand engagement metrics that vastly outperform those of traditional social media marketing.”

 

 

Tunebot provides mobile marketers with an automated tool for interacting with their advertising spend data.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Marketing company TUNE has announced the release of tunebot, the first chatbot built specifically for the mobile marketing industry. Tunebot, available within the team messaging service Slack, is designed to enable TUNE customers to quickly and easily interact with marketing and advertising data such as quickly looking up reports or calculating return on ad spend.

For example: Tunebot: Show me app installs in May, by day:

By logging into the Multiverse product, TUNE customers can setup tunebot and then ask it to return specific results, graphs and charts that highlight key metrics like the cost per click on Google Adwords, the number of app installs by day, or over time, revenue per impression, as well as return on ad spend. Enabling tunebot is as simple as authorising TUNE for your Slack team and then logging into Multiverse directly within Slack. More information about how to enable tunebot can be found here.

Says Jennifer Crook, Marketing Manager, Revl, “We integrated tunebot with Slack to give us quick updates on our daily performance without the need to check the platform manually. I can check volumes and CPI by channel or platform just by typing to tunebot in Slack, which saves us time and allows us to make optimisations faster.”

Says Peter Hamilton, CEO of TUNE, “We believe all marketing should be measured and judged on performance. To be most effective, marketers also need access to measurement and performance in different forms, depending on what they need to know. The first of its kind, tunebot adds a new layer of quick access to KPIs or partner performance by simply asking a question. I’m really excited to see how marketers use tunebot. It will continue to evolve quickly the more requests it receives, so please start using it and sending your feedback!”

For marketers, understanding the link between return on advertising spend (ROAS) and bottom-line results are vital to dialling up a winning mobile marketing strategy.

The people at TUNE say that their bot can integrate ad spend data from more than 150 ad partners together with attribution data in one unified system. Included within the TUNE Marketing Console, Multiverse is a marketer’s system of choice for tracking and reconciling ad spend, installs revenue and ROAS.

 

 

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Canadian company Little Dragon Media recently surveyed 500 small business owners and asked: “What part of your company’s digital marketing do you struggle with the most?” The survey discovered that “Getting fans and followers on social media” was the most popular response, overthrowing SEO.

Female business owners struggle with social media, while their male counterparts struggle with SEO more.

“The results were a bit surprising to me,” states Amine Rahal, CEO of Little Dragon Media. “When we launched the survey, I assumed that most businesses would choose SEO as being the hardest, since it can take years to rank high organically on search engines, especially in competitive niches.”

“Ranking high on search engines” was the second most popular option, measuring at 26.2%. Blogging came in third at 19.4%.

Reputation management swept in fourth swallowing up 13.4% of the survey pie, and “Finding a trustworthy agency to help us” came in last place measuring at 11%, suggesting that this was a non-issue for many businesses.

Social media marketing’s lead over SEO signals that small business owners today highly value social media community development. They also show signs of struggle in efforts to figure out how to get the best results when compared to SEO, an established digital marketing service which is now also influenced by social media community development.

According to Rahal, survey results show how social media has swept into the forefront of the overall digital marketing landscape.

Says survey moderator Monica Guan, “In the current digital era, having a strong social media presence and ranking on Google are the best and low-cost ways to reach your local audience. Just by the fact that business owners are struggling with these aspects show that they do realise the importance of these factors to their business, but may not have the know-how to succeed in these areas.”

55.7% female small business owners report social media community development being the most difficult struggle when compared to their male counterparts who reported at 44.3%.

Guan says, “Female business owners may care more for the social media of their business and sees it as a priority that needs to be improved on. This shows that not only do many business owners require more education about how to use their social media and gain more fans and followers, but more education to male business owners on the importance of social media to their business.”

The full survey is here.

 

 

 

Sharing happy news with your Twitter followers? Odds are, they’re more likely to share it than a negative post according to a recent study.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

An analysis of 3,800 randomly chosen Twitter users found that emotions spread virally through Twitter feeds – with positive emotions far more likely to spread than negative ones.

“What you tweet and share on social media outlets matters. Often, you’re not just expressing yourself – you’re influencing others,” said Emilio Ferrara, lead author of the study and a computer scientist at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s Information Sciences Institute. Ferrara collaborated with Zeyao Yang of Indiana University.

Ferrara and Yang used an algorithm that measures the emotional value of tweets, rating them as positive, negative or neutral. They compared the sentiment of a user’s tweet to the ratio of the sentiments of all of the tweets that appeared in that user’s feed during the hour before. Higher-than-average numbers of positive tweets in the feed were associated with the production of positive tweets, and higher-than-average numbers of negative tweets were associated with the production of negative tweets.

About 20 percent of Twitter users were deemed highly susceptible to what the researchers described as “emotional contagion” – with more than half of their tweets affected. Those users were four times more likely to be affected by positive tweets than negative ones.

Those least likely to be affected by emotional contagion were still a little less than twice as likely to be affected by positive tweets as negative ones. Over all users, regardless of susceptibility, positive emotions were found to be more contagious than negative emotions.

The study builds on decades of research demonstrating first that emotions can be spread through person-to-person contacts, and now finding that they can spread through online interactions as well.

Facebook drew criticism last year for attempting to demonstrate a similar effect by tweaking 700,000 users’ news feeds. Unlike that experiment, Ferrara and Yang did not manipulate what Twitter users were experiencing – rather, they simply observed what was already happening and analysed it.

So what does that mean for marketers? Positive news tweets are more likely to go viral than negative tweets…especially if they contain positive emotions! Get that smiley emoji ready for lauch!

Researchers urged to hone methods for mining social-media data, or investment in marketing will be wasted.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

A growing number of people, from marketers to academic researchers, are mining social media data to learn about both online and offline human behaviour. In recent years, studies have claimed the ability to predict everything from summer blockbusters to fluctuations in the stock market.

But mounting evidence of flaws in many of these studies points to a need for researchers to be wary of serious pitfalls that arise when working with huge social media data sets. This is according to computer scientists at McGill University and Carnegie Mellon University.

Such erroneous results can have huge implications on data gleaned from social media. A lot of marketing investment could be placed in the wrong areas.

The challenges involved in using data mined from social media include:

  • Different social media platforms attract different users – Pinterest, for example, is dominated by females aged 25-34 – yet researchers rarely correct for the distorted picture these populations can produce.
  • Publicly available data feeds used in social media research don’t always provide an accurate representation of the platform’s overall data – and researchers are generally in the dark about when and how social media providers filter their data streams.
  • The design of social media platforms can dictate how users behave and, therefore, what behaviour can be measured. For instance, on Facebook the absence of a “dislike” button makes negative responses to content harder to detect than positive “likes.”
  • Large numbers of spammers and bots, which masquerade as normal users on social media, get mistakenly incorporated into many measurements and predictions of human behaviour.
  • Researchers often report results for groups of easy-to-classify users, topics, and events, making new methods seem more accurate than they actually are. For instance, efforts to infer political orientation of Twitter users achieve barely 65% accuracy for typical users – even though studies (focusing on politically active users) have claimed 90% accuracy.

Many of these problems have well-known solutions from other fields such as epidemiology, statistics, and machine learning. The common thread in all these issues is the need for researchers to be more acutely aware of what they’re actually analysing when working with social media data.

Social scientists have honed their techniques and standards to deal with this sort of challenge before. Says Derek Ruths, an assistant professor in McGill’s School of Computer Science, “The infamous ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’ headline of 1948 stemmed from telephone surveys that under-sampled Truman supporters in the general population. Rather than permanently discrediting the practice of polling, that glaring error led to today’s more sophisticated techniques, higher standards, and more accurate polls. Now, we’re poised at a similar technological inflection point. By tackling the issues we face, we’ll be able to realise the tremendous potential for good promised by social media-based research.”

 

As marketers, we must be aware that Millennials are low on trust when reading the medium.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

A new study indicates young adults have a healthy mistrust of the information they read on Twitter.

Nearly anyone can start a Twitter account and post 140 characters of information at a time, bogus or not, a fact the study’s participants seemed to grasp. This is according to Kimberly Fenn, assistant professor of psychology at Michigan State University.

“Our findings suggest young people are somewhat wary of information that comes from Twitter,” said Fenn. “It’s a good sign.”

The study, funded by the National Science Foundation, is the first to examine social media and false memory. Participants were college students from the so-called Millennial Generation. Twitter, with 230 million users, is most popular among people in their teens and 20s.

Fenn and MSU colleagues showed 74 undergraduates a series of images on a computer that depicted a story of a man robbing a car. False information about the story was then presented in a scrolling text feed that bore a high resemblance to Twitter or in a feed from a more traditional online source.

The researchers tested whether the students integrated the bogus information into their minds, which psychologists call false memory. The results showed that when the participants read the “Twitter” feed, they were much less likely to form false memories about the story.

Fenn said the students were more mistrustful of the Twitter feed than they were of the more traditional feed.

“We propose young adults are taking into account the medium of the message when integrating information into memory,” Fenn said.

 

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In this digital space, businesses are increasingly relying on advanced technologies, artificial intelligence, machine learning, internet of things and mobile apps to scale up and grow their brands. With this advanced shift, marketers strive hard to satisfy their customers in order to get better user engagement.

Obviously, your customers want your products and services you offer at fair prices, but that doesn’t good enough to create a meaningful experience. Providing a consistent amazing experience needs planning and structure far beyond the desire of many brands.

How Can Brands Delight Customers?

But here is a question, how can brands delights customers if they are not your customers yet? Obviously, you can’t delight your customers if they are not customers, but you can offer an amazing experience to users that focuses on interests, desires and needs that makes them so satisfied. Smart marketers know that delighting potential and existing customers from their very first interaction with the brand can ensure success and greater sales.

Delighting your customers in the right way by creating an intuitive experience is the key to promote your brand. The better the user experience, the happier your customers are, and more likely they repetitively come to your website and tell their friends about the great experience your website offers.

The goal of providing positive experience throughout the customer’s lifecycle will help your brand to stand from rest and improve your bottom line. As happy and satisfied customers stick around longer than those who have a bad experience.

Successful organizations don’t simply focus on attracting qualified leads, converting into leads that their sales team can close. Instead, these brands aim to offer an amazing user experience for potential and existing customers.

Here are a few points that help ensure your brand is doing things right to delight your potential and existing customers.

  1. Solve Users’ Problems

The first and foremost thing your brand needs to do is to offer products and services that solve the problems your potential and existing customers are facing. Offering your customers a quick, easy and reliable solution to the problem they face or make it easier to perform their tasks or meet their goals, can make them to stick around. Provide your customers with the solutions that best fit their needs, preferences and requirements is the key to success.

No matter if they are not paying customers, it is important to solve your potential customers’ problems. Focus on the rule: help people and in return they’ll help you. If your brand can prove to your potential customers that you are reliable and trustworthy even when they are not paying, they’ll be more likely to want your products or services down the road.

  1. Educate Them

Okay, so you are focusing on solving your customers’ and prospects’ problem, but what’s next? What will happen when they face a similar problem in the future? Going beyond just offering solutions to their problems and offering useful information helps them deal with the similar challenges they might encounter down the road.

Empowering your potential and current customers with knowledge, making recommendations and helping them accomplish their goals are essential to build a remarkable user experience. The perks of enabling people to solve their problems and meet their goals instead of providing them with facts are far reaching for users and your brand. If your potential customers get a positive reminder of your brand every time they use information, advice you provide, your brand will become known as a reliable organization that customers want to do business with.

  1. Compelling Mobile Presence

Customer delight and customer retention is the primary goal of your business, but it’s not that easy, especially in this digital space when brand loyalty among users is rare. However, a comprehensive mobile strategy can help retain customers. Since people have access to high-speed broadband through a smartphone in their pocket, and these days they are much more familiar with the online shopping process, making them to buy everything from their favorite gadget to groceries.

So, if you want to delight your customers, your brand must have a mobile presence through mobile apps and mobile optimized websites. Mobile apps are used more often as for consumers, accessing a brand online matters most more than the price and product range of a brand. If truth be told, mobile app users are more loyal to a brand than those who visit a mobile-optimized website. Mobile apps can be an extraordinary effective tool for delighting customers, meeting their desires and eventually turning them into brand’s micro influencers. Mobile apps have changed the way users interact with brands, there are many companies who offer mobile app development in New York and help brands to create a compelling experience users, which ultimately results in long-term relationships.

Conclusion

Brands that invest their energy and time in these strategies will be the winners. Do it now to drive business growth, brand loyalty and engage your customers in a more immediate way.

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Sourced from Tech Insider Journal

The way ads play on our senses influences the timing of our purchases.

By MediaStreet staff writers.

There’s a reason marketers make appeals to our senses; the “snap, crackle and pop” of Rice Krispies makes us want to buy the cereal and eat it. But as savvy as marketers are, they may be missing a key ingredient in their campaigns.

New research finds the type of sensory experience an advertisement conjures up in our mind – taste and touch vs. sight and sound – has a fascinating effect on when we make purchases.

The study led by marketing professors at Brigham Young University and the University of Washington finds that advertisements highlighting more distal sensory experiences (sight/sound) lead people to delay purchasing, while highlighting more proximal sensory experiences (touch/taste) lead to earlier purchases.

“Advertisers are increasingly aware of the influence sensory cues can play,” said lead author Ryan Elder, associate professor of marketing at BYU. “Our research dives into which specific sensory experiences will be most effective in an advertisement, and why.”

Elder, with fellow lead author Ann Schlosser, a professor of marketing at the University of Washington, Morgan Poor, assistant professor of marketing at San Diego State University, and Lidan Xu, a doctoral student at the University of Illinois, carried out four lab studies and a pilot study involving more than 1,100 study subjects for the research, published in the Journal of Consumer Research.

Time and time again, their experiments found that people caught up in the taste or touch of a product or event were more likely to be interested at an earlier time.

In one experiment, subjects read one of two reviews for a fictional restaurant: One focused on taste/touch, the other emphasised sound/vision. Participants were then asked to make a reservation to the restaurant on a six-month interactive calendar. Those who read the review focusing on the more proximal senses (taste and touch) were significantly more likely to make a reservation closer to the present date.

In another experiment, study subjects read ad copy for a summer festival taking place either this weekend or next year. Two versions of the ad copy existed: one emphasising taste (“You will taste the amazing flavours…”) and one emphasising sound (“You will listen to the amazing sounds…”).

When subjects were asked when they would like to attend, those who read the ad copy about taste had a higher interest in attending a festival this weekend. Those who read ads emphasising sounds were more likely to have interest in attending the festival next year.

“If an advertised event is coming up soon, it would be better to highlight the more proximal senses of taste or touch – such as the food served at the event – than the more distal senses of sound and sight,” Schlosser said. “This finding has important implications for marketers, especially those of products that are multi-sensory.”

As part of the study, researchers also learned an interesting insight into making restaurant reviews more helpful. In their field study, the authors analysed 31,889 Yelp reviews to see if they could find connections between the sensory elements of a reviewer’s experience and the usefulness of a review.

They found reviews from people who emphasised a more distal sense (such as sight) were rated more useful when the review used the past tense (“We ate here last week and…”), while people emphasising a proximal sense (touch) had more useful reviews when they used the present tense (“I’m eating this right now and it is so good!”).

“Sensory marketing is increasingly important in today’s competitive landscape. Our research suggests new ways for marketers to differentiate their products and service, and ultimately influence consumer behaviour,” Elder said. “Marketers need to pay closer attention to which sensory experiences, both imagined and actual, are being used.”

 

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In an increasingly virtual market, it’s becoming harder and harder to stand out from the crowd, which is why you need a strong brand.

We’re all familiar with ‘Where’s Wally.’ Trying to find the cheerful bobbled-hatted character can be fun, but it’s also pretty frustrating. The lesson here is that in an increasingly competitive market, your customers don’t want the frustration of staring at a number of different companies who all look the same.

What is brand anyway?

James Dyson, the industrial-design icon, is famed, or rather loathed, within marketing circles for his infamous statement: “There’s only one word that’s banned in our company: brand. I don’t believe in brand at all.”

Ironic perhaps, coming from the mouth of someone who has created one of the most recognisable British brands of the last century. What we would suggest, however, is that Mr Dyson doesn’t have much time for the skin-deep and superficial understanding that many have of brands.

Branding according to Wally Olins, authority on corporate identity not the stripy hat-wearing book character, is not merely smoke and mirrors but rather “creating and sustaining trust and delivering on promises. Branding is nothing more than creating an emotional attachment between the brand and the person.”

Let’s start with your story

The first step to creating a strong brand involves getting your company story straight. Simon Sinek, TED legend, leadership guru and all round bright spark, tells us we should ask just one question when developing our brand identity. Why? He puts forward the compelling argument that companies need to think less about what they do and more about why they do it.

Red Bull is a classic example. While they may be purveyors of a sickly sweet, caffeine infused liquids, they present themselves as fearless embracers of life in all its extremes. In the process they stand head and shoulders above their competitors – whoever they may be!

And if we just hop back to our friend Mr Dyson, there are few brands out there with as firm as an identity as the company that bears his name. Everything about Dyson screams that they are engineers with a relentless desire to bring technological innovation into the home.

Your customer’s story

But a great story in isolation is just words on a page. To bring a story to life, you need someone to tell it to; enter your audience. And don’t we just love defining our audience? Dave, a 43-year-old accountant, lives in Hertfordshire and holidays in South Wales.

Some rather clever chums at Cambridge Analytica decided this sort of customer profiling didn’t really cut the mustard. Analytica have put forward the Ocean model that divides the audience not into segments based on background, age, wealth or status, but the personality traits, what they care about, and why they behave the way they do.

When you understand not just what decisions your customers make but why they make them, you can start to build a more compelling brand that touches at the very heart of your customer’s decision making processing, steering them toward your brand; a brand whose ethos and outlook reflects theirs.

Give your brand wings

When you’ve got your stories straight, you’re ready to bring them to life. As Su Matthews Hale of the design firm Lippencott explains: “a company’s logo is its shorthand, a visual cue that tells a story of the brand’s culture, behavior, and values.” A logo can send out all sorts of signals about who you are and what you do.

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Claire Passos is business development director at branding agency iFour.

Sourced from The Drum

Email marketing has been around for a while, and for those who do not know, it is worth pointing out that it represents the practice of sending commercial messages to a group of people via email. It represents a smart marketing strategy that can help build brand awareness, trust and loyalty, while also increasing the percentage of conversions and of revisiting users.

In a broader sense, all emails sent to a potential business partner or customers is a form of email marketing, as these emails can be sent out for various purposes, such as encouraging repeat business, convincing customers to purchase a new item or service, sharing third-party ads, but also enhancing the merchant’s relationship with a past customer.

This infographic will provide you with a total of 119 facts about this marketing strategy, while also sharing tonnes of interesting stats that will help you better understand the niche. Apart from this aspect, you’ll also get the opportunity to view studies, learn what works, what doesn’t, and what you should do to ensure that your email marketing campaign turns out to be successful, rather than a nuisance to your customers.

Email-Marketing-websitebuilder.org-infographic

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