Snapchat is Growing Up

Snapchat was once the new kid on the block, putting pressure on big social media rivals such as Facebook and Instagram.  However, the company's rise in popularity has forced it to go head-to-head with all the largest social media platforms and compete for the one thing everyone is gunning for:  attention on mobile phones.

Snapchat has been expanding its services to match those of its competitors.  This week, the company released 6 new features to makes its app more relevant, including allowing people to make phone calls, send audio messages and send video messages.  Snapchat also now providdes the ability to conduct video calls like a private livestream.

These new capability launches follow Snapchat's decision two years ago to let people replay videos.  These decisions have been made in an attempt to keep people within their ecosystem longer.  Competitors such as Instagram and Facebook are expanding their services offers with the same intent.  For example, Instagram just announced that videos on its platform can now be up to 60 seconds in length.

Who will win the ultimate fight for users' attention?

Bots Costing Advertisers

It is a well known trend that companies are shifting their marketing dollars from traditional advertising to digital advertising.  The benefits of digital marketing are vast:  more targeted ads, extensive analytics, higher ROI, etc.  However, there is an offsetting cost that is costing advertisers significant money:  bots.  Bots are website robots that run automatic tasks such as clicking on advertisements.  This in turn causes companies to pay for these "fake" clicks with no promise of a return.

How much are these bots costing advertisers?  According to a study released by the Outdoor Advertising Association of America, bot fraud is stealing ~$7B from advertisers.  Display media with CPMs over $10 received 39% more bot traffic than lower CPM media and media with CPMs over $15 had a 173% high bot rate.

http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/report-bot-fraud-costs-advertisers-7-2-billion-worldwide/636920

Marketers Find You at 2:00am

Traditionally, advertisers market to consumers during the day.  According to studies, 70% of marketing emails are sent during "normal" hours while 30% during off-peak hours.  The typical online marketing pattern has been posting to social media in the morning, at lunch time and at night when people leave work.  However, mobile and social media advertising are testing a new approach:  late night.   Marketers are posting advertisements across youtube, facebook, instagram, etc. in the "after hours" in an attempt to get in front of people when they do not have the usual distractions that they face during the day.  Additionally, studies have indicated that people are more prone to make purchases late in the evening.  Marketers are also testing the concept of advertising to people before going to sleep, in an attempt to persuade them to take actions upon waking.  For example, Taco Bell is testing breakfast advertisements in the evening to see if they can break into the morning routines of people.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/marketers-find-you-at-2-00-a-m-1460570019

Raining ROI for Digital Marketers

Achieving attractive ROIs was a challenging proposition for digital marketers just a few years go.  Today, the story has changed for digital marketers according to a recent study released by Salesforce.com.  The survey results indicated that "ROI is everywhere" now.

The digital marketers surveyed (4,000 across roles and regions) reported ROI in:

1. Social media marketing:  75% of respondents reporting social media generating ROI, with Facebook noted as the most effective social channel.
2. Email marketing:  8 out of 10 respondents said email is core to their business marketing strategy.  50% said it is directly related to their primary revenue source.
3. Mobile marketing:  77% of markets who use movile as part of their marketing strategy said mobile actively generates ROI.

Given the strong returns digital marketing is generating and the central role it plays in a company's marketing strategy, 72% of respondents said they will increase their spending on marketing tools and technology in the next two years.

http://www.cmswire.com/digital-marketing/salesforce-its-raining-roi-for-digital-marketers/

Tips for Developing the Perfect Social Media Strategy

Social media has become a crucial avenue for reaching potential customers.  When developing a social strategy, it is important to always keep in mind what your customer wants.  According to the below article, start with asking 3 questions when deciding your outreach:

1. Do you want to build closer relationships with customers and brand advocates in order to solicit word of mouth recommendations?
2. Do you want to support customers in a location they prefer to hang out?
3. Do you want to drive sales and referrals?

Once your direction is set, it is recommended to be aware of these 6 tips:

1. Keep it simple:  Make core ideas stand out
2. Convey your expertise:  Generate content that shows what you can offer
3. Create relevant content:  Make sure content is up-to-date and regular
4. Be consistent
5. Be honest
6. Use links:  Transfer readers to further information or link them to another social media platform that they can further share your content on

https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=25016902#editor/target=post;postID=8841537389025667747

Ad-blocking racket kills $32B display advertising business?

Before add blockers were developed, I remember being constantly annoyed with the endless random pop ups that would inundate my online experience.  Add blockers have significantly decreased the annoyance factor of unwanted ads and improved user experiences online.  However, have ad blocks gone too far in blocking display ads?  Rather than ad blockers making the decision as to what ads should reach consumers, shouldn't the consumer make the decision?  Consumers should have ability to define what is acceptable to them.  

The ad blocking industry should be regulated in order to give consumers and publishers the ability to chose the type of content they want to receive and promote.  Consumers are losing out on content, their favorite Web sites are in jeopardy, and the industry is suffering from it.  Excessive ad blocking results in overly aggressive advertising as publishers do everything they can to reach the consumer.  

http://www.luxurydaily.com/ad-blocking-racket-kills-32b-display-advertising-business/

The 5 best digital marketing success stories of 2015

The 5 best digital marketing success stories of 2015

https://www.internetretailer.com/2016/02/26/5-best-digital-marketing-success-stories-2015

The retailers holding the five top spots, according to Internet Retailer’s just-released Digital Marketing Report Series, range in size from the very large to the very small.

Digital ad spending among online retailers reached $12.91 billion last year—far outpacing the spend from any other industry, according to research firm eMarketer. Paid search spending among retailers ranked in the Internet Retailer Top 1000 alone reached $278.9 million per month in 2015—up 21.2% from 2014.

Of course those figures don’t account for other spending on digital marketing, including fees to marketing and consulting firms, and the significant amounts of staff time and focus online retailers spend on crafting marketing content for email campaigns or social media posts, or optimizing their sites to make them more appealing to search engine crawlers.

The time and money online retailers are spending on digital marketing are benefiting some more than others, according to the recently released 2016 Digital Marketing Report Series. The report, available as a four-part downloadable PDF, scores retailers on effectiveness in the main channels of online marketing—social media, email, and paid and natural search.

Internet Retailer factored in 36 metrics to arrive at its scores, including such data points as the percentage of site traffic a retailer attracts from the various channels, monthly paid search spend, monthly volume of emails sent to consumers, and the size and relative engagement of the merchant’s following on social networks.

Here are the merchants that ranked No. 1 in each channel, and a brief summary of how they earned that rank.

Best Email Marketer in E-Commerce: Beyond the Rack (Score: 93 out of 100)

• Discount flash-sale retailer Beyond the Rack gets 16.2% of its website trafficfrom customers clicking on its email campaigns, according to web traffic measurement firm SimilarWeb. This is nearly five times the average among Top 500 retailers (which get 2.6% of their traffic from email), and is a clear sign that the content of its emails are resonating with consumers enough to make them click.
• Beyond the Rack sends on average of 65 e-mail campaigns to new signups per month—that’s more than two per day and the eighth highest among the Top 500, according to a study conducted for Internet Retailer by email marketing firm Listrak. Clearly, the e-retailer is communicating often to customers, and that suggests the merchant places a high premium on email to drive sales.
• Beyond the Rack has three of the four key email marketing features Internet Retailer and Listrak tracked for this report. First, the merchant’s emails are optimized for mobile devices. Second, it has a shopping cart abandonment program in place, meaning if customers are on the site, add an item to their cart then leave, the retailer will send them an email encouraging them to complete their purchase. Third, the retailer has a pop-up box on its home page that asks new website visitors for their email address.

Best Natural Search Marketer in E-Commerce: Amazon (Score: 80 out of 100)

• Amazon dominates organic search, and the leading web retailer by sales earns its highest points in this score from the sheer number of visits per month it garners from natural search results—a number that basically blows away the competition. More than 55 million Amazon.com visits per month stem from organic search results, according to SimilarWeb, more than 662 times as many as the median among Top 500 retailers (84,000) and seven times as many as the second-highest number, Walmart.com’s 7.7 million visits per month from natural search results.
• In an Internet Retailer analysis of Alexa Inc. data on top keyword searches and the retailers garnering the highest rankings on those searches, Amazon scored in the top five—and often No. 1—in 14 of the 15 merchandise categories tracked.

Best Paid Search Marketer in E-Commerce: The New York Times Co. (Score:  78 out of 100)

• The New York Times Co., which sells gifts, photos and art on its online store, spent around $1.3 million monthly on paid search last year, according to estimates provided to Internet Retailer by search marketing firm AdGooroo. That’s nowhere close to the roughly $38 million Amazon.com Inc. spent, but it is 48 times as high as the median spend among Top 1000 retailers ($27,141) when including those that don’t invest in paid search. The merchant, therefore, earned a high score on this metric.
• The merchant gets 19.9% of its site traffic from paid search ads, which translates to roughly 24.8 million monthly visits that stem from consumers clicking onto its site from a paid search ad—again, far ahead of the average. The scoring system tracks visits from paid search ads to retailers’ home pages, and for the New York Times Store, that happens to be NYTimes.com. That means some of those clicks may be from consumers clicking on ads with the intent of reading news, and not buying products.

Best Social Media Marketer in E-Commerce: Amazon.com Inc. (Score: 88 out of 100)

• The primary reason for Amazon’s lead in social media comes its sheer size and ability to direct large volumes of shoppers onto its site from social networks, even with only modest efforts. While the merchant gets only 1.5% of its website traffic from social networks, according to SimilarWeb, that equates to roughly 14 million visits to Amazon.com from consumers clicking from organic or paid content on Facebook, Twitter or one of the other large social networks.
• Those 14 million visits, Internet Retailer estimates, lead to roughly $1.32 billion in direct online sales from social networks last year—far and away the largest among retailers tracked in this report.
• Amazon also earns high scores for its large following on Facebook—it had more than 26 million Likes as of mid-2015, the seventh highest behind such big-name brands and entertainment companies as Starbucks Corp., Discovery Channel, Wal-Mart, WWE Inc., National Basketball Association, and Victoria’s Secret.
• Amazon’s followers are also more engaged than other retailers, and that helped its score as well. For example, on average, each post on Facebook earns more than 4,791 comments, 7,303 shares, and 213,000 Likes, according to social media measurement firm Unmetric—far ahead of other retailers tracked.  Each post on Twitter is retweeted on average 274 times.

Digital Media's Consumption Growth Slowing

Digital Media's Consumption Growth Slowing; So Is Traditional's Decline

Digital media’s consumption growth rate in the U.S. continued to slow last year, while the rate of decline in traditional media use (dominated by television, of course) also slowed.

Driven by higher smartphone and tablet penetration, new gaming console launches, and the draw of major political and sporting events, U.S. digital media usage rose 7.1%, to 18 hours per week, in 2015, according to PQ Media’s Global Consumer Media Usage & Exposure Forecast 2015-19.

That's lower than the 9.6% increase in digital media usage in 2014 (to 16.8 hours per week). Further, the projected compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2015 through 2019 -- 7.3% -- is barely above 2015’s growth rate. That CAGR will result in an average 23.9 hours per week of digital media consumption by 2019.

Digital media’s share of total U.S. media usage increased to 27.7% last year -- up from 25.9% in 2014, and from 17.3% back in 2009.

Mobile audio led usage growth last year, surging 33.5%. Increasing use of Spotify and other streaming music subscription services was a major driver, according to Patrick Quinn, president and COO of PQ Media. Mobile video’s usage growth was nearly as robust, at 26.9%

Meanwhile, traditional media usage in the U.S. decreased 2.4% in 2015, to 46.8 hours per week, after declining 2.1% in 2014, to 47.9 hours. (Television consumption is, of course, historically higher in even years, due to Olympics and election coverage.)

Despite continued growth of digital media consumption, traditional media’s rate of decline will not accelerate, according to the report.

Instead, the projection is for traditional consumption to decline at a compound annual rate of 2.1% through 2019, bringing usage hours per week for these media down to 43.1. (In comparison, in 2009, total traditional media hours consumed per week were 53.4.)

Television’s Continuing Evolution
Traditional media brands’ digital extensions are an increasingly important driver of online and mobile media usage.

“This is driving up overall media usage, as more content is repurposed for digital devices, such as Internet and mobile video streaming of TV programs and movies, online radio stations, Web-based multiplayer editions of console videogames, and mobile newspaper and magazine apps,” points out Quinn.

Within the overall media landscape, television continues to be the leading combined traditional and digital media “silo,” and aggressive players like NBCUniversal-Comcast are “strongly positioned” for continued growth, Quinn notes.

Driven by the expansion of devices for accessing television programming, including OTT video, laptop computers and smartphones -- as well as scripted shows created for non-broadcast channels -- total broadcast and cable television consumption (through traditional sets and all other devices) reached 32.4 hours per week last year, representing 50.2% of all U.S. media consumption.

By 2017, the increased availability of user-generated and other media content, combined with younger demographics watching less TV, will result in total television usage accounting for less than half of all U.S. media consumption (49.8%, or 32.8 hours per week) for the first time since 1953, when radio was still the dominant media choice, reports Quinn.

Still, PQ Media projects that traditional TV viewing will continue to dominate through 2019.

Utilizing Digital Market Techniques Via The Cloud

http://cloudtweaks.com/2016/02/cloud-marketing-techniques/

Digital Marketing Trends

In the past, trends in the exceptionally fast-paced digital marketing arena have been quickly adopted or abandoned, keeping marketers and consumers on their toes. 2016 promises a similarly expeditious temperament, with a few new digital marketing offerings taking center stage. According to Gartner’s recent research into Digital Marketing Hubs, brands plan to increase digital commerce investment as they attempt to connect business revenue with digital marketing spend through “digitally led business models.” Thanks in part to the convergence of multimedia, superior machine learning, and the quest for more personalized marketing, this year’s trends and innovations promise even more excitement.

(Infographic Source: Gartner)

Custom-Made Advertising

A top-performing trend right now, advertising made to fit seamlessly into a website’s general content is more a necessity than novelty. The impact on user experience is significant, particularly when one brand purchases all of the advertising space in one area. But the concept often causes contention as ads often ‘trick’ readers into believing they’re part of the standard content. Furthermore, this type of advertising is often perceived negatively as paid endorsements. Objective media is likely to lose any credibility should their audience ever believe they are solely ‘in it for the money’, so the use of advertising that appears to be an extension of the publishing brand should always be executed prudently, if at all.

Personalization

(Image Source: Shutterstock)

When driven by data, personalization allows marketers to better communicate with their audiences through especially relevant content. This promises greater response rates from correctly targeted consumers and fewer marketing withdrawals thanks to a drop in SPAM-like communications hitting the wrong people. Video portals is a particular area in which increasingly personalized experiences are being created, with some marketers dynamically reconfiguring videos based on a user’s activity. 2016 is sure to see the continued personalization of content marketing, web marketing, and video marketing, with vendors amalgamating trends and offering refined content.

Video: Interactive & Live

The use of interactive video is gaining momentum, allowing marketers the opportunity to develop one on one communications with prospective customers. Viewers have the chance to tailor their experiences, choosing preferred content paths, all the time increasing marketers’ insight. And live video is providing more intimate experiences for customers and companies worlds apart. Customers are provided more engaging and positive experiences with the brands they use, thus heightening the sense of personalization.

The Cloud & Marketing

As evidenced in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, the top tools take into account today’s not-so-secret weapon: Cloud. Digital marketing in the cloud promises all of the essential digital marketing tools, but with the flexibility and speed to ensure to-the-minute solutions are always available and personally customizable. Though Adobe, Marketo, Oracle, and Salesforce dominate, competition in the sector is stiff, fortuitously guaranteeing today’s digital marketers user-friendly, cost-effective, and cutting-edge possibilities.

How Internet of Things Will Change Digital Marketing

http://www.business2community.com/digital-marketing/internet-things-will-change-digital-marketing-01441101

Internet of things pretty much dominated the digital space during last year and has now left everyone waiting to see its significant results across our homes, workplaces, streets as well as across the digital marketing platforms. The Internet of Things technology brings with it the power to change everything physical around us and people have now started to take the entire connectivity factor of IoT more seriously than ever. With billions of our devices connected over the same cloud network, it is needless to say that there is going to be an effect of IoT seen across all the digital marketing platforms as well. So how exactly do you think that the Internet of Things technology can benefit the field of digital marketing?

How exactly will Internet of Things transform Digital Marketing

Over the last few years, it was predicted that there is going to be a hike in the number of things that are going to be available online that will also be able to share information among one another in the real time, which of course we can see happening around us! This not only helps in cutting down the cost of connectivity; rather it also makes sure that there is ample conservation of resources, such as fuel and energy.

If you have already heard about Amazon tide buttons, then you can easily make out the difference in resources spent both during online as well as offline shopping. Using these Amazon tide buttons, users can simply press a button on their connected smart phone which will trigger an action of placing order for any commodity that is going out of stock in your home! This means that you not only were capable of making the optimum use of the Internet of Things technology, rather you were also able to save a lot of your time, energy as well as fuel which you would have spent otherwise.

 
Turning products into interactive media

Another advantage of Internet of Things in digital marketing is that once it comes into force, all products available on the internet will become a platform of direct relationship/ interaction with the respective customer base. This means that IoT will encourage the idea of digital marketing since all customers will be capable of forming a direct connection with the products that they are using without the intervention from any third-party vendor or merchant. There will also never arise the need for machine- generated bills as well as vouchers as the digital aspects of marketing will take charge over our traditional shopping means.

In the coming times, we will also be able to scan our products for procuring its ingredients and user manuals, which is nothing short of a boon for coming generations. In fact, there are already several new Internet of Things companies which are focusing on the creation of such 1:1 customer relationship by digitalizing products so that their information can be retrieved by its users.

 
Products capable of shifting ecosystems

Providing any particular product with the power to shift across ecosystems/ categories on its own is one of the most sought- after advantages of IoT meeting digital marketing. This will help isolated products in moving to data centres/ apps where there are higher scopes of getting accepted by the customers; hence creating more value and a better brand name for itself.

Presenting products as a service

All physical products, when combined with a digital layer, will help in developing a personalized as well as interactive bond with its consumers. These consumers can interact with the brand without any third- party intervention and hence get a chance to put their preferences in the front seat in an attempt to improve their experience with any particular product/ service.

The more interactive our products and digital marketing becomes, the more benefits of Internet of Things we can reap in the coming times.