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In News

MailChimp Wants To Solve Every Small-Biz Marketing Challenge (Even Snail Mail)

August 10, 2017 No Comments

A company that made its name helping small businesses with email is staking its future on the “small business” part of that proposition.

MailChimp did not start out as an enterprise obviously destined to help millions of small companies market themselves via email.

Actually, the company was originally the Rocket Science Group, a web-design firm that began fooling around with email in 2001 at the request of some of its customers. Its original email engine borrowed code from an earlier failed e-greeting card startup. Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius landed on the name MailChimp after discovering that their first choice, ChimpMail, was taken. And their initial simian-themed branding consisted of a repurposed drawing of a chimp–eventually known as “Freddie”–who’d appeared on one of the e-greetings.

The email marketing features the company built proved so useful that they began to look like a better opportunity than the design business–which, Chestnut says, “was all about billable hours and salesmanship, and those were things we sucked at.” In 2006, Chestnut and Kurzius decided to go all-in with MailChimp. “We took a year saying goodbye to all the agencies and clients, finding them new vendors,” he explains.

MailChimp really went into turbo mode in 2009, when it instituted a freemium business model that let customers send up to 3,000 emails a month to up to 500 subscribers at no cost. Letting companies get addicted to the service before requiring them to pay up proved so successful that the free version now lets users send 12,000 emails to 2,000 subscribers.

Now MailChimp is probably the biggest name in its category–in part because its offerings are so well done and widely used, and in part because it’s cleverly promoted itself via efforts such as quirky sponsorship messages on the Serial podcast. And despite its high profile, it’s even larger than you might guess. Based in Atlanta–far outside Silicon Valley’s bubble of venture-funded would-be unicorns–the company has 600-plus employees and did more than $400 million in revenue last year. More than 15 million customers sent 246 billion emails in 2016.

There are still additional small businesses out there that need help with email, but MailChimp’s growth strategy isn’t just about finding them. It’s also committed to keeping its focus on serving small businesses rather than using them as a springboard to reach larger customers with more lavish budgets.

Though Chestnut is quick to tout the effectiveness of email marketing–he says it can return $40 in revenue for every $1 spent–he also claims “not to have any particular kind of affinity or attachment to email.” The future of the company, he says, is “to take MailChimp magic we give to email, and sprinkle it on other marketing channels.”

That vision has been apparent in the company’s product announcements for awhile now. A year ago, it introduced a recommendation engine–akin to the ones devised by big companies such as Amazon–that let its customers plunk product suggestions into the emails they sent their customers. Then in January of this year, it began helping small businesses buy Facebook ads–figuring that the expertise it had in building friendly web interfaces gave it an opportunity to make the process easier than Facebook had done on its own.

The Instagram Opportunity

As MailChimp was deciding what big ad platform to support after Facebook, it sought input from its customers. They had a clear favorite: Instagram. If you find that unexpected, you’re not alone. “We kind of thought Google might be next,” Chestnut says. “Instagram was a surprise for us.”

Once you think it over, though, that preference makes more and more sense. In March, Instagram announced that it had a million active advertisers, a milestone it reached in large part because a lot of small businesses find it to be a valuable marketing platform. Any digital business with that many small-business customers is likely to have meaningful overlap with MailChimp’s customer base.

Chestnut speculates that another reason for Instagram’s popularity among MailChimp users is that writing the ad copy required for a Google ad sounds like more work than creating an image-centric Instagram post. In fact, he says, many small companies are already adept at promoting themselves simply by having and maintaining Instagram accounts: “Anything that’s new and free, they’re going to exploit the hell out of.”

As with Facebook, MailChimp’s Instagram ad-buying feature aims to simplify the process of purchasing ads. Just as important, it allows Instagram to choose the pool of users who will see an ad by picking people similar to those in the MailChimp customer’s email file, allowing for more precise targeting. “When they use Instagram alone, they get OK results,” Chestnut says. “But when they combine it with MailChimp, they get much better results.”

MailChimp’s strategy with these new ad-buying services and other functionality it’s recently added isn’t to give itself a new revenue stream. Instead, it’s offering them as part of its existing subscriptions at the same price as before. As with its freemium model, the company is betting that the more essential it can make itself to the way small businesses operate, the easier it will be to get large numbers of them to pay on an ongoing basis.

With MailChimp’s broadening of its mission beyond email, it won’t run out of new features to roll out anytime soon. Since the Instagram feature launched in May, the company has added integration with online commerce service PrestaShop alongside its existing support for commerce platforms such as Shopify and Magento. (PrestaShop is particularly popular in Europe, and over half of MailChimp’s business now comes from outside the U.S.)

The company is also experimenting with a marketing medium I would not have predicted: direct mail, delivered by the U.S. Postal Service. It isn’t a logical option for every small business, Chestnut emphasizes–“if you’re selling something for $2, you’re not going to benefit from direct mail, you’ll lose money on it”–but for high-ticket items, it could have its place. And he adds that he’s often heard that direct mail is ripe for democratization, thereby playing to MailChimp’s strengths as an outfit that specializes in streamlining the complexity out of marketing tasks.

With its large base of email customers, MailChimp also has the opportunity to blur the lines between marketing’s digital and physical realms. “Maybe we send an email, and if you opened and didn’t buy, we send something a week later via snail mail,” Chestnut muses.

Marketing MailChimp

Once upon a time, MailChimp actively avoided conventional marketing of itself. “Ben had this idea: Instead of spending money on traditional advertising, we’d take that money and buy shirts and give them away,” says Mark DiCristina, MailChimp’s senior director of brand marketing. “It worked really well. Part of that is people like free stuff. But we made really nice T-shirts and they had Freddie our mascot on them and they didn’t have our logo anywhere. It was more like a gift they received than swag.” The fact that these freebies were so well done, DiCristina says, helped shape MailChimp’s overall desire to be a brand associated with quality.

Particularly given MailChimp’s current broadening of its horizons, the company is now more interested in marketing itself in a way that feels more like marketing–while still feeling like MailChimp. Its current efforts began with a campaign that like that memorable Serial spot, riffed on its own odd name. It involved terms such as “JailBlimp,” “MailShrimp,” and “KaleLimp,” and was about as far from a hard sell as imaginable. “Rather than coming out of the gates with all this stuff explicitly about functionality, we [showed] them we’re still the same MailChimp they love,” Chestnut explains.

Now the company has followed up with “MailChimp vs. the Black Hole,” a set of ads that do tout specific benefits such as the ability to use your MailChimp customer list to pinpoint prospects on Instagram. They remain quirky–the black hole even talks in some of them–but the quirkiness serves the straightforward goal of explaining what MailChimp is and what it can do for small businesses.

Which brings up another marketing medium that the company has found effective for telling people about its expanding portfolio of features: email! MailChimp, it turns out, is a happy MailChimp customer. “In all seriousness,” Chestnut says, “it gets us the best ROI when we email our customers and tell them this stuff is available.”

By Harry McCracken

Harry McCracken is the technology editor for Fast Company, based in San Francisco. In past lives, he was editor at large for Time magazine, founder and editor of Technologizer, and editor of PC World. More

Sourced from Fast Company

In News

Will marketing agencies always be nothing but sweatshops?

August 9, 2017 No Comments

By Samuel Scott.

There are so many slaves in the marketing industry that we should create an underground railroad beneath all our office buildings.

Following the recent news that the Japanese advertising firm Dentsu has been charged in the suicide of an illegally overworked employee, I collected stories from my own personal experiences, what I have read in the press, and what others have told me or posted online. Identifying specifics and situations have been removed. The anecdotes are from several countries.

But first, I will present data that compares agency and in-house salaries in the PR, advertising, and digital worlds in the UK, US, and Canada. (For those who want more information, the UK recruitment agency Major Players partnered with The Drum to release this 2017 salary report as well.)

The salaries

Public relations

The Works PR and communications recruitment agency in the UK conducts a salary survey every year. Here is part of the 2016 findings:

For the US, I pulled data from PayScale. The chart in the top left corner shows the median nationwide salaries for various job titles at PR agencies. The other boxes are in-house salary details of some of those listed agency jobs:

For Canada, I used the latest data from The Creative Group:

Advertising

For the UK, I could not find side-by-side comparisons of agency and in-house salaries. But I did find the following two data sets for agency positions in the Major Players 2017 salary report:

Here is the corresponding US data from PayScale. The chart in the top left corner shows the median nationwide salaries for various job titles at ad agencies. The other boxes are in-house salary details of some of those listed agency jobs:

A comparison for Canada:

Digital

For the UK, I used a report from The Candidate staffing firm:

US and Canada:

I could not find such side-by-side salary comparisons for digital agencies and in-house jobs in the United States and Canada, but I did find this 2016 agency survey conducted by Moz cofounder Rand Fishkin that includes both countries:

What it means

For most positions in all three countries, the salaries at marketing agencies are moderately to significantly lower than those for in-house positions – especially at the inexperienced end of the spectrum. The ‘gap between the rich and poor’ also seems to be larger within agencies.

However, I can attest from personal experience and stories from others that many agencies effectively give even less than these figures – and that they do it with a straight face.

Public relations

In the PR world, many agencies consist of a few well-paid strategic executives and an army of low-level, underpaid publicists who make countless phone calls and write untold numbers of emails to get as much news coverage as possible. Most are salaried but work so much overtime that they are effectively paid only a couple of pounds, dollars, or euros per hour. Many are students or recent university graduates who are officially – and often illegally – unpaid “interns” who are there only to “learn” and not work.

It’s a huge problem that no one is acknowledging – because the old have always taken advantage of the young.

Agency stress is also higher. Companies take weeks or months to hire and fire in-house staff, but many clients feel that they can change agencies within days. As a result, agency staff are under constant pressure to respond at all hours to multiple ‘bosses’. The young are on the first line of communication from clients and bear the brunt of the workload.

In a case that rattled the entertainment industry and beyond, the US studio Fox Searchlight settled a lawsuit last year from an unpaid intern who argued that he had learned nothing from his work on the film Black Swan and was essentially free labour. (For those in America who think that their rights have been violated, the Huffington Post published a list of tips on how unfairly unpaid interns can get their due wages. Here are the US Department of Labor’s specific rules.)

When any agency advertises openings for interns, the business goal is almost always to get cheap labour. No agency makes money by altruistically devoting time to teaching something to someone who will leave in six months.

Still, the problem does not stop with interns.

Advertising

Take a look at this archived Reddit thread from 2015 on “Why agency people are so unhappy.” Two of the comments summarise the problem well:

“The money just doesn’t make sense to me at this point for the amount of time you have to work sometimes… Most of my peers look at it as more of a long-term game. Low pay up front, but bust your ass long enough, and with a little luck, you’ll never have to worry about money again. That’s a little unrealistic for most of us, but the few optimists I know look at it that way.”

Here is more:

An anonymous advertising industry blogger simply called agencies “white collar sweatshops”.
MGH Advertising itself once placed an ad in The Wall Street Journal claiming that the ad industry was full of sweatshops (see main image).
“Goodvertising” author Thomas Kolster wrote in a column for The Drum that the industry needs to stop the overworking culture and make it fun and worthwhile instead.

The Twitter satire account Adweak, which is as funny as it is truthful, put it perfectly:

Digital

On the digital side of things, the situation is a little different. Online marketers should not be surprised at the low salaries at agencies. People who routinely proclaim that they know multitudes of quick and easy ‘hacks’ have only themselves to blame when their retainers and salaries are hacked down as well. Why should anyone pay a lot of money for someone to do hacks?

Instead of creating long-term, integrated campaigns, digital marketers all too often suffer from short-termism and think about numbers of social media followers, blog spam, and rankings of keywords – and those activities occur with high turnover rates that lead to lower retainers. Of course, the good agencies know that true SEO is a complicated, long-term process – but the constant promotion of ‘hacks’ by hacks is not doing anyone any favours.

So, between ad agencies and digital ones, guess which ones are paid more? Companies often choose to go with digital agencies when they need something done quickly and cheaply.

I do not want to name names, but I know the owner of a digital agency in a certain country with global, well-known clients. I respected the person greatly – until I found out that the owner was paying gross salaries of $18,000 per year to young employees in the agency’s large, metropolitan and expensive city.

A friend of mine who once worked at a ‘content agency’ in a certain country told me this:

“At my content agency, they defended the rights of the client at the expense of the employee. We had very stringent goals on a monthly basis which were impossible to meet. At one point, I had almost 30 blog articles I had to write in one month, many of which were extremely technical and required 2,000 words.

“Days off were allowed, but it was known that they give a really hard time and try to make you work on vacation days. I took off in April to be home with my family. I took one week off after being there almost a year and never even taking a sick day.

“About a week before the vacation, I get called in for a meeting: ‘Congratulations! You have a new client! They only require 12 more articles a month – starting now.’ I was furious. I had told them about my vacation and they never even took it into consideration.

“This is the situation in many agencies. More work is more money and employees are expected to go to all lengths to to get the work done without being included in the conversation in the first place and saying whether or not it’s possible to even accomplish.”

Sweatshops kill agencies

Among my circle of friends in marketing, most of us agree that agencies are places to learn early in one’s career – but that everyone should leave as quickly as possible. Those with talent and ability eventually end up in-house. (Many of us have also sworn never to work for agencies again following the bad experiences.) It’s why sweatshop conditions lead to short-term gain but long-term pain for owners – everyone ends up leaving.

And the agencies have no one but themselves to blame.

In 2016, Farmer & Company chief executive Michael Farmer, a 25-year advertising veteran, published ‘Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profit-Hungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies‘, a book that Keenan Beasley summarises in Forbes with this question: “How did America’s darling Mad Men go from rolling in it to barely holding on?”

The answer, according to Farmer, is a combination of outdated compensation models, an inability to measure results, and the pressure to spread themselves too thin. In the Forbes interview, he also says:

“Executives at these large agencies somehow continue to eke out profits through these sweatshop conditions, and they get huge bonuses for doing so. They’re all just praying they retire before the whole system blows up.”

The timer might already be ticking. Two years ago, marketing consultant Mark W. Schaefer cited reports from the Association of National Advertisers and the Society of Digital Agencies to show in the Harvard Business Review that companies are bringing more and more marketing in-house. In the first half of 2017, an increasing number of brands purchased agencies themselves.

Gerry Moira, the retired chairman and UK director of creativity at Havas London, put it more bluntly:

“If I were starting out now, I’d much rather be client-side. It’s the future… Agencies have had their day. They are sweatshops whose output has become so much more prosaic because of social media.”

So, what’s the answer?

Of course, not every agency is like the underground work camp in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Most bosses are not going to rip out hearts and wheel people down into lakes of lava – unless perhaps you work for Meryl Streep’s Anna Wintour-inspired character in The Devil Wears Prada.

But far too many agencies are, in fact, sweatshops.

Agencies typically compete with other agencies and in-house alternatives with either their expertises or their pricing. In other words, they market themselves by saying that they are either better or cheaper. Those that compete based on price are usually sweatshops that deserve to implode more quickly than Lindsey Lohan’s acting career.

Once the sweatshops close, the marketing agencies that remain will deserve to remain and will be those that focus on the one thing that differentiates them: creativity. Agencies need to reassert the value of creativity to get higher fees, and agency employees need to do the same to justify higher salaries.

Creative people get bored easily. It’s why agencies have typically delivered the best ad campaigns. (Just remember that the doomed Kendall Jenner Pepsi spot was created by an in-house ‘content creation arm’, a fact that reveals the results when marketers who do not know advertising are the ones creating the ads.) People who work on a single brand will eventually run out of ideas. The ability to work on multiple accounts keeps the creative juices flowing.

As I discuss as a frequent marketing speaker, the problem is that creativity is being increasingly devalued in the marketing world today. Marketers think more and more about data, automation, and analytics – and, therefore, what typically results in direct-response campaigns.

Just read this eye-rolling column from Jesse Williams of Mindbox Studios:

“Marketing is no longer design, it’s no longer messaging, it’s no longer SEO, or social, or branding. It’s data – and the rock stars of modern marketing are the ones who can find and interpret that data.”

Unfortunately, this pile of malarkey is what drives a lot of discussion today. Too many people think that they can merely press a couple buttons, insert a few keywords into website metadata, target and track the best individuals, spread blogspam, or write a social media post in a certain way and then the sales will start pouring in.

In response to such drivel, creative staff need to communicate that direct response campaigns are only one tool of many and that a lot of the data is completely wrong anyway.

Creativity can save agencies

Creativity is something that the tech world will never replace – and that creativity is what builds brands and can be used in areas ranging from television to print to social media to email. Creativity is the only advantage that premium agencies can offer because all of the others compete on price and therefore offer a value proposition that is not viable over the long term.

But I guarantee you that some martech person somewhere will soon develop something he will call ‘AI-powered content marketing’. It will purport to use artificial intelligence and real-time analysis of one thing or another to create instant blog posts designed for goals such as ranking in Google search results or maximising conversion rates.

And the posts will be loads of tosh because they will be more boring than Daft Punk’s autotuned-to-death song One More Time. They will do nothing to build brands. Creatives need to remind people that at the end of the day, the brand is the most important thing. It’s the only way that agencies – and the people who work for them – will survive.

Creative agencies of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your existence. Come together to advocate for brand advertising and against the hacks the dominate modern marketing. Show the world the benefits of creativity. Demand higher fees, not lower ones. Pay your workers more, not less.

But will all of this work? I admit that I’m skeptical. As conditions will either remain the same or worsen, I think that we will instead see more unionising along the lines of what boutique consultancy Modern Craft co-founder Randy Siu recently saw in Canada:

Unless agencies can raise their fees to cover the higher salaries that workers deserve, such unionising will merely slow down the approaching agency extinction rather than prevent it.

So, in the meantime, will marketing agencies really ever stop being sweatshops by another name? Sadly, it’s as likely as a bloke building a time machine, going back to the year 2000, and dating all three members of Atomic Kitten at the same time.

But please prove me wrong.

The Promotion Fix is an exclusive biweekly column for The Drum contributed by Samuel Scott, a global marketing speaker who is a former journalist, newspaper editor, and director of marketing and communications in the high-tech industry. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook. Scott is based out of Tel Aviv, Israel.

By Samuel Scott

The Promotion Fix is an exclusive biweekly column for The Drum from Samuel Scott, a global keynote marketing speaker who is a former journalist, newspaper editor, and director of marketing and communications in the high-tech industry. Follow him @samueljscott.

Sourced from THEDRUM

In News

Six things you need to stop doing right now with your mobile strategy

August 4, 2017 No Comments

By Michael Hewitt.

he mobile search landscape has changed immensely in recent years, transforming how consumers engage with brands and discover new products. But the change of pace has left some brands struggling to keep up, wondering just how hard mobile is working for them, and whether their brand proposition is really translating to the small screen.

It has led to many making what are, in 2017, some fundamental mistakes with mobile strategy. Here are six of the biggest:

The ‘m-dot’ site

When the ‘mobilegeddon’ update first reared its head in 2015, it unsurprisingly caused panic in the digital ecommerce sector. This was an update that threatened to dramatically harm the web visibility of those brands that weren’t delivering a mobile-friendly experience, and it was an update that would kick-in not very long after it was first announced – certainly not long enough to align all of the necessary stakeholders and plan, build, test and launch a completely new site.

Many brands responded by launching what became known as m-dot websites – essentially copies of a desktop website that were tweaked for mobile and appear on an m.website.com or mobile.website.com sub-domain. It was a quick-fix solution, allowing brands to meet the criteria that would see them becoming a ‘mobilegeddon’ victim, but avoided the need to go through a lengthy web redesign and build.

But now Google is warning brands that it wants to see the end of the m-dot, claiming that the mobile-first index may not index m-dot sites effectively. Throw in the increased risk of broken redirects and duplicate content that come with an m-dot, and the time really has come for you call in the designers and go responsive.

Being deaf to voice search

In June 2017, a Think with Google survey found that 57% of people would use voice search more if it recognised more complex commands, and 58% of respondents said they would like more detailed results when using search.

Think about how you can make your existing keyword strategy more conversational, to reflect the way in which your audiences are going to interact verbally with their mobile or smart devices – particularly if your site features a lot of ‘how to’ content on its site. A desktop search for ‘flights to London’ could very easily become ‘when is the next flight to London?’ or ‘what is the cheapest way to get to London tomorrow morning’. Could your current content answer that query?

Not thinking about your long-term app strategy

A survey by Localytics found that 60% of people who download an application become inactive within 30 days, whilst data from Quattra shows that the daily active user rate drops 77% the first three days after an app is installed on a device.

Mobile apps are not, in themselves, a flawed marketing channel but if you are going to invest in developing and maintaining one, think carefully about how you are going to avoid the graveyard of unused apps that lies on practically every smartphone in existence.

Is your app simply an extension of your mobile site? If so, then think about why you actually need one. What does your app offer that your users can’t get or would find more difficult to get elsewhere?

Think about how you would use your app to re-engage and reconnect with your audiences throughout the customer journey, using your data to provide personalised messages and push notifications that will resonate with them. Just remember not to over-use tactics like push notifications as they can get irritating (particularly if you are just pushing offers and sales messages).

Bombarding users with ads

Speaking of things that are irritating, ads on mobile. Obtrusive adverts are annoying on any platform, but on the small screen of mobile, they are even more of a user experience faux-pas.

If you are advertising to consumers on mobile, make sure that it isn’t your brand that is frustrating what should be a seamless and enjoyable user experience with an intrusive and impossible to dismiss pop-up or interstitial. Not only does it frustrate users and harm the brand, it can also harm your organic search visibility.

Ignoring your audiences’ neighbourhood

So-called ‘near me’ searches are growing at a rate of 130% per year, and 88% of these searches are made using a mobile device, claims Google.

This trend is being driven by the way in which the customer journey is becoming much more integrated between desktop, mobile and offline. Consumers are turning to their devices for ‘quick reference’ queries – local shops and restaurants for example – and then making purchasing decisions across any number of channels based on that information.

It means that brands, particularly those with an offline presence, need to really think about how they are optimising their online presence for ‘near me’ searches, and thinking about the content that they serve to these audiences that works on a localised level, and could drive an in-store visit.

Consider the importance of implicit search variables, such as location, time, device, transport and previous search history, and ensure that you have content that can serve as many combinations of those searches as possible.

Failing to close the loop

Cross-device tracking remains one of the biggest challenges for marketers, as multiple devices and multiple communications channels converge to create a much more complicated customer journey.

Google is working hard to close this loop as much as possible, with Google Attribution rolling out to provide much better integration between AdWords and Analytics, and it is continuing to use user data and search history to ‘join up the dots’ as much as possible.

Different organisations will have different approaches and different models to understand how different devices and channels contribute to the overall buying journey, and the model that you adopt will ultimately depend on your brand objectives for your mobile strategy. However, if you are using a last click model of attribution, then it is highly likely that you are either under or over-estimating the value of mobile, depending on the nature of the brand and the product.

By Michael Hewitt

Michael Hewitt is a content marketing manager at Stickyeyes, and is behind the agency’s guide to mastering your mobile strategy.

Sourced from THEDRUM

In News

In Retail? Till Receipts Can Now Be Digital – And Feature Advertising

August 2, 2017 No Comments

A South African tech company wants retailers to send receipts to their consumers’ phones directly upon purchase. These receipts can be held in the cloud, be searchable, and carry advertising.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

The company, called EcoSlips, says it is launching the new disruptive service to forever get rid of paper-based transaction receipts.

Retailers can now link their point-of-sale systems to EcoSlips and send transaction receipts digitally from any pay point to the consumer’s mobile phone.

Paper receipt waste is reduced and a new advertising platform provides opportunities to grow any business in the retail sector.

Consumers may download the application to their mobile phone and register free of charge. The cashier scans or enters the customer’s unique pin number and a digital receipt is forwarded to their phone within seconds.

Transaction receipts are stored in the cloud from where it can be downloaded, verified, forwarded or printed at any time, from any location.

BENEFITS TO CONSUMERS

Transaction receipts do not get lost and a printer-friendly report with all transactions can be downloaded in seconds. Consumers may use it for tax purposes, corporate expense claims, medical and warranty claims.

Transaction slips can also be forwarded directly from the retailer to the user’s office for corporate expense claims. Users do not even need a cell phone to request their digital receipts at a pay point.

The system saves hours of manual labour, since transaction slips are already scanned and summarised in digital format.

Customer identities remain protected and no spam can be sent to any phone, as is the case with text or email powered systems. Messages do not get lost in spam filters because they are sent directly to the user’s phone.

BENEFITS TO POINT-OF-SALE VENDORS

Vendors can provide a value-added service to their clients at no additional cost. They have an advantage over competitors and receive free advertising exposure in the process.

Free software is provided to link any windows based POS system without backend programming to EcoSlips.

BENEFITS TO RETAILERS

EcoSlips provides an advertising platform that targets only consumers in their immediate geographic location.

Complaints and compliments can be sent directly to the retail manager from the customer’s phone and frustrations caused by waiting in line to speak to a call centre agent are completely eliminated. Service levels can improve significantly when complaints are handled in a timely fashion by the retailer.

According to Henco Schoeman, founder of EcoSlips, “consumers may use the service free of charge. Retailers can significantly reduce paper slip waste, save on printing costs and early adopters may secure an exclusive opportunity to advertise in their geographic area. It is a win-win solution for retailers and consumers.”

EcoSlips is financially supported by Mlab and the SA Technology Innovation Agency (TIA). The service can be used anywhere in the world.

So if you are a retailer, this may be food for thought.

In News

How To Avoid Ruining Your Brand With Branded Content

August 2, 2017 No Comments

By Avi Dan

Marketing is increasingly more complex, what with disruptive technologies in mobile, the Internet of Things, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and automation. Consumers are now more empowered and more skeptical than ever about businesses. The media is fragmenting in today’s “always-on” world.

This feeds an insatiable appetite for diversified branded content. It challenges marketers to act more like newspaper or magazine editors, and mix long-form “features” with by bite size lifestyle morsels. This supplants the traditional campaign-based model of digital as extension to the TV buy.

In the hyper-complex, chaotic ecosystem, no single ad could tell the whole multi-dimensional story of a brand to a diverse audiences. “Positioning”, the celebrated interruptive model of message-pushing, owning a distinctive real-estate of the customer’s mind, is out of date. In this age of dialogue marketing, content management is the new strategic imperative for brands.

Shutterstock

However, as brands embrace content marketing, marketers don’t just want content — they want a lot of it. Demand for branded content is driving staggering growth and investment. A survey by the Content Marketing Institute found that 73% of marketers say that creating more engaging content is a top priority of their organization. In 2016, marketers spent more than $10 billion on branded content, according to Forrester Research. The Boston Consulting Group expects spending on branded content to rise to $25 billion by 2019.

Brands could once produce just 2 or 3 TV commercials a year, and spend about eight-to-nine-months developing one piece of content and, then, half-a-million-dollars on producing each piece of film. Now, those 2 or 3 pieces have turned into hundreds and thousands of pieces of content,; eight months has changed to eight days and eight hours, while budgets have become smaller. Many brands are paying a high price for this proliferation by producing a large volume of low quality content, simply because they feel like they need to be on social media.

Because of sub-par quality, most content goes unseen. Marketing analytics firm Beckon found that that just 5% of content generated 90% of total consumer engagements. The rest is noise. In fact, branded content as a marketing approach is failing, and consumers are rebelling, with one in five smartphone users, or almost 420 million people worldwide, blocking advertising when browsing the web on cellphones. That represents a 90% annual increase. Consumers don’t reject the clutter – they reject the crappy content which does not inspire, enlighten, educate and entertain consumers.

Content marketing requires scale, and a different set of management skills. It requires planning and resource allocation, and the understanding that content is not a tactical tool. Here are a few things that can help manage scaling the content demands of a brand:

1. Set an editorial calendar. It will ensure adequate time to prepare content in a timely manner without feeling rushed

2. Think “repurposing.” Core pieces that can be adapted help create a wide variety of content on the same or similar subjects, that will be quicker to apply at various channels

3. Queuing. Do have an inventory of finished content “in waiting”, ready to publish if current content is pulled or suddenly becomes irrelevant.

4. Create content in batches. Produce multiple pieces concurrently in order to lower cost and to increase efficiencies.

5. Outsourcing. When you don’t have the resources to produce high quality content that you need have, an external network that can be quickly activated, comes in very handy.

Content should not be about impressions. With content, you don’t really get credit just because you’ve put a lot of it out there or because a lot of people saw that it existed. You get credit when you engage people, and entertain and inspire them with what you publish. To avoid a quality trap, you need to approach it strategically and understand how each piece contributes to brand equity.

By Avi Dan

Avi Dan is CEO of Avidan Strategies. It improves agency partnerships, and manage agency search and compensation

Sourced from Forbes

In News

Identity Marketing Backfires: Don’t Tell a Consumer What they Like

August 1, 2017 No Comments

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

When choosy parents choose Folláin jam and sports fans who call themselves sports fans subscribe to SkySports, identity marketing is hard at work. But what happens when this type of advertising misses the mark?

According to a study in the Journal of Consumer Research, when a person’s sense of ownership and freedom is threatened they are less likely to respond positively to identity marketing campaigns.

“While people may be drawn to brands that fit their identity, they are also more likely to desire a sense of ownership and freedom in how they express that identity. Identity marketing that explicitly links a person’s identity with a brand purchase may actually undermine that sense of freedom and backfire,” write authors Amit Bhattacharjee (Dartmouth College), Jonah Berger (Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania), and Geeta Menon (New York University).

The researchers ran a series of five studies that compared two types of identity marketing, messages that simply referenced consumer identity or messages that explicitly tied consumer identity to a brand purchase. Participants were first asked to answer questions about the importance of a given identity in their overall life. They then viewed an advertisement for a brand that appealed to that specific identity. The advertisement used a headline that either referenced the identity or explicitly linked it to a brand. Participants then rated their likelihood to purchase a product from within the brand.

Study results showed that explicit identity marketing messages backfired with consumers who cared about the specific identity and resulted in a lower likelihood to purchase the product. This information may help brands understand why some people react negatively to products used in important areas of their lives.

“Contrary to the traditional thinking about identity marketing, our research shows that people who care deeply about an identity are not receptive to messages that explicitly communicate how a brand fits with their lifestyle,” the authors conclude. “In fact, to restore their sense of freedom, some people may avoid purchasing a product that otherwise appeals to them and fits with who they are.”

There you go marketers. You can suggest your product to your customer using their identity, but not tell your customer that if they are a certain type of person that they will buy it for sure. Humans: we hate being told what to do.

In News

An Early Warning Sign to Change Your Social Media Strategy

August 1, 2017 No Comments

By Ryan Holmes.

Treating social media as just another marketing channel? Tread lightly. A user revolt is brewing.

Fake. It’s a word that gets mentioned a lot these days when we talk about social media. Fake news. Fake followers. Real people sharing fake, filtered versions of their lives.

It’s enough to make you stop and wonder: Is there something inherently wrong with social media? Is it bad for us? It it … evil?

This isn’t a new question. I’ve thought about it a lot over the years. My life and career are wrapped up in social media. I know it’s sometimes tempting to dismiss social networks as time sucks … or even threats to civilization. But this is too simplistic. The truth, I think, is much closer to an old adage:

The day after fire was invented, someone invented arson.

Social media, just like fire, is a technology. It’s neither good nor evil. You can use it to bring warmth and light into your life. Or you can use it to burn, harm, and destroy.

For some people, social media is a valuable tool that brings together family and friends, raises awareness for social causes and gives us something to scroll through when we’re bored. For others, it becomes a tool for exploitation, an unhealthy addiction, even a vehicle to spread hate and violence.

Ultimately, the impact is in our hands. Social media, as the name suggests, is just the medium–not the message.

The social paradox

Having said that, it’s not hard to understand the haters. In some respects, social media has done a 180. In the beginning, it was about living out loud–an antidote to slick corporate messages and imagery pushed out over TV and in magazines. Facebook was revolutionary precisely because it was real–immediate and unfiltered. On Twitter, people really did share photos of their breakfast.

But that’s changed. The gold standard in social media these days is something that’s “Instagram-worthy.” Instead of a raw look at real life, we get an impossibly beautiful and polished version of life–cropped, filtered … largely fictitious. Even when it’s our own face. The popular Facetune app, for example, makes it possible for anyone to airbrush their features to model-worthy perfection. (And, more often than not, these perfect people on Instagram are actually trying to sell us something.)

That same craving for fakeness and excess partly explains the prevalence of fake news and clickbait. As our news feeds get increasingly crowded, it’s hard to resist gravitating to splashy, tabloid headlines, even when we sense something just doesn’t add up. Fakeness is a lot like trans fat in that way–tempting but just empty calories; irresistible but ultimately damaging.

A real-ness revolt

But it’s critical to remember social media isn’t just that. And it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, it’s not hard to see a countermovement afoot–a push to reclaim social media’s roots. Snapchat started it. Disappearing pics gave people license to be real again. Silly lenses helped us let our hair down. Instead of worrying about projecting a personal brand, we actually started communicating.

Thankfully, other networks have begun to get the message, too. Facebook Live videos are proving so popular because you only get one take–no re-dos. Instagram Stories already has 250 million users in large part because it’s a lot more interesting to watch an unedited video of someone than to look at a picture that’s been Photoshopped to death.

Intimacy and authenticity are regaining a foothold. Especially among younger users, fake is out. Teens have taken to starting “finsta” accounts–friends-only Instagram profiles–so they can share a “less edited, less filtered version of their lives.” The newfound popularity of the Minutiae app–which alerts users at a random time and challenges them to share a “mundane” picture of their actual surroundings–is another testament to this real-ness revolt.

Social media lessons for businesses

So, where does this leave all the companies today who rely on social media to connect with customers? To me, it’s an early warning. Social media has grown into an invaluable business tool. (In fact, my company is built on that fact.) But treating social media as business as usual is a recipe for failure.

More than other channels, social media marketing requires creativity, reinvention and breaking rules. Because there are no gatekeepers, people are constantly pushing the limits and demanding more real-ness and more honesty. Businesses that have grown used to treating social media as just another mass marketing channel may have a rough road ahead.

The key, instead, is to find ways to reclaim social media’s personal and human roots. Granted, doing this at scale isn’t easy. But the more that businesses are able to share candid updates and connect with people on an individual level, the greater the impact that their messages will have. Getting actual employees on board–and even executives–can go a long way to breathing life back into dry corporate social media channels. Tracking “meaningful relationship moments“–not vanity metrics like Likes or RTs–is also a step in the right direction.

The alternative isn’t pretty. A rebellion is brewing. Social media may be more prevalent than ever, but news streams today are as likely to be greeted with skepticism as with enthusiasm. Honesty, transparency and authenticity are re-emerging as the new standard. Anything less is playing with fire.

Image Credit: Getty Images

By Ryan Holmes

Founder and CEO, Hootsuite@invoker

Sourced from Inc.

In News

Unclear CEO Expectations Often Inspire Marketing Officers to Quit

July 28, 2017 No Comments

More than 40 percent of CMOs have been in their jobs for 2 years or less.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Nearly three-quarters of chief marketing officers believe their jobs aren’t designed to let them have the greatest impact on their companies, according to a new survey.

Chief marketing officers frequently suffer from having poorly designed jobs, accounting for why they have the highest rate of turnover among all roles in the C-suite.

The survey found that more than 40 percent of chief marketing officers have been in their roles two years or less, and 57 percent three years or less – a significantly shorter tenure than any other C-level executive.

This “revolving door of CMO short-timers” affects how consumers view the company, since new chief marketing officers often change some or all of their predecessors’ strategic direction for positioning, packaging and advertising. These changes also come at a significant financial cost.

The research was conducted by Neil A. Morgan, a professor of Marketing at Indiana University, and Kimberly Whitler of the University of Virginia. The results can be found in the Harvard Business Review article, “Why CMOs Never Last and What to Do About It.”

“We believe that a great deal of CMO turnover stems from poor job design,” Morgan and Whitler wrote. “Any company can make a bad hire, but when responsibilities, expectations and performance measures are not aligned and realistic, it sets a CMO up to fail.”

They interviewed more than 300 executive recruiters, CEOs and chief marketing officers; conducted multiple surveys of chief marketing officers; analysed 170 CMO job descriptions at large firms; and reviewed more than 500 LinkedIn profiles of CMOs. They found more disparity in how the chief marketing officer’s role was defined and much more than for any other C-level role.

Morgan and Whitler found common core CMO responsibilities. More than 90 percent of chief marketing officers were responsible for marketing strategy and implementation, and more than 80 percent controlled brand strategy and customer metrics.

“But beyond that, the range of duties – from pricing to sales management, public relations to e-commerce, product development to distribution – is mind-boggling,” they said. “Even before considering candidates for the job, a CEO must decide which kind of CMO would be best for the company.”

Their research identified three types of chief marketing officers: the strategist who makes decisions about firm positioning and products, accounting for 31 percent in their survey; the “commercialiser” who drives sales through marketing communications (46 percent); or someone who is an enterprise-wide profit-and-loss leader who handles both roles (23 percent).

The key problem is that CEOs and executive recruiters do not do a good job of identifying the type of role that the firm needs the chief marketing officer to play before they identify and evaluate candidates. Rather, they look at CMO candidates and select the one the CEO rates highest – which assumes that the CEO knows what type of chief marketing officer the firm needs.

That turns out to be a false assumption in most cases. This is much less of a problem for chief financial officers, chief information officers or even chief human resources officers, where there is much more standardisation in the role these executives play across firms and industries.

To solve the problem of identifying the type of chief marketing officer they need before looking at candidates, Morgan and Whitler said CEOs need to take into consideration:

The degree to which consumer insight needs to drive firm strategy.
How difficult it is to achieve firm-level growth.
The level of dynamic change in the marketplace.
The historical role of chief marketing officers in the organisation.
The firm’s structure, including whether the marketing function is centralised or dispersed throughout the organisation.

Once they have identified the type of chief marketing officer they need, CEOs must design the role to align with what the firm needs from that person before looking for candidates. This “role design” part of the process is also done badly most of the time.

“Alignment of responsibilities is the critical area where mistakes are made. It’s common for companies to describe a role in which the CMO is expected to change the overall performance of the firm,” Whitler and Morgan wrote.

“Expectations typically far exceed the actual authority given the CMO,” they added. “That problem is often compounded when CEOs are wooing candidates who already have good jobs.

“While overpromising and ‘up-selling’ are common in recruitment across many functions, our research suggests that they can be a bigger issue in marketing, because of the general confusion and lack of uniform expectations about what a CMO does and the knowledge and skill differences among marketing executives.”

Only 22 percent of the job descriptions Morgan and Whitler studied mentioned how chief marketing officers would be measured or held accountable, and only 2 percent had a specific section that clearly spelled out job expectations.

When searching for the best CMO candidate, Morgan and Whitler also point to the increased importance of experience in shaping knowledge and skills relative to other functions due to the lack of professional certifications in marketing, compared to those required of lawyers and accountants.

Only 6 percent of the chief marketing officers in their survey had degrees in marketing. Although 44 percent had MBAs, their educational backgrounds varied and included degrees in other disciplines such as engineering, philosophy and political science.

This means that most chief marketing officers learn most of their marketing “on the job,” making their prior experiences and employers of key importance in determining their knowledge and skills.

“Another stumbling point, in our analysis, is that in almost all CMO job descriptions there are significant gaps between the responsibility given and the experience required,” they added.

In News

Sex Doesn’t Sell Anymore… Wait… What?

July 25, 2017 No Comments

If you think sex sells, you’d be wrong. You now need to associate your product with compelling dialogue to make it appear attractive.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

So maybe a world saturated in free porn and technology has had a rather unpredictable outcome. People are craving conversation and connection in person, and not nameless faceless sex, helped along by tech. Who knew?

Plenty of Fish (POF), a dating website and app, has just released the findings of Conversation Nation, the largest survey on the topic. According to this survey, 90 percent of singles crave great conversation – not sex.

65% of both men and women of all generations believe conversation is a lost art, yet see a great conversation as the top indicator of a successful match.

Conversations should be a primary driver in how singles connect, according to the study. However, 61 percent of singles believe the rise in technology usage has impacted our ability to have meaningful, face-to-face conversations. Nine of 10 respondents identified a great conversation as the gold standard for a great date, bumping out sex by a longshot with only one in 10 opting for it. Compelling dialogue can also make someone appear more attractive, according to nearly 90 percent of respondents.

“The internet is making it difficult for people to have meaningful conversations, so technology companies need to do their part to solve that,” said Celeste Headlee, conversation expert and author. “Learning to have conversations that inspire and enlighten you is achievable.”

POF have decided to concentrate on conversation as the true measure of dating success. The company has just launched “Spark”, a new in-app feature that enables a user to easily initiate a conversation. By picking up and dragging a new conversation icon over any aspect of a potential date’s profile, users can quote and comment on any content – from photos, to anything a user has written about themselves.

“With more conversations than any other dating app, Plenty of Fish is focused on bringing conversation back to singles,” said Hesam Hosseini, CEO, Plenty of Fish. “In the short time we’ve been testing Spark, we’ve seen a 15 percent increase in conversations. Given our scale, this can result in an increase of hundreds of thousands of conversations happening every day on the app, leading to more dates and more relationships – and it is just our first step to bring the art of conversation back to dating.”

Conversation Nation Insights

The Emotion of a Great Conversation

Nerves run high with Gen Z. While 87 percent said they prefer face-to-face conversations with someone they’re interested in dating, a full 62 percent said they get too nervous for face-to-face. Only 32 percent of Gen X and 26 percent of Boomers felt the same way.
Fear of rejection (48 percent) and not knowing what to say (43 percent) are the leading reasons why singles are hesitant to start a conversation with a potential date. Of all the generations, Gen Z is least likely to start a conversation because 60 percent have a fear of rejection.

The (Lost) Art of Conversation

Face-to-face conversation isn’t the only lost art. Letter writing (78 percent), common courtesy (66 percent) and cursive (63 percent) are also on their way out.
With age comes confidence: Forty-five percent of Gen Z think they need tips or techniques to keep a conversation going, while only 35 percent of Millennials, 25 percent of Gen X and 18 percent of Boomers felt the same way.
Sixty-one percent believe that technology has impacted our ability to have a meaningful, face-to-face conversation, because it’s distracting (72 percent), people are heads down in their phones (65 percent), and it has just made people worse at speaking face-to-face (61 percent).

Smart + Funny = Key to Attraction

Nearly nine in 10 respondents have found someone more attractive after having a conversation with them, proving beauty is a lot more than skin deep. Intelligence (42 percent), having a sexy voice (40 percent), and a sense of humour (34 percent) ranked at the top of reasons people got better looking with dialogue. Gen Z and Millennials both selected sexy voice as their top pick, while Gen X and Boomers chose intelligence.
It does work both ways: Someone can also appear less attractive after a conversation. Having nothing in common (61 percent), coming across as insensitive or mean (58 percent), and having misaligned values (57 percent) dominated an appearance downgrade.

Tech Talk: What Constitutes a Conversation?

More than 80 percent of respondents agreed that a phone/voice call is a conversation, but division ensues from there.
- Fifty-four percent said texting constitutes a conversation, particularly among Millennials (67 percent) and Gen Z (76 percent). Only one in four Boomers think texting qualifies as a conversation.
- 87 percent of Boomers don’t consider chat apps as a conversation. A majority of Gen Z (54 percent) and 47 percent of Millennials disagree with the Boomer mindset.
- Boomers are significantly more likely than other generations to communicate by email, while Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z prefer texting.

So if you are about to launch that sexy ad campaign, maybe you need to have a rethink. Witty and smart is the new sex, and if any of us want to sell anything, we have to take this on board.

In News

The Weather Can Make People More Open to (or Ignore) Your Mobile Phone Ad

July 21, 2017 No Comments

Certain weather conditions get better consumer responses to mobile marketing efforts.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Many factors impact digital marketing and online advertising strategy. And now, a new Chinese study provides insight to a growing trend among firms and big brands … weather-based advertising. According to the study, certain weather conditions get better consumer responses to mobile marketing efforts, Also, the tone of your ad content can either help or hurt your marketing efforts, depending on the current local weather.

In the U.S. this is far more advanced than in Europe. Over the pond, many major brands – including Burberry, Ace Hardware, Taco Bell, Delta Airlines, and Farmers Insurance – are currently leveraging weather-based promotions. More than 200 others have partnered with the Weather Channel Company for targeted advertising and promotions.

The study, “Sunny, Rainy, and Cloudy with a Chance of Mobile Promotion Effectiveness,” was conducted by boffins at Beihang University, Temple University, Fudan University, and Zhejiang University. The authors examined field experiment datasets with mobile platforms (SMS and APP) on two digital products (video-streaming and e-book reading) on over six million mobile users in 344 cities across China. They simultaneously tracked weather conditions at both daily and hourly rates across these cities, with a focus on sunny, cloudy and rainy weather.

The authors found that overall, consumer response to mobile promotions was 1.2 times higher and occurred 73 percent faster in sunny weather than in cloudy weather. However, during raining conditions, that response was .9 times lower and 59 percent slower than during cloudy weather. Better-than-yesterday weather and better-than-forecast weather engender more purchase responses. A good deviation from the expected rainy or cloudy weather with relatively rare events of sunshine significantly boosts purchase responses to mobile promotions. In addition, compared with a neutral tone, the negative tone of prevention ad content hurts the initial promotion boost induced by sunshine, but improves the initial promotion drop induced by rainfall.

The authors also ruled out the possibility that the results could arise purely because of different mobile usage behaviours during different weather conditions. Their results also took into account the effects of individual locations, temperature, humidity, visibility, air pressure, dew point, wind, and time of day.

“Obviously, although brand managers cannot control the mother-nature weather, our findings are non-trivial because they suggest that brands can leverage the relevant, local weather information in mobile promotions. Firms should use the prevention-tone ad copy on rainy days and the simple neutral-tone ad copy on sunny days to attain greater bang for the buck,” said Chenxi Li of Beihang University.

“Given that consumers nowadays are inundated with and annoyed by irrelevant ads on their personal mobile devices and small screens, for marketers, these findings imply new opportunities of customer data analytics for more effective weather-based mobile targeting,” added Xueming Luo of Temple University.

The full study can be found here.