Just let people do their thing, you’ll have more success.
Online user reviews have become an essential tool for consumers who increasingly rely on them to evaluate products and services before purchase. The business models of online review platforms such as Yelp and TripAdvisor, and e-commerce sites such as Amazon and Expedia critically depend on them. Should such sites pay users to encourage them to write reviews?
According to a forthcoming study in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science, a leading academic marketing journal, that is a bad idea. Paying users suppresses the number of reviews on social platforms, especially among those users who are socially well-connected and likely to be more influential.
The study is authored by Yacheng Sun of University of Colorado, and Xiaojing Dong and Shelby McIntyre of Santa Clara University. The authors examine user response from a sample of customers following the introduction of a monetary payment program for user reviews by a social shopping platform in China.
The payment was roughly the equivalent of 25 cents per review in credit for purchases from sellers affiliated with the platform. To the company’s surprise, the number of user reviews declined by over 30 percent in the month after the payment program was introduced, relative to the month before. “The familiar “Law of Supply,” that implies supply increases in response to higher prices, does not seem to hold true when it comes to paying for reviews on a social platform,” said Sun.
The paper explores why reviews drop in response to the monetary payments. The authors conjecture that the drop in reviews could be the result of community members’ concerns that their honest reviews – motivated by an intrinsic motive to either help others with relevant information or to present themselves as knowledgeable about the product or service – may now be interpreted by the community as simply driven by the less honourable extrinsic motivation of making money. If this were true, the drop in user reviews would be greater among users who had more friends on the social network, who could potentially misinterpret the user’s motivation for writing reviews.
The authors empirically test their conjecture by comparing the change in reviewing behaviour among “socialites” (more than five friends on network) against “loners” (no friends on network) after the introduction of the payment scheme. Indeed, the reviews from socialites drop 85 percent, from just over 0.4 reviews a month to just under 0.06 reviews a month. In contrast, the loners who had little to lose in terms of social capital increase their reviews from close to zero to about 0.03 per month. The increase in reviews from the loners however does little to offset the massive drop among the socialites, who are the heavy contributors overall. Hence the aggregate drop of 30 percent.
“Nobody wants to be seen as a paid shill for brands, so the users with more friends and followers, who were likely more influential and wrote more originally, are the ones who stop writing. A real double-whammy,” said Dong.
“Our results support the approach of industry leaders like Yelp or Amazon, who do not compensate for reviews. In fact, they tap into the intrinsic motive for social recognition through status badges for frequent contributors,” said McIntyre. “There may be still ‘under the radar’ ways to pay only the less socially active users for their reviews, but such targeting can be risky as the heavy reviewers may perceive it to be unfair and therefore stop writing reviews, if and when they learn about it.”
A new study that includes a University of Kansas researcher has found that the level of smile intensity in marketing photos influences how consumers perceive the marketer’s competence and warmth, which can lead to different results depending on the context.
“We found that broad smiles lead people to be perceived as warmer but less competent,” said Jessica Li, a KU assistant professor of marketing in the School of Business. “We ask how that can influence consumer behaviour and in what situations might marketers want to smile more broadly.”
The study by Li and her co-authors was published online recently and will be in the January issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, one of the leading journals on marketing academic research.
Participants in the study viewed images of marketing photos that depicted the marketer either smiling broadly or only slightly. The researchers found that in advertisements for services that carry higher risk, consumers were more likely to assign competence to marketers that smiled only slightly rather than more broadly, which was associated with warmth but not necessarily competence. Credit :Journal of Consumer Research
The researchers conducted experiments in which respondents viewed marketing images that included marketers with either broad or slight smiles. Also, they conducted a content analysis of postings on a crowdfunding website, Kickstarter.com, where people commonly seek donations for causes or business ventures.
Past marketing and psychological research has focused on smiles leading consumers to perceive people as being friendly and viewed in a more positive light. However, Li said the research team’s new study shows that is true but that there can be a trade-off in how a smile might elicit action from a consumer.
Li said one consideration is the context of the service the marketer is providing and whether or not there is potential risk associated with it.
The intensity of someone’s smile in a marketing image elicits two fundamental dimensions of social judgements – warmth and competence, the researchers found.
Li said broader smiles that tend to elicit more warmth seem to be more effective in promotional ads for a service that would carry less risk. But photos with a slight smile did better in marketing scenarios where services were higher risk, such as a medical procedure, legal representation or investment in a startup company.
“If I see an ad with a heart surgeon who smiles really broadly at me, I might think she is really warm, but not choose her to be my doctor because she seems less competent than a surgeon with a slight smile,” Li said. “If the risk is really low, such as going to the store to get a new shirt, then the competence of the salesperson isn’t as important and I respond more positively to the broad smile.”
In their analysis of Kickstarter.com, when the page creator’s profile photo exhibited a broad smile that tended to elicit perceptions of warmth, the total amount of money pledged decreased by more than 50 percent, and the average contribution per backer was 30 percent less than when the creator’s photo included only a slight smile.
“Project creators with a slight smile are perceived as more competent,” Li said. “More people wanted to donate to their project because they believe this competent person is able to deliver the product.”
However, a more intense smile does appear to elicit more buzz on social media or other low-cost behaviours. Profile photos with a broader smile received twice as many Facebook shares than someone with a slight smile.
“It’s intuitive that if you seem to be friendly but not competent, people will want to help you in low-cost ways but not necessarily be willing to give you a lot of money,” she said.
The study could be valuable for marketers as they strategise on how to best elicit a response for their products. “Warmth and competence are such important judgements,” Li said. “We want to make sure we are giving people the right signal.”
Singles Day, held in China, is a day where Chinese shoppers go mental, buying themselves all sorts of nice stuff. This is all in aid of cheering themselves up while living the single life. The day is now the biggest day for e-commerce sales in the world.
The celebration for Singles Day held on 11/11 used to celebrate people who were proud to be single. So about those 1s in the date – obviously, single means “1.” But also, the four 1s evoke “bare branches,” the Chinese expression for the unattached. So the day became an anti-Valentine’s day of sorts. It was a self-love day. It was nice. Ahh.
But since the day started out, a lot has happened. There are now lots of single dudes in China. And, they are slowly getting richer. They have Yuan to burn and no one to spend it on but themselves. But let’s not forget the Chinese women too. They are now richer, taking their time to marry, and certainly love a good spend-up. And, if these women can afford it, it is the day where luxury brands get a solid burst of credit card love.
Even up until the Noughties, Singles Day used to be a small celebration. Then Billionaire Jack Ma of Alibaba came along (Alibaba is the Amazon.com of China.) Ma decided that he would do huge promotions around the day and plug it as an online shopping fiesta. And it worked. It is now the biggest online sales event in the world.
People who have gone on to marry have kept buying themselves stuff on Singles Day, jealous of singles and their self-spoiling. Singles Day is now a 24-hour-period where just about every demographic goes utterly mental with their credit cards. And if we don’t adopt it in Europe I was be very distressed. It sounds awesome.
While Alibaba was the first to link Singles’ Day to a shopping craze, plenty of rivals have joined in. Xiu.com is a Chinese luxury e-commerce platform. It just released its sales report for this year’s Singles Day.
So much to buy, so little time…
Here are the sales stats generated via Xiu.com:
Online shoppers born after 1990 have become the leading consumer group in China
Online shoppers aged between 25 and 30 (born between 1987 and 1992) took up the biggest share of Xiu.com’s total sales on this year’s November 11. Purchasing behaviours vary significantly across age groups. Citing a few examples: the favourite fashion brand among women shoppers born in the 2000s was The Kooples, an emerging French street fashion brand featuring a Brit-pop style that, to date, had not yet proven popular in China.
Shoppers born in the 1990s preferred Dolce & Gabbana. Burberry was the top-selling fashion brand among women born in the 1970s and 1980s.
Giuseppe Zanotti was the best-selling shoe brand among male shoppers born in the 1990s and 2000s, while men born in the 1980s preferred Gucci. Men born in the 1960s and 1970s opted overwhelmingly for Prada. Surprisingly, Chanel was the favoured brand among male shoppers born in the 1950s.
Burberry remains the country’s favourite brand
The top selling brands overall were Burberry, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Prada, Dolce & Gabbana and Chanel.
However, obvious differences existed between different cities. In Beijing, Moncler was the bestselling brand, while in Shanghai, Hermes, which was barely mentioned in other cities, proved to be the best seller. Philipp Plein was favored by Shenzhen buyers, while Emporio Armani sold best in Chongqing.
Male buyers spend more in fashion field
This year saw a huge increase in the average sale among men for fashion items, outspending the women. Male shoppers preferred the casual style of Armani Jeans and the avant-garde fashion style of Philipp Plein, while women remained with traditional luxury brands represented by Valentino, Dior and Chanel.
Beijing is where most of the shoppers are
Beijing ranked first on Xiu.com’s list of the top 20 Chinese cities in terms of sales during the one-day event, followed by Shanghai, Shenzhen and Chengdu.
The overall results showed that while there were more luxury-item shoppers in the bigger cities, people from smaller towns spent more per person, although there were fewer of them. So this seems to show that there is more money in bigger cities, which seems to be true of every country in the world.
If we can learn anything from this, it is that European luxury brands are killing it in China. And, that we must institute Singles Day here at once, people. Let’s get on it!
Mistakes are part of digital marketing. What’s important, however, is making sure you’re avoiding preventable mistakes that could kill your campaign.
When it comes to digital marketing, mistakes are all but guaranteed to happen. After all, marketing your company is very much a process of trial and error.
The key, however, is minimising the impact of these mistakes and avoiding those you shouldn’t be making in the first place. Of course, this is much easier said than done, especially for businesses, many of whom still practice and believe in many traditional marketing techniques.
Not that there’s anything wrong with keeping things classic, but there’s no denying that traditional marketing – even “traditional guerrilla marketing”– is sometimes completely different from internet marketing.
And this is where mistakes often happen. Writing for Inc., Neil Patel notes, “These mistakes cost money, traffic opportunity, and growth. Unfortunately, marketers make these mistakes because they fail to truly understand how to leverage their skills and improve their approach.”
Digital marketing requires a significant investment in terms of time and resources. The last thing you want to do is to waste your efforts doing things that are taking your online presence farther away from your goals.
Here are some of the most common digital marketing mistakes your company might be guilty of making.
Marketing Without any Goals
If you’re writing on your blog or posting on social media without any real goals, you might as well as be wandering around aimlessly on the internet. One of the most common mistakes many digital marketers make is not setting any goals before launching their campaign.
Goals are critical for evaluating the success of your digital marketing efforts, whether it’s in the context of sales, sign ups (for newsletters), messages, or phone calls.
“Goal setting is the backbone of marketing. Goals help us prove how effective we are, keep us focused and push us to succeed,” says Amber Klein of Hive Digital Strategy. “And while we know how important goals are to measure our success, more than 80% of small business owners do not keep track of their business goals.”
With no goals, you have no direction. With no direction, you have no way of knowing your campaign is successful. And if you don’t have benchmarks for success/failure, what’s the point of marketing your business?
You Don’t Know Who Your Audience Is
Marketing your small business on the internet is one thing, but all you are doing is wasting time and resources if you do not know whom you’re reaching out to.
It’s not enough to just say “potential clients,” because that could mean anyone.
Even if you’re creating insightful killer content, you’re only setting yourself up to fail if you’re not promoting your content to the right audience at the right time. Chances are your niche is already saturated with content, making it difficult to stand out.
The trick is figuring out just whom you want to market to.
“Identifying your target audience is the first step in any type of marketing endeavour,” says Neil Patel in a Forbes write-up. “Tragically, it’s also easy to overlook. Don’t make this mistake. Study your audience, and much of your marketing will take care of itself.”
The most basic way to understand your audience is by creating buyer personas – semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer/client, complete with personal descriptions as well as behaviours.
You’re Not Putting Your Customers First
Many marketing teams make the mistake of boxing themselves inside echo chambers, where all they do is strategise and plan about things they like, but not so much the things their customers actually do.
This rookie mistake is something you can easily avoid if you focus your entire campaign on putting your customers first.
At its core, digital marketing is about doing the following:
Attracting
Engaging
Educating
Nurturing
Converting
Retaining
And naturally, all these things involve your customers. The experience you provide must be tailored to their needs and preferences, which fortunately you can know through data analytics and engagement evaluation. To put it simply, the customer must always come first.
You’re Not Being Social on Social Media
While there are certainly many businesses building a presence on social media, many of them use platforms like Facebook and Twitter not so much to engage their audience, but as a way to simply promote their firms with ad-like content.
This is not what social media is about. Yes, you can broadcast information about yourself, but this should not be your priority. Social media is a way to be social—to interact and engage your audience with genuine dialogue.
In other words, you need to respond to your audience and not just post something and leave them alone in the comments section. Your community will come to respect you more if you genuinely want to build a relationship with them, which can only be a good thing for your firm in the long run.
Conclusion
In summary, the 4 most common mistakes digital marketers make are ignoring the importance of setting goals, failing to understand your audience, not putting your customers first, and misusing social media.
Although it would seem these are ‘no brainer’ mistakes, you would be surprised just how many marketers, even those with quite a bit of experience under their belt, are guilty of making them.
There’s a whole genre of music that has grown inside the world of gaming. Many now-famous bands got their mainstream breakthrough thanks to this process. So if you have a band, you need to read this.
By Nicole Buckler
The symbiotic relationship between music and video games is now so established that a games studio called Bugbear Entertainment is searching for bands to submit music to them. The winning tunes will be played inside their latest racing game: Wreckfest.
Bugbear Entertainment specialises in action driving. They have been making car games for sixteen years, starting with Rally Trophy. They are best known for the critically acclaimed demolition racing series FlatOut (2004-2007, PC, PS2, Xbox, Xbox 360) and street racing title Ridge Racer Unbounded (2013, PC, PS3, Xbox 360).
As of yesterday, Bugbear are calling for bands everywhere to send in their tunes to accompany gamers while they race and smash the crap out of each other in their latest game. The winning prize is $3,500 and there are nine runner-up prizes of $1,000 per track. But it is not the money that’s the real prize: it is exposure to their gamers that is the real coup. There are hundreds and thousands of them.
The winning music will be featured on games released on Playstation 4, Xbox One and PC. Bands featured in previous Bugbear releases have included upcoming indie bands and household names like Megadeth, Rob Zombie, Fall Out Boy, Audioslave and Skrillex.
This innovative approach to sourcing music is evidence of a growing realisation amongst game designers, that there are thousands of unheard of bands out there. According to Bugbear, “They just need the right chance to have their music heard internationally, and by the right demographic to get to that critical mass of fans to push them to the next level of popularity.”
For more established bands like Megadeth, putting their music inside high-selling video games offers a symbiotic relationship. Gaming studios can promote Megadeth music to their gamers, and Megadeth’s fans might be more open to buying games that have their favourite tunes in it. It’s a match made in cross-promotion heaven.
Bugbear is very interested in getting the sound right for their games, which is why they are letting their gamers cast their votes on the tracks they want to hear while playing the game. Happy customers, more sales. Well, in theory, anyway.
Music has always been a vital part of the gaming experience. The aim of Wreckfest is to create an immersive experience for the player, one where the in-game radio feeds the road rage in all of us. While you can blast your tunes out on your REAL car radio, you can’t smash the crap out of other drivers while doing so. But, in Wreckfest, you can. What’s not to like? Smashing other people up and decent tunes? It’s win-win.
An Insta-grandma called “Baddie Winkle” says she has been stealing your man since 1928.
By Nicole Buckler
Hotels.com have got together with a bad-ass granny who calls herself “Baddie Winkle” to encourage people to go travelling (staying in their hotels, of course). Using the hashtag #BadAssBucketList you can follow her adventures and even contribute yourself to the hashtag should you be a granny looking to feel up some prime young beef. I’m only in my 40s and I’m ready to join the squad.
Don’t touch, Weinstein
Baddie is promoting Hotels.com Rewards program, which gives players a one-night freebee in a hotel for every 10 stayed. She says, “I have always wanted to party in London, go to the Moulin Rouge in Paris and watch cheeky volleyball players do their thing on a beach in Brazil!” Now as a micro-influencer, she can unlock the “Perve Level: Brazilian” and other treasures on hotel.com’s dime. Which is nice work if you can get it. All the Insta-grandma has to do is to flit around a number of hotels, staying there and showing fans what she gets up to inside them. Baddie wrote on her Instagram page last week; “I’m international baby!”
International indeed. The 89-year-old microinfluencer even has her own celebrity fans, including Miley Cyrus, Khloe Kardashian and Nicole Richie. Perhaps they will be watching with glee as she mixes rooftop cocktails in NYC, rubs shoulders with NFL players, and helicopters over The Grand Canyon. It’s a tough life, but someone’s Nana has to do it.
Hmmm… slutty but hot.
It’s not just the rather wealthy grandparent market hotel.com are going for. According to the astonishing results of a recent survey, one in five people under 30 have confessed that their travel plans are inspired by their favourite oldies. Who knew that oldies could be travel inspirators? The marketing people at Hotels.com knew. Oh hell yes, they knew.
Damn she’s bad.
Baddie is bringing her granddaughter along on the trip, and this seems to fit in with accusations that millennials are a bunch of home-loving family-stalking squares. The previously-mentioned survey shows that 40 percent of millennials would prefer to complete their bucket lists with their parents or grandparents – that’s more than celebs (11 percent), siblings (28 percent) or on their own (25 percent).
What the….?
One in eight confessed that their gran (or nana) was cooler than them and travelled more than them. I am ashamed of millennials. Stop protesting over stupid crap and go and see the world you wasters!
Squad goals: Polyamory
And for those of us in marketing? Let’s remember that the best micro-influencers might be someone you haven’t considered before. Like grannies in leather dresses. Who are on their way to steal your man. Now would be a good time to panic.
A recent survey by 10Fold has revealed that marketing executives now focus a substantial portion of their budget on creating and constantly delivering new content at an ever-increasing frequency. According to the research findings, nearly one-third of respondents are now producing content daily or hourly.
The report looks at current and planned content marketing budgets, frequency, type, development and measurement of content programs. It found that three-quarters of technology marketers plan to generate three times more content in the next 12 months than they did in the previous year; and 42 percent will spend €250,000 or more in the next 12 months on content.
Measuring the effectiveness of content is still a challenge for marketing executives. But it seems that soliciting customer feedback never goes out of style.
Key Research Findings:
Social media, video and webinars are cited as the best content “types” among all respondents
Top executives prefer video as a content medium
44 percent of respondents say that lack of domain expertise is the top barrier for creating quality content
99 percent of respondents use third parties to create at least 25 percent of their content
83 percent of respondents report that third party generated content is at least above average
80 percent leverage basic tools (Google Analytics) to track and measure content impact; followed by 60 percent using marketing automation systems
“The marketplace is constantly changing,” said David Gehringer, principal of Dimensional Research. “Based on the results of our research for 10Fold, there is no doubt that there is an insatiable demand among technology companies for content that has technical relevancy and that is delivered in a form, such as video and blogs, that is appealing to their buyers.”
It seems that the saying “content is king” still rings true, for now.
New growth hacks emerge, and old tactics fade off in the distance.
Our daily tactics shift because consumer behaviors shift.
People get tired of the same-old same-old.
They start ignoring the same ad they’ve seen multiple times. They start ignoring the same old e-book lead magnet that they’ve seen for nearly a decade.
Thankfully, there are actually still a few constants. There are some underlying principles that will continue to stick around despite how often the tactics change.
For example, old-school copywriting formulas like PAS and AIDA still work today.
You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Instead, you just need to adapt it.
If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.
Just improve it with new techniques. Fine-tune it with new developments like personalization.
The future of online marketing will be a combination of the most successful techniques of the past mixed with the growing need to personalize everything.
Here’s what the past has taught us and how we can use it to prepare for the future of online marketing.
What the past has taught us about marketing
If we can learn anything from the past, it’s that the proven methods stick around.
Keeping it simple really does work.
Especially when it comes to content marketing and building an online presence.
Why? Because using proven methods and formulas gives you an established guideline of what goes where.
It takes out the need to start from scratch. You don’t have to cross your fingers or hope and pray that your efforts bring in new customers.
A great place to start is to look at what the past has taught us about online marketing and how it’s evolved.
Content marketing and advertisements haven’t changed all that much in the last few decades.
Notice how this ad uses concise copy and an emotion-provoking image.
Sounds exactly like every memorable ad we see now, doesn’t it?
Here are a few formulas from the past that still work incredibly well today. I’m willing to bet most of these will work in the future of online marketing, too.
Tip #1. AIDA
AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.
E. St. Elmo Lewis thought it up in 1898. And yes, it still works today!
Here’s how it works:
Attention: Grab the reader’s attention (obvious, I know)
Interest: Provoke interest with fact, statement, etc.
Desire: Pull on their heartstrings and their sense of want and need
Action: Give them a solution that allows them to take action on the subject.
AIDA works incredibly well on most marketing channels today. It works on AdWords, Facebook, long-form blog posts, and even podcasts or video.
They send you emails related to your browsing history on their website.
What do a lot of other companies do?
They send you random, cold emails with product deals that could be totally irrelevant to you personally. Instead, Amazon tailors the entire message so that you’re more likely to convert.
And personalization is just starting to take effect. Less than 10% of companies believe that they are successful at personalization.
That’s insanely low!
But it’s good news for you. It means that you can jump out ahead if you start working on it now.
My favorite example of personalization comes from Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign.
“Online marketing” at the time was simple and static. But Hotmail decided to change it.
They took a big risk that ended up paying off in a big way.
The reason it worked was that they changed the traditional strategy and created a more compelling reason for people to take notice.
Instead of buying their service from an irrelevant advertisement, people were being introduced to Hotmail by their own friends.
That means that sending out a single, generic email blast won’t work anymore.
You might have small business owners, marketers, students, and VPs of marketing on the same list, for instance.
Their ages, genders, and races will be all over the map. They’ll be dealing with completely different problems.
So we need to focus on breaking these people down into segments. That will allow us to deliver custom content to complex audiences at every stage of the funnel.
Check out your own email inbox to see how this is already happening.
If you provide relevant, personalized content to the right audience, you’re going to see better results for a lower cost.
It’s even beginning to spill into other social networks like Instagram.
Why is it spreading? Because major companies are recognizing this shift in consumer behavior.
They’re looking at these online marketing trends that will be the gold standard in 5-10 years.
In almost every circumstance, whether it’s on-site or on a social network, delivering more relevant content to the right audience segment will give you a greater return.
The key is being able to adapt to the future of online-marketing segments.
They are growing, changing, and becoming more diverse every single day.
Thankfully, there are still a few tactics like using dynamic text replacement and message match to keep up with these changes.
Conclusion
SEO is dead. PPC doesn’t work. Content marketing isn’t worth it. Emails are the best.
Every week, we hear that our favorite marketing tactic is either the gold standard or that it doesn’t work at all.
The online marketing landscape is always expanding and evolving.
But that doesn’t mean our favorite tactics can’t work anymore.
Tactics like AIDA and PAS have been around for decades. They used to work well. And they still do for many marketers.
Facebook Ads might be relatively new. However, the same strategies that worked long ago can still apply.
They just evolve, grow, and change based on user behavior. Technology speeds up those advancements.
Instead of print ads being the #1 advertising platform, PPC has exploded.
Instead of keyword stuffing for SEO, Google’s search engine got smarter, and SEO evolved.
Just because online marketing is constantly evolving doesn’t mean our old “hacks” are useless.
We simply need to adapt to the changing meta and expand on our tool sets.
Hitching a ride on the personalization trend is one of the best things we can do to secure our place in the future of online marketing.
I don’t just mean the personalization of emails. You have to personalize everything from the messages people receive to their experience on your website.
Wondering about the current state of the industry? Columnist Jayson DeMers shares highlights and stats from a recent survey of digital marketers.
For entrepreneurs and startup founders looking for new ways to grow their businesses, there’s no shortage of information on the “whats” and “hows” of digital marketing.
For the past decade, I’ve done my best to provide even more information in those categories, helping entrepreneurs with everything from the basics of building an online presence to advanced tactics in categories like SEO.
But it’s also important to zoom out, beyond the strategies and tactics, so we can understand the “whys” behind marketing — as well as where it’s headed and when.
Last year, I attempted to answer these questions with an original survey I called “What Works in Online Marketing,” and I walked away with some interesting revelations about the state of the industry. Now that it’s a year old, I figured it was time to redistribute the survey and find out exactly where we stand today.
You can download the entire report here (registration required), but below, I’d like to highlight some of the most interesting findings from the survey and discuss what they mean for your business.
Survey methods
The survey itself was fairly simple. It comprised a number of questions regarding the use and effectiveness of multiple different online marketing strategies, including content marketing, SEO, social media marketing and link building.
We distributed the survey to 376 people, most of whom are professional marketers or business owners, and collected the results for analysis. There was a fairly equal distribution of participants by age, gender and position.
This year’s most important takeaways
So, what did we learn about the state of online marketing? These were some of the biggest takeaways:
Attitudes haven’t changed dramatically. Compared to last year, attitudes about marketing haven’t changed much one way or another. As you’ll see, marketers still feel good about the strategies they’re using, and they are investing in different tactics (such as SEO, content marketing and social media marketing) in similar patterns. There haven’t been many disruptive events to force people into new paradigms and new strategies, nor have there been any big scares or economic disruptions to curb the power of marketing.
People are ready to spend more on marketing. Nearly 45 percent of marketers are planning to increase their marketing budgets this year, with another 30 percent of responders planning to keep their budgets the same. That means 75 percent of respondents are keeping their budgets the same or increasing them, compared to less than 25 percent who are planning to decrease their budgets. This is a sign of overall economic growth, potentially, but it’s also important to recognize it as a sign that most marketers are finding success.
Marketers are clueless when it comes to ROI. But how are those marketers defining success? Return on investment (ROI), arguably the single most important metric for gauging the profitability of a campaign, remains elusive for many marketers to measure. For each core online marketing strategy, we asked marketers what type of ROI they were seeing—and the top answer for nearly every strategy was “not sure.” The only strong exception to this rule was social media marketing, which 44 percent of marketers saw a positive ROI for. Otherwise, either marketers aren’t measuring their ROI rates consistently, or they don’t know how to do it.
Facebook is king, but Instagram is rising. As you might have predicted, Facebook remains the most popular social media platform, both in terms of the number of marketers using it and in terms of the ROI those marketers are seeing from it. Over 88 percent of respondents are using Facebook, and 53 list it as their top-ROI platform. However, Instagram is also rising in importance, jumping to become the second-most popular social platform for marketers (excepting YouTube). With 95 percent of marketers planning to keep or increase their social media budgets, social media marketing is likely to stay around for a while.
Optimism reigns. Finally, optimism in the online marketing community is high. Overall, marketers are increasing budgets, but they’re also increasing budgets for most specific strategies, including SEO, content marketing, link building, influencer marketing and social media. They’re happy with the results they’re getting, and they’re predicting that the strategies they use are going to stick around for a long time. For example, when asked if they thought SEO would ever become universally impractical, unprofitable or otherwise useless, 32 percent said “maybe, but it’s unlikely,” making it the top response. Only 22 percent gave some kind of “yes” answer, and 17 percent said “no, never.”
Where are we headed?
Between any two points, you can draw a straight line. With the information from this year’s survey in conjunction with information from last year’s survey, we can predict what’s going to unfold over the course of the next year.
Personally, I look forward to seeing more enthusiasm and more investment in online marketing overall. The more people we have working in the industry, the more innovation we’ll collectively drive, and the more information we’ll have to collectively work with.
Just like the everyday social media user, a successful brand should have its own story and personality.
Brand storytelling, when done properly, allows marketers to build personality and associate emotion with a brand to create (or, at least, attempt to create) a personal connection with the consumer. The prevalence of social media today has driven an interest in leveraging the convergence of content creation and programmatic advertising to tell the story behind a brand.
As co-founder and president of Track Marketing Group, I’ve helped different brands socialize their story using strong visual narratives and integration of live experiences to build engaged communities. Here are five tips to creating your social brand narrative, and hopefully, inspiring your community.
Use Powerful Imagery
It’s often said that good public speakers take their audience on a journey, hopefully leaving it feeling motivated and inspired. Leveraging the power of photography to take the consumer through a visual journey is one of the most powerful ways to tell your brand story across all social platforms.
Use original images. Storytelling is most effective when it’s personalized. Stock images will never do your brand story justice. Make the investment and create original visuals that tell the exact story in your brand voice.
Use social platform-specific visual tactics. With the number of social platforms consumers are using today, it’s safe to say that one size does NOT fit all. Instagram profile grids, the act of taking one single image and sharing it as a grid of several broken images to create a big picture when viewed on the main user profile, might work well on Instagram but lose their effectiveness on Twitter and Snapchat. Know your community and apply the best visuals that work within the confines of the different social platforms.
Limit The Use of Hashtags
Being on the agency side, clients are always looking to sum up their entire brand ethos using one hashtag. Unicorn hashtags — simple premises that the consumer can immediately understand and connect to the brand — are far and in-between.
Use hashtags as a way to corral and enhance your brand story along with the extended consumer chapters and plot twists. The hashtag should not be your brand story
Empower Your Community
One of the most popular story structures is called the “monomyth,” also known as “the hero’s journey.” In monomyths, heroes are called to leave their home and set out on a journey to an unknown place. After overcoming a trial, they return home with newfound wisdom or a reward that they can share with and ultimately help their community.
Social media and the power of user-generated content allow marketers the unique opportunity to allow the consumer to finish the monomyth. The brand’s journey into the unknown can be open ended and completed by the consumer in his or her own words and visuals.
Tactically, we can do this two ways:
Crowdsourced Content. Leveraging crowdsourced images to show the pillars of the brand story through the consumer’s lens and, in turn, bring the brand story into the real world.
Social Listening. Utilize social tools to identify and listen to your brand advocates and engage with them on a one-on-one basis to amplify the story beyond your reach.
Expand Your Message
The greatest stories are those that are broad and relatable to a wide group of people. The best TV shows in history all transcended their specific subject and captured a moment in time in our culture. “Star Wars” is a box office juggernaut because it tells a story that the consumer easily understands.
The best stories are relatable by the average person. Telling your brand story on social means that you have to be unique yet still attainable by the average social media user. If your entire story is only for the one percent on social, that’s not a story – that’s only a chapter.
Let The Words Tell A Story
Storytelling on social media is ultimately driven by words. Whether we are looking to inspire, motivate or galvanize the consumer and community, the copy that we use either as standalone text or as captions to our visuals will dictate the brand story arc(s).
New Balance, one of our agency clients, recently launched its “Always In Beta” campaign telling their brand story of being in a state of relentless improvement — that there is no finish line to what’s possible and that you can always improve with determination.
New Balance has taken its ‘Always in Beta’ brand story to social by creating original content that visually speaks to its performance heritage, yet with words that are broader than footwear and apparel. This has allowed it to become more than just a footwear brand but to enter its consumer’s personal storyline.
Great brands rely on stories to define their brands. With society driven by social media and an “always on” mentality, today’s brand journey must begin, build and extend onto social. Approach your storytelling with an authentic yet broader lens than your brand-specific filter, and you’ll give your consumer the social authority to make your brand story into their personal folktale.
This article is courtesy of BusinessCollective, featuring thought leadership content by ambitious young entrepreneurs, executives & small business owners.
