Viral Content and its Impacts on Business

Last Saturday, I was talking to an acquaintance, who works in a content marketing company, about viral content in digital media. As we went over recent examples such as the Salt Bae and Hunter College Subway Graduation, it intrigued me to research on what makes a content viral. Here are the highlights:

Positive content

For a content to be viral, it must be shared by people, and positive contents are more likely and easier to be shared. Note that both Salt Bae and Hunter College viral videos are intended to leave viewers with positive feelings.

Content which evokes high emotion arousal

People tend to share content which are relate-able and awe-inspiring. In the subway graduation video, everyone can relate to the student’s misfortune (and frustration towards MTA) and appreciate the support of other strangers in the subway car.

Practical and actionable content

People like to share practical content to their friends and family as it may make them feel smart and useful to their circle. In addition, people like to imitate cool and trendy actions. For those who remember #IceBucketChallenge, the viral challenge was tagged by 2.4 million videos and successfully raised over $100M dollars to support the ALS Association¹.

Now, how is this information useful for business school students? Businesses have lots to gain from viral content created by both consumers and businesses. First, viral content can reach wider audience with the same or less cost as targeted content. This wider audience consists of people who may not realize that they need the product until they are exposed to the viral content. In addition, viral content can open doors for global expansion; for example, leveraging his online sensation, Chef Nusret Gökçe is opening his Turkish steak house restaurant in London.

Next, viral content is an excellent opportunity for businesses to build their reputation. In the example of Hunter College, which ended up arranging a private ceremony for the nursing student who was stuck in the subway. It was a good PR opportunity for Hunter College as it enters new school year.

In summary, there are common ingredients of viral contents such as positivity, high emotion arousal, and practicality. In order for businesses to leverage viral content, they have to ensure that there is strong relevancy between the content and the brand.

Sources:
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/science-of-virality/

https://socialtriggers.com/craft-contagious-content/
https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/blog/2017-4-4-the-5-best-social-media-campaigns-of-2017-so-far

¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Bucket_Challenge

Email Marketing: The Past, Present & Future

From an internal messaging tool in 1971, email has evolved to become a powerful channel in digital marketing. With an average of 20.5 billion emails sent daily to 2.6 active email accounts, email marketing generates roughly $19.3 billion dollars and provides tough competition to social media channels.

See the infographic on the left for the evolution of email technology allowing it to be a powerful marketing channel.

In fact, the evolution of email marketing doesn’t stop here. Here are few factors which could have significant impact on email marketing in the future:

·      Machine Learning & Personalization
Study shows that subscribers respond better to email when the content is catered to their personal interests and needs. As we learned in our Marketing Strategy course, a simple change in addressing customers using their first names results in better Click-Through-Rate. In the real world, machine learning techniques are used to analyze customers’ past activity with a brand to provide personalized content and recommendation. See an example email from Birchbox below.

·      Multi-device Support
Increased popularity of mobile devices, wearables and smart appliances is all set to pave the way for innovations in email marketing integration. Imagine the day when an email is sent to your refrigerator to remind you to stock up on juices and where you can get them.

·      Voice Interfaces

Voice-based search has been gaining a lot of traction this year. With established players such as Apple Siri, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Microsoft Corona, email marketing may have a different form in the future, where it puts renewed emphasis on plain text and voice-html so that brands can create messaging that’s designed to be read aloud.

In summary, email marketing has never been more alive. While email is a well-established technology, further development on how users consume information will impact the content and format of emails in the future.

Sources:

http://www.emailmonks.com/infographics/evolution-of-emails/

http://marketingland.com/12-stages-email-marketings-evolution-past-future-201718

https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/34146/7-excellent-examples-of-email-personalization-in-action.aspx#sm.00010m2el0qsxe2zrtt2n0pg4lc3v

The Art of PPC: Why users click them

In the last class session, we learned about SEO and how it is used to improve page ranking in organic search result. As Prof. Kagan mentioned, another search engine marketing strategy is Pay-Per-Click (PPC). This blog post provides insights into PPC and possible explanations on why users click them.

What is PPC? According to www.wordstream.com/ppc, PPC is a model of internet marketing in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. Essentially, it is a way of buying visits to your site. The most popular form of PPC is Google AdWords due to Google’s popularity. The million-dollar question is, “Do people clicks on sponsored results?”. As a user who rarely clicks on sponsored results, the answer is surprising. See the infographic below provided by www.wordstream.com.

I was intrigued by the result and attempted to understand the reasons behind it. Below are few reasons why I think PPC is getting the clicks:

• The real estate of the Search Engine Result Page is skewed towards PPC

As we can see from the search result page, almost 85% of the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) is filled with sponsored results.

• Google’s purely commercial model makes it easy for users to click on PPC

Why click on texts when the items you’re looking for show up with images and prices?

• Bottom of the page Ads

Moving on to the next ? Perhaps these sponsored results are what you’re looking for.

In summary, it is by designed to have users click on sponsored results. After all, Google’s AdWords provides the bulk of Google’s advertising revenue. 

Sources:

• http://www.wordstream.com/articles/google-ads
•  https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/how-google-is-killing-organic-search.html

SEO Trend in 2017

With every passing year, SEO continues to evolve with the development of new search algorithm and rules. Below are some of SEO trends to look out for in 2017:

Structured data markup. This is to provide “featured snippet” on Google’s search engine result page (SERP). See example below on “How to clear cookie cache on Mac”.

Mobile search optimization. In May 2015, Google reported that mobile searches had surpassed desktop searches on its search engine. Thus, it is critical to have more responsive pages on mobile browsers. One practical solution is integration of Acceleration Mobile Pages (AMP). AMP pages only use one-eighth of data to load content compared to average webpages.

Cross-channel marketing. These days, users are browsing products using multiple channels i.e. mobile, desktop, and tablet. It is important for marketers to create a consistent brand presence across these channels, so that users can move seamlessly between devices and platforms to interact with the site.

Voice search. According to marketingland.com, teens are the highest users of voice search with 59% using voice search while watching TV and 57% while with friends. This high usage number is no surprise given recent improvements in voice recognition technology. In fact, in SMX West 2016, Google’s director of conversational search noted that speech recognition error rate has been reduced to just 8% today.

Short branded links. One way to share one’s content is via ‘short branded links’. This is particularly relevant on Twitter, which imposes 140 characters limit. Compared to generic short links e.g. http://bit.ly/12UR34df, branded links are easier to remember and offer signal of quality on the destination webpage.

Branded links have been used by Fortune 500 companies – Pepsi (pep.si), Starbucks (sbux.co). Furthermore, research shows that using branded links increase CTR by 35%.

Sources:
http://searchengineland.com/seo-trends-prepare-2017-263710

https://thenextweb.com/insider/2017/01/11/5-search-engine-optimization-trends-for-2017/#.tnw_o49jzVRp

http://www.seonick.net/7-simple-seo-tricks-to-improve-your-2016-seo/