Interactive Mobile Ads - Even Better Than Building Your Own Pizza

With demand for mobile marketing increasing, mobile ad startup Adtile appears poised to benefit. Adtile produces motion ads which take advantage of a smartphone's GPS, gyroscope, motion coprocessor, accelerometer and digital compass on both Android and iOS.  Instead of simply tapping an ad or clicking to watch a video, Adtile ads immerse the marketer into the user experience by asking consumers to shake, turn or otherwise interact with the ads.  For example, Adtile did work for a coffee chain that required the user to shake their phone, filling up a cup with coffee in the process. Once the cup was full, Adtile, using location data from Yelp, showed a map with a list of nearby stores.

Adtile says it motion ads have an average engagement rate of 30%, a participation time of 23 seconds and an average CTR of 5%.  The company has continue to expand its technology by branching out into virtual reality and by developing a product called Air Pencil, a tool where the consumer treats his or her phone as a device for drawing in the air (see link to YouTube video below).  Adtile's new mobile software platform, Adtile VR, allows users to experience virtual reality on smartphones without the need for special equipment.  This VR software is easy-to-use, smooth and natural for real-time motion simulations.  By incorporating Adtile VR into native or web-based applications, users can "explore" the digital space by turning left and right and looking up and down, using touch controls to interact.

Adtile uses algorithms using smartphone sensor technology to accurately capture the scale and sensitivity of motion.  Its blend of short-range, arms-length gestures with medium to long-range motions allow for accurate physical movement in virtual space.  This technology allows users to have a real connection with their surrounds via their smartphones.  Additionally, Adtile has been given approval by the USPTO for its patent on "multiple panel touch user interface navigation" and Adtile is partnering with Singapore Press Holdings to offer motion ads as part of SPH's mobile campaigns.  Adtile appears to be uniquely positioned to help users interact with brands via mobile.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKRxcwNNMvs

Have Looser Connections Led to Less Sharing?

Facebook appears to be facing certain negative consequences of its vast size; in particular the increasing size of the networks of individual users.  Original sharing of personal stories -- rather than posts about public information like news articles -- dropped 21 percent year over year as of mid-2015, The Information, a tech news site, reported Wednesday. Facebook said in a statement that "the overall level of sharing has remained not only strong, but similar to levels in prior years."

People appear to be less willing to post updates about their lives as their list of friends grow to include individuals they are only loosely associated with.  Facebook is working hard to combat this decline in people sharing original, personal content, the fuel that helps power the money machine at the heart of its social network.

Rather than posting original content, Facebook’s 1.6 billion users are increasingly posting more news and information from other websites.  Many Facebook users  have more than ten years' worth of acquaintances added as friends. As a result, people may not always feel comfortable checking into a local bar or sharing an anecdote from their lives, knowing these updates may not be relevant to all their connections.  Data shows that personal sharing has shifted to smaller, more intimate audiences on Snapchat, Facebook’s Instagram and other messaging services.

Facebook, the same company that has given us the term "social graph" has given us a new term to describe this dropoff in original content: "context collapse."  Facebook has tried several tactics to encourage more of these posts, such as an "On This Day" feature launched last year that brings up memories from past years that users might want to talk about again, or reminders about special occasions like Mother’s Day. Facebook has also prompted users to post the most recent photos and other recently accessed content from their phones.  Sounds to me like trying to relive the glory days.

The company this week made another move to make it easier to post, introducing a live video tool that everyone on Facebook can use. Zuckerberg on Tuesday did a video address to Facebook users encouraging them to post live video of whatever they want, noting that even mundane activities like getting a haircut can be entertaining when they’re in the moment. More than five million people watched.  Call me crazy but watching someone get a haircut doesn't sound very entertaining.

Are Retail Sales on Social Media Dead?

A new study, conducted between January and March 2016, which analyzed $100B in sales data among 500 million shoppers found that only 1.5% of retailers last click e-commerce transactions came via social media.  This study confirms what we heard in class; specifically, social media marketing is something that brands need to do but whether the social media marketing messages can be directly translated into sales is questionable and difficult to measure.  Within the 1.5%, Facebook was responsible for most of the sales totaling 81% while Pinterest had 10.8% and Instagram, YouTube and Twitter collectively generated 5.2%.  Of course, this does not take into account ads posted on social media that motivated a consumer to make an in store purchase.  Still, the small percentage of last click transactions coming from social media should be alarming to retailers.

Other digital marketing methods like search and email marketing dominated 70% of retail transactions in the study, while another 20% of sales were simply impulse purchases. The remaining 10% was the result of long-tail methods such as display ads, text messages and push notifications.  Michael Scheiner, Vice President of Marketing and Communications at Abercrombie & Fitch  was not discouraged by the study.  A&F is an aggressive user of social media marketing with its largely millennial customer base.  Said Scheiner:  "We're not as concerned about 'Did they see a piece of content and immediately go to the website?' as we are about 'Did they have a good experience with the brand? Was it interesting to them?'.  Of course, there is an aspect of clicking to the site, but it's a smaller percent than other platforms."

More than sales generation, social media's impact on branding is what is keeping retailers in the game.  At Macy's, social stats around engagement and awareness are used in targeting consumers with digital ads via other platforms. Serena Potter, Vice President of Digital Strategy explained "When we think about social, we can't always measure direct, last-click [sales], so we look at a variety of metrics in addition to ROI.  As we look at the platforms from a customer-behavior perspective, we've really been able to drive traffic to our website, to our mobile experience to create a re-marketable audience."

With algorithm changes coming to Instagram and Twitter, other retailers could learn from Macy's and increase their social media budgets with paid ads, making social commerce a harder space for brands to play in, observers say.  In the case of Instagram in particular, Mark Aikman, GM of Marketing Services at Mercedes-Benz USA, regularly sees organic posts attract tens of thousands of likes and shares within hours. "It's important to create original content and not recycle images and videos," he explained.  Aikman said his team approaches Instagram as a branding platform and Facebook as more of a direct-response channel. For example, the automaker's campaign around last month's New York International Auto Show used 15-second clips on Instagram and longer-form video on Facebook. 

Then, there is Pinterest. Unlike Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, Pinterest is typically used as a research tool consumers turn to for future purchases. Since it debuted buy buttons last June, more than 10,000 merchants have set up more than 60 million "buyable pins." But because the bulk of posts clicked on are saved by consumers for purchases down the road, marketers often have no way of knowing whether particular content drove an immediate sale.  Many marketers, however, seem less concerned about last-click analysis and more focused on long-term effect—which is good news for social media platforms, at least for now.

Instagram algorithm may hurt some brands

Instagram is about to undergo a major change.  Many of us receive what seems to be an infinite amount of meaningless posts.  Today, posts from companies we follow ask us to turn on post notifications out of concern that upcoming changes will hurt their brand.  Instagram is about to turn on its algorithmic feed which has companies worried that their ads are going to disappear from our feeds.

People who follow hundreds of accounts can receive dozens of new posts per hour.  It's becoming impossible to differentiate between posts valuable posts and not-so-valuable posts and marketers have to be concerned about that.  Instagram is certainly concerned because if user experience, fewer people will use the app.  To solve this problem, Instagram's algorithm will put the best photos at the top of our feeds.  If posts don't perform well, Instagram won't show those posts to other followers.  No wonder some marketers are in panic mode.  The very same people who spent countless hours increasing the number of followers they have will soon have to worry that their posts will be seen by only a small number of followers.  Basically, Instagram's new algorithm is forcing marketers to compete for our attention by creating "good" posts.

Adding to the concern is the fact that Instagram doesn't provide any analytics so companies won't know how many people view their posts.  As a result, they can't perform any A/B testing to determine which posts are "good" and therefore will be viewed by all their followers and which posts are "bad" and will therefore only be viewed by a small number of followers.  Some speculate that Instagram is doing this in the hopes that marketers will pay for ads on Facebook instead of getting publicity for free on Instagram.    

Here's a post showing the reaction to the change...

New app, Crescendo, aims to be the Mailchimp for push notifications

Crescendo, a new app which soft-launched a few weeks ago, allows companies to set up accounts, grow an audience and send them push notifications.  To develop its own app with push, a company can spend upwards of $300,000.  Crescendo allows these companies to instead sign up for its service and then customize their own page.  The founder's comments on why he thinks Crescendo will be a winner are consistent with those we heard from our guest speaker in our last class; specifically, Crescendo founder Dave Cascino notes "every other mechanism for reaching audiences is falling off.  Organic reach on Facebook is around 1%.  Twitter is around there, too."  He differs from our guest speaker insofar as he points out the drawbacks of email marketing.  "We've seen an exodus back home to email, but email is fraught with its own problems, too.  Email has the promotions tab, messages still go to spam quite often, it's just this messy-ass place.  The open rates even on a great email are 10-20% on a good day.  So if you have an audience, it's hard even to reach your own freaking audience," states Cascino.

Though still early, open rates for Crescendo's product are over 50% in every test so far.  50% is the baseline Cascino expects.  Cascino has even created a new marketing metric called 0 to 50, which is the time it takes from push being sent out to it reaching a 50% open rate.  Two Crescendo customers, Trap Karaoke and the Tribeca Film Festival have 0 to 50 open rates under 5 minutes.  Think about the effect that this can have on a marketing campaign; being able to reach over 50% of your target audience in under 5 minutes.

Crescendo's goal is to put companies at the forefront of opt-in marketing, meaning marketing to audiences who actually want to receive messages from a particular company.  Contrast that approach with an email marketing campaign that can come from purchased or rented email lists or from opt-out type customer interactions where the customer is unaware that he or she must opt-out.

Crescendo will operates as a SaaS, charging companies a monthly fee to maintain their page.  Cascino will soon begin looking for investment and hopes to raise a Series A somewhere between $1 million and $2 million.  Sounds to me like he could have a winner on his hands.

Google Boosts Effects of Mobile-Friendly Algorithm

Google announced another change to its search algorithm to boost the effects of its mobile-friendly algorithm that it first launched last April.  Google said the update will occur“beginning in May,” and it “increases the effect of the [mobile-friendly] ranking signal.” Google noted that if your site is already mobile-friendly, you do not have to worry, because “you will not be impacted by this update.” Famous last words, right?

The update is expected to rollout gradually due to the length of time it can take for Google's crawlers to access each web page. Depending on how fast Google crawls and indexes all of the pages on your site, the full impact of this update may not be felt for some time.  Experts believe that this update will have less impact than the original mobile-friendly update, which came to be infamously known as “Mobilegeddon.” 

The basic idea for Google is to offer even more of an incentive for publishers to create mobile-friendly web pages. These days most publishers have mobile-friendly web pages, but for the few that do not, beware.  Over the last few months, Google has also introduced AMP, which makes sites load even faster on mobile.  See https://www.ampproject.org/ for more info. AMP pages are featured prominently though Google does not use AMP in its ranking algorithm...at least not yet.    

If your website is not mobile-friendly, or if you want to ensure you are, check out https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/.

Sins and Virtues of Email Marketing

Excerpt of original post by Beth Hayden.

Sin #1: Disappearing after you send out your “welcome” message

Many content marketers set up an automated “welcome” message to send to new subscribers, but after that, they completely disappear and don’t email their list members again for a long time.  Some marketers are afraid they will be pests. Others just aren’t sure what to say or how to say it.  Whatever the reason for your email silence, you mustn’t be an email Houdini. You’re missing a huge opportunity to bond with your subscribers if you don’t touch base with your list on a regular basis.

Virtue #1: Regularly sending your audience great content

Emailing valuable content builds relationships with your audience members and helps them get to know you.  Send emails to your list with blog post or podcast notifications, quick tips, or other useful content. Then supplement those emails with regular, relevant offers.  And always remember: Your email subscribers wouldn’t have signed up for your list if they weren’t interested in you, your content, and what you have to say. If you provide value, you’re not being a pest.

Sin #2: Panicking when people unsubscribe from your list

Do unsubscribe notifications strike fear in your heart? If so, you’re not alone. This one is a common (and avoidable) sin.  There are a lot of reasons why people unsubscribe from your list, and you don’t need to worry about most of them. Panicking holds you back and may eventually make you hesitant to send emails to your list.

Virtue #2: Remembering that your ideal community members will stay subscribed

People who discover they aren’t a fit for your list might opt out, and when they do, they save you time, money and energy. To combat this fear, you can easily turn off unsubscribe notifications and stop regularly looking in your email service provider to see how many people have left your list.

Sin #3: Over-promoting or under-promoting

If you send too many promotions to your list, your subscribers may become annoyed and less likely to buy from you. On the other hand, if you never send relevant offers, you run the risk of being taken for granted as the “free” person.  Over-promotion and under-promotion are both deadly sins of the email marketing world and should be avoided.

Virtue #3: Striking the perfect balance of publishing valuable content and presenting relevant offers

The best thing you can do for your list is send a balanced mix of high-quality content and regular offers.  Take a look at your email editorial calendar, and make sure promotions and content are both part of your emails over the next few months.

Sin #4: Trying to do too much in one email

Nothing’s worse than an email that includes tons of links that direct subscribers to many different pieces of content, landing pages, and sales offers.  Especially in our increasingly mobile world, we simply can’t overload our readers with too much information (and too many links) in one email.  If you try to do too much in one email, your reader will be more likely to think, “Eh, I’ll read this later” and file your message away in email folder purgatory. There’s a good chance it will never be rescued and read.

Virtue #4: Writing focused emails that include a single, strong call to action

Try to stick with a single call to action in each email, if you can. Want someone to read your latest blog post? Great! Stay focused on that, and include clear and easily clickable links.  If you’re sending out a newsletter and multiple links are unavoidable, make sure each article is clearly labeled so your content is manageable.

Sin #5: Being boring

Dull emails are the ultimate sin. Most of your subscribers get tons of emails every day, so carefully consider what you can do to stand out.  Boring emails get lost in the fray and will be deleted.

Virtue #5: Injecting personality into your emails by using your unique voice

Your subscribers want to get to know you — they want to know what you like, what you hate, and what you stand for.  Don’t be afraid to introduce some individuality into your emails by telling stories, sharing your opinions, or showing a bit of your personal side.  Your subscribers will love it, and they’ll be a lot more likely to read your emails.

Sin #6: Sending out emails that aren’t mobile-friendly

More than 65 percent of emails are now opened on smartphones and tablets. If you’re still sending three-column emails (or other messages that aren’t mobile-friendly), a large portion of your subscribers are having trouble reading your messages.  There’s no excuse for this massive sin in 2016. You simply must be kind to your mobile subscribers.

Virtue #6: Sending single-column emails with large, clickable links

Use a single-column layout, and test your emails on mobile devices to ensure they are easy to navigate and click on.

Sin #7: Neglecting to create a smart, workable email marketing strategy

Many content marketers approach email messages like the task of achieving perfectly cooked pasta — they just throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.  This sin can be deadly for your business. Confusing, overwhelming, or flat-out poorly crafted emails can hurt your website traffic, your next promotion, and your overall reputation — so you should always think before you hit “send.”

Virtue #7: Mapping out your email plan before you hit “send”

I can’t overstate the importance of having an email marketing strategy before you start getting subscribers to opt in to your list.  You need to determine approximately when you’ll be emailing your list, what you’ll be sending, what your goals are, and what your emails will look like. A smart email marketing strategy that yields high open rates is sin-free and attractive to your subscribers.

3 Best Practices for PPC Strategy

This post was originally published on the Leap Clixx marketing agency blog and written by Peter Cartier. Read more at http://www.business2community.com/inbound-marketing/increase-ppc-roi-3-inbound-marketing-best-practices-01435432#2kk6hA0MW0mKTGHW.99

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can be a highly successful and cost-effective way to attract qualified leads and guide them through the buyer's journey. 

According to SearchEngineLand.com, the top 3 PPC ad spots receive more than 40% of clicks on the page which obviously translates to a massive advantage as well as a prime opportunity for businesses facing heavy competition to rank high for popular keyword search terms.

However, simply launching a PPC campaign and hoping that it sweeps you away to a Lead Generation Wonderland probably won’t improve your bottom-line (though it will certainly improve Google’s). That’s because you need to enhance your PPC results with inbound marketing best practices to get the most ROI from your campaign.

Below, we highlight 3 best practices that should be part of your core strategy:

How Inbound Marketing Helps Increase Your PPC Campaign’s ROI

1. Keyword Selection + Buyer Personas

A major element of inbound marketing involves developing buyer personas. These are fictional profiles of your different target market groups that capture their goals, challenges, problems and interests.

In addition to using buyer personas to calibrate and create great content – such as blog posts, eBooks, Infographics, white papers, datasheets, and so on – you can use them to research and select low competition, low cost, yet high impact keywords (a.k.a. long-tail keywords) that will spark your customers’ interest. This can lead to more clicks, more conversions and more sales.

2. Landing Pages + Assets

One of the most common mistakes that businesses make with their PPC campaigns – and also one of the costliest – is that they only drive customers to an existing page on their website (usually their home page).

And while this is not always a mistake, in many situations, it would be far more effective to drive customers to a specially-crafted landing page that offers an inbound marketing asset, such as an eBook. This is because many searchers aren’t ready to buy yet. They’re in the research and discovery phase and the less work they need to do to find what they’re looking for the better.

For example, a customer who searches for “best office relocation company” could be presented with a PPC ad that invites them to download a free eBook, which responds to this inquiry (e.g. “How to Choose the Best Office Relocation Company”).

When they click the ad, instead of being taken to the company’s home page, they’re ushered to a landing page that affirms that they’re “in the right place” and makes it fast and easy for them to download their eBook after filling out a brief form. They get an impressive eBook, and you get their contact information – everyone wins.

3. Retargeting

Retargeting involves pushing specific PPC ads to customers based on their browsing history. For example, someone who visits a website that sells new cars would start seeing Facebook ads (by no coincidence) from companies that sell cars, rent cars, offer car buying information, etc.

Retargeting integrates effectively with inbound marketing because it helps “remind” customers to continue the journey that they recently started. What’s more, this reminder is not an aggressive sales pitch – which would be pointless, because if the customer wanted to buy, they probably would’ve done so already (i.e. nobody “forgets” to buy a car). And since inbound marketing is primarily about informing and influencing customers rather than directly selling to them, it’s the perfect way to re-kindle the relationship.

For example, the aforementioned car shopper can be retargeted with a PPC ad that invites them to download an eBook entitled, “The 5 Things You Must Know BEFORE You Buy a Car!” Or the offer may be an Infographic covering ways to slow down new car value depreciation. Neither of these are sales pitches, yet they achieve the goal of pulling the customer back into the relationship – one that they’ll hopefully move forward and ultimately lead to making a purchase in the near future.

The Bottom Line

For many businesses – particularly small ones that have well-heeled competitors with huge online marketing budgets – PPC campaigns can be highly effective and surprisingly affordable. But the campaigns have to integrate with inbound marketing. When that happens, businesses spend less money and less time to get more customers and more sales. And isn’t that the point of all this marketing in the first place?

Navneet Kaushal, CEO of PageTraffic, Discusses Best Ways to Master SEO in 2016

AJ Agrawal: What do you see as the single most important emerging trend in SEO in 2016?

Navneet Kaushal: That’s easy. Clearly, mobile optimization will take front and center stage this year. Marketers who neglect to specifically target people using mobile devices will not only be limiting their reach, but they’ll also be effectively committing SEO suicide. We’re at the point now where mobile devices have surpassed desktop devices in terms of the number of users. It’s more important than ever to ensure that part of your marketing reach includes people on mobile devices. Further, there are more searches  on mobile devices now than there are on desktop devices. That means search engine marketers are going to have to be certain that their sites are responsive. Otherwise, users will get frustrated with unprofessional or unusable output and visit another site – probably a competitor’s.

Agrawal: How do you see social media impacting SEO this year?

Kaushal: I think it’s going to be challenging for new sites to keep pace with social media. When people on the Internet can get their news in real time from Twitter Moments, they’re likely to prefer that channel than to a blog with popups and annoying banner ads. That could put pressure on news sites that optimize their stories for search engine results. It’s likely that people will just go to social media to get their news as opposed to browsing around the web as they did years ago. Also, social media influence will diminish the number of backlinks that some sites receive from one-man-shop blogs. That could hurt their rank in the search engine results pages.

Agrawal: How else do you think social media will impact SEO?

Kaushal: You’re going to see more social media updates in search results. Google is already working with Twitter to show relevant information in its search results. Right now, when you search for a keyword that’s getting buzz on Twitter, you’ll see relevant tweets towards the top of the first page. That first page, as any SEO professional knows, is prime digital real estate and could limit the reach of search results near the top, but below the tweets. Beyond that, though, you can expect to see updates from other social media channels in the search results. That will make things even more challenging for brands that are hoping to get traffic from search engine marketing efforts.

Agrawal: What kinds of technological innovations will have an impact on SEO?

Kaushal: There’s almost certainly going to be more of a focus on micro-local search. I say “micro-local” search because it really goes beyond local search. Local search involves a geographic region, such as a city or town. However, micro-local search takes it a step further to a particular place of business or even a street corner. Thanks to the emergence of wearable technology and advancements in the Google algorithm, expect to see people search for terms on mobile devices that return results promoting a retail outlet within walking distance. Digital marketers who ignore geo-targeting do so at their own risk.

Agrawal: What else is going to complicate things for digital marketers?

Kaushal: Simply put: competition. Blogs are being created every day. Businesses, recognizing the value of content marketing, are going to post more content and, probably, use longform content to give themselves a boost in the search results. All of that competition is more pressure for SEO professionals who are trying to rank content.

Agrawal: What can digital marketers do in the face of that competition?

Kaushal: There are a couple of things they can do. First, they can practice some micro-niche targeting. Instead of optimizing results for keywords that have broad appeal, they should employ keywords relevant to a very specific subset of people within their target market. Also, they should optimize for longtail keywords that don’t have as much competition.  SEO, like every other type of technology, is constantly changing. If you just stick to “old school” methods, you’ll be throwing away some great opportunities to reach people based on emerging trends.

SEO analytics tool - Botify raises Series A round

French startup Botify just raised a $7.2 million Series A round from Indivest and Ventech. Botify uses a SaaS approach to make it as seamless as possible to crawl websites and give users insights into their search engine optimization strategy.  Botify gives users data so that they can make optimizations. Botify is an analytics tool to designed to support SEO assumptions with tangible numbers. Currently, the company as more than 300 customers, including BlaBlaCar, eBay, Expedia and Farfetch.

Botify has three different components. First, it developed a server-based crawler. The company then gives users an overview of your website’s structure.  Then, it also gives users more information about Google’s or Bing’s indexing crawlers. The company knows which page was crawled by search engines. Finally, Botify gives uses a complete dashboard with detailed reports about their SEO strategy.

There are two things that make Botify unique. Botify targets big companies that rely heavily on search engine traffic — e-commerce, transportation, media, etc. Bringing more traffic to these websites is a great way to create new customers.  In other words, improving SEO isn’t just something nice to do, it’s a good way to generate purchases.  Naturally, anything that can improve a company’s bottom line is a good thing.  Also, there is the recurring pricing model. Botify costs between $569 and $999 per month. With 300 customers already, you can see that the startup has a healthy business model.  New features should help Botify retain these customers by bringing them more value.