Is your brand agile enough in the world of digital marketing?

I found a posting that talks about an importance of ‘in-moment’ marketing in the digital world nowadays rather than the simple concept of channel-based marketing. It also shares a best practice from  a recent campaign for beauty brand Luxola. I think Luxola's campaign was very brilliant and innovative digital campaign. 

See the original post below or http://www.marketing-interactive.com/events/is-your-brand-agile-enough-in-the-world-of-digital-marketing/ 

Is your brand agile enough in the world of digital marketing?

Digital marketing has become a test of agility for brands.

What does that mean in a practical way? Brands should be able to easily engage with high-value audiences by delivering relevant ads across search, social, mobile and display platforms. Everyday there are millions of data signals on the web that enable brands to fine-tune and target their digital marketing to the best possible audience.

It’s time to evolve beyond the concept of channel-based marketing into ‘in-moment’ marketing.  In each potential interaction with a customer or prospect there are many parallel signals available to a marketer to decide whether to engage, and if so, using what ad for a certain price. Brands need a responsive digital marketing solution that can intelligently respond to the varied and complex ways that customers interact with their products, services and offerings.

Today’s customer journey is infinitely varied and complex. But it feels easy, even intuitive. Customers navigate from point A to point Z in seconds, by clicking, tapping and swiping. Marketers want to be relevant, engaging, and increase the opportunity to secure a purchase in these moments, and yet, cannot move as freely.

They are often held back by their ability to scale their spend across the web and by the challenge of moving to a dynamic audience targeting program. The key is to automate, optimise, and recalibrate marketing investments to maximise opportunity and performance.

In a recent campaign for beauty brand Luxola, the Kenshoo team in Singapore was faced with the challenge of developing a digital marketing model that would spur online growth. The main focus was to overhaul its digital program to drive more e-commerce sales.

Luxola wanted to intelligently automate and adjust bids and budgets throughout the day to optimise conversions. It stripped away all existing manual elements of its digital marketing operations, enabling the brand to focus on maximising its revenue and return on investment.

On the Facebook advertising side, Luxola deployed the Kenshoo Infinity Suite to leverage cross-channel insights and improve its social ads targeting.  Luxola was also able to create personalised ads for consumers who had added products to their shopping cart but hadn’t completed the purchase. By re-targeting that audience with a 20% discount voucher, the brand was able to drive more purchases.

The social advertising program resulted in a 27% decrease in acquisition costs per checkout and a 52% rise on ROI in the six months of the campaign.

Luxola also transformed its search marketing by implementing Kenshoo’s Scheduled Actions, enabling it to launch search ads at a particular time, customise its bid strategies, and focus on meeting specific campaign goals. It succeeded in increasing click-through rates by 100%, lowering its cost-per-click by 5%, and increasing its ROI by 30%.

This is the new age of digital marketing, and automation and algorithms are driving that change.  In addition, new publishers and advertising formats are emerging every quarter, and the existing platforms are providing more solutions aimed at making it easier to navigate the digital world.

The latest platform for marketers is Instagram. The photo-sharing site is quickly proving to be one of the best mobile platforms to reach consumers and drive conversions, making it the platform to watch next year in Southeast Asia.

Those brands that move swiftly and show agility in their marketing  to capitalise on this opportunity and others that will likely emerge will secure an advantage over their competitors. 

The Best Digital Marketing Tactics From the Current Presidential Candidates

As the election heats up, candidates like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are using innovative digital marketing tactics.

Even though the general election is more than 350 days away, the campaigns have already invested a lot of time and money into their digital marketing. Out of the field of 17 candidates, four candidates stood out this year with the best digital marketing strategies.

This is not a political endorsement of any candidate or their campaigns, simply a few observations looking through the lens of digital marketing and media.

Bernie Sanders

The Sanders campaign excels in its use of longform content. On Bernie Sanders'website, the issues tab has in-depth content on 16 issues central to Sanders' campaign. Well-written and informative, this content addresses these issues and provides concrete steps that Sanders would take to solve them. Sanders uses statistics to substantiate his claims, further boosting his credibility. His campaign team also created a page on the website that aggregates news stories relevant to Sanders' policies, called Democracy Daily. The content on this page is not generated by Sanders' team or even about him; instead, it focuses on the issues he cares about and provides easy social sharing options.

Carly Fiorina

The SuperPAC CARLY for America, which supports Carly Fiorina's candidacy, uses post-click marketing to engage voters. During the last two GOP debates, the team at CARLY for America used an interactive post-click campaign to create an engaging experience for users to voice their opinions. Once visitors arrived to the home page, they could enter the interactive experience and answer questions on Fiorina's policies, their intent to vote, and more. Once they finished the questions, they unlocked a free bumper sticker. This campaign collected valuable voter data while educating voters on Fiorina's stances. No one else in the field has used post-click marketing, and as a result these campaigns helped Fiorina stand out at critical times in the campaign.

Hillary Clinton

Clinton's use of social media is arguably the most effective out of all the candidates. She has a massive following: 4 million Twitter followers (the most out of all candidates), 1.1 million Facebook likes (the most out of the Democrats), and 217K Instagram followers (leading the Democrats and second to only Trump). She announced her campaign using YouTube and Twitter, and also has LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and Snapchat accounts. Clinton's Instagram account stands out - she uses trending hashtags like #tbt, she demonstrates a sense of humor in her posts, and she has let social influencers like Katy Perry take over her account for a day. Clinton also used Periscope to livestream campaign events and created a campaign-inspired Spotify playlist, showing that she's willing to embrace the newest social media marketing platforms.

Donald Trump

Trump has dominated news coverage ever since he announced he was running for president. His presence in mainstream news outlets has dramatically boosted his brand awareness as a candidate, and not just as a businessman and reality TV star. ROI on press is positive, and Trump has outpaced the other candidates from both parties in the press. As of the end of the summer, he had been mentioned 132,077 times in the press - almost 30,000 times more than Hillary Clinton and 62,420 more than Jeb Bush, the closest Republican at the time. When Trump hosted Saturday Night Live 9.3 million viewers tuned in - SNL's largest audience since 2013. Thus far, much of Trump's digital marketing efforts have cost his campaign nothing while propelling him forward in the polls.

From a collective online spend that's topping $1 billion, the one thing we know for certain is that the 2016 presidential election digital campaign is going down in the books.

Article link: http://www.inc.com/jonathan-lacoste/the-best-digital-marketing-tactics-from-the-current-presidential-candidates.html

What’s the ROI of Digital Marketing?

As you see above, defining the ROI of digital marketing is a challenge.

Measuring it is easy, once you have the right definition.

What’s a Tweet worth?

People ask me all the time: What’s a social post worth?

My answer?

Likely NOTHING!

Yeah, I know. Lots of folks disagree with me, but, as noted in the infographic below, the answer is — it depends.

Does that mean digital marketing doesn’t work?

Absolutely NOT!

The value of digital marketing

First, the value of a Tweet or Like or Pin depends on the size of your network — the larger the network, the greater the value of a social post. A network of 16,000 Twitter followers requires only 6 Tweets to return a value equal to the average US car payment– $450.

But the story doesn’t end there.

Size is only one element relevant to the value of digital marketing. Engagement is a much bigger reflection of value. A highly engaged network shares much of what you post across social networks. All those Likes, RT, Re-Pins, etc add up to huge amplification of your message. Thus, a single Tweet, Post, Pin gets magnified to a much larger audience than the original network.

Owned versus earned media

In digital marketing, we refer to this as owned versus earned media. Owned media belongs to the brand and represents their Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, etc. Earned media represents the amplification you earn through motivating followers to share your posts.

Engagement comes from posting the “right” content — content your followers find valuable. Valuable content:

• Solves a problem
• Entertains
• Respects your followers

In addition, the right content is posted on a consistent basis when your target audience is likely online. Earned media is likely the most valuable media and much cheaper than paid media (online advertising).

Why is earned media so valuable?

Earned media has so much value because it has the appearance of objectivity. Think about it, we’ve all become so jaded by advertising we barely listen when brands tout their benefits. But, when friends tell us something, we believe them. A Tweet from a friend we believe.

When your followers share your content, they not only amplify your message, they de-commercialize it — make it more believable because it comes from friends rather than the brand. The value of earned media is so valuable, Facebook even use it to support sponsored posts by showing you which friends like the brand.

So, it’s not just the size of your network, it’s how engaged they are.

Influencers

Some brands pay influencers by offering money or free product (hence the offers made to influencers with high Klout scores). I personally think paying influencers is a bad practice as it calls their motivations for sharing content into question and, if used frequently, dilutes their value. I’d encourage brands to develop relationships with influencers rather than paying them.

But, putting the motivation issue aside, evaluating influencers needs more than just assessing the size of their network, and evaluating how well they do in terms of engagement.

Building engagement

If engagement is more valuable than the size of a social network, an important question is: How do you build engagement?

Valuable content

Again, the best trick to building engagement is producing valuable content on a consistent basis. Value comes in the eyes of your target market. Sometimes that’s creating content that solves a problem — like this. In other cases, content that’s interesting, unusual, funny, surprising, or emotionally charged drives engagement.

My advice to new clients is to try various types of content, then see what works best with your target audience by monitoring both reach and engagement for each post. Likely, some combination of entertaining and problem-solving content works best.

Be sure to avoid over promotion. A recent guest post argued for the 80/20 principle where content is concerned — 80% valuable, 20% promotional . I actually try for something closer to 10% promotional content.

2-way conversations

You need to engage with followers if you expect them to engage with you. Thank them when they share your content and when they say something nice about your brand.

User generated content

Treat your network as a valuable part of your social network and get them to generate content.

Ask their opinions about your brand, hold contests to encourage them to generate content about your brand, provide tools to create a true community around your brand.

Engage employees

Employees are likely the best advocates for your brand. Not only can they act as evangelists, they can share unique perspectives about your brand that consumers find engaging. For instance, someone working to make the product might share a typical day at work, a buyer might talk about how he/ she builds relationships with suppliers, a sales person might share about interactions with retailers.

Sharing insider knowledge makes consumers feel like they’re getting a backstage tour of your operation and makes them more engaged with your brand.

Article link:  http://www.business2community.com/infographics/whats-the-roi-of-digital-marketing-infographic-01378451#6lqoz7jKf5XDlVBs.99

Here Are 9 Fascinating Digital Marketing Stats From the Past Week

It's interesting to find out that it's not just me who has not posted anything on Facebook for the past three month. I still doubt about rosy outlook of utilizing wearable devices for SNS in near future. What do you think? Below is the article:



Facebook lurkers and wearables users are increasing

We've selected nine of the most interesting digital marketing stats from the past seven days. Enjoy them below:

1. Facebook users are becoming lurkers. A new GlobalWebIndex report said 34 percent of Facebook users posted a status update during the third quarter—meaning 66 percent didn't post one at all during a three-month period. That's down from 50 percent of users updating their Facebook statuses during the same period the year before. No big deal or canary in the proverbial coal mine? Stay tuned.

2.The same GlobalWebIndex study found that while Facebook users were using an average of 2.5 social networks in 2012, that number has since increased to 4.3.

3. Here is one more stat from GlobalWebIndex, which interviewed 200,000 consumers across 34 markets for its Q3 study. While Facebook has the biggest worldwide membership of any social platform, it is not the most-visited social platform—YouTube is. YouTube is No. 1 for visitation, with 81 percent of respondents having gone to the video platform at least once last quarter compared to Facebook's 80 percent.

4. By the end of this year, 39.5 million U.S. adults will have utilized wearables such as smartwatches and fitness trackers, a 58 percent jump over last year, according to data from eMarketer, which expects wearables usage to more than double by 2018 to 81.7 million users.

5. Forty-one percent of those surveyed by Social Media Link say it takes between one and four digital product reviews to get them to buy.

6. Invoca found that 58 percent of Gen Y consumers consider themselves to be addicted to their smartphones. The company's mobile-minded report also said that 66 percent of millennials are likely to contact a business by placing a call versus 22 percent who are likely to use social media.

7. Mobile might be the future of marketing, but Wall Street could be more impressed. Digi-Capital's report late last week revealed that "mobile Internet" stocks were down 15 percent during the third quarter.

8. GfK and the Institute for International Research (IIR) surveyed more than 700 market researchers  and suppliers. When asked what their single most important source of data for insights creation will be two years from now, 30 percent of clients and 27 percent of suppliers chose "consumer-specific data collected passively." The most common example for "passive data" is the use of cookies on a consumer's computer to capture Internet browsing history.

9. Coca-Cola recently tested Facebook's new promo unit Slideshow in Kenya and Nigeria for two weeks and reached 2 million consumers, raising brand awareness by 10 pointsfor its Coke Studio Africa project. Instead of video, the ad unit uses photo slideshows. It is targeted at emerging markets where consumers have older phones—not iPhones or Androids—and sometimes have slower connection speeds. The ads also use less data than videos. (Conserving data is a bigger issue in places like Africa than it is in other markets.)

The below article talks about how to launch successful holiday online campaign.
Regardless of seasonal or holidays, the key principles of a successful digital campaign seem to be still the same.


URL: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/251532

The 6 Musts of a Successful Holiday Marketing Campaign

OCTOBER 12, 2015

Fall is upon us, with the holidays waiting right around the corner. Holidays are a perfect time to connect with your prospects and celebrate those feelings of camaraderie, gratitude and interconnectedness. Marketers can leverage these feelings to deeply engage with their customers on an emotional level and build trust and credibility.

The holidays are a popular time to market, so it’s important to put a lot of thought into your holiday marketing campaign. You want to appeal to everyday emotions while also standing out from the crowd. There’s a lot of spending that occurs during the holidays -- the trick is to get your customers to spend with you and not your competitors. Here are six musts of a successful holiday marketing campaign:

1. Plan a personalized campaign.

Instead of hoping your customers will be seen with your products and spread the word, why not take the next step and let them physically insert themselves into your ad? OfficeMax saw an enormous boon using this strategy with the “Elf Yourself” social-media campaign. The site drew 193 million visits and continues to evolve with new characters, dances and animated graphics.

Related: A 6-Step Checklist to Get Your Online Business Ready for the Holiday Season

Personalize your own ad campaign by allowing customers to get involved and put themselves in the mix. The more innovative and fun the experience is, the more likely they are to share it on social media and beyond.

2. Get your staff involved.

Studies show there is only a 2 to 8 percent overlap between employee and company social networks. In other words, getting your staff involved can exponentially boost your marketing campaign’s effectiveness. Some companies feature their staffs directly in commercials, while others simply encourage their employees to participate and share the personalized campaign. However you choose to do it, you can’t afford to ignore your employees when planning your holiday marketing strategy.

3. Hit key emotions with your campaign.

People tend to think their decision-making is purely rational, but the truth is all people make decisions emotionally before justifying them rationally. As a result, a successful holiday marketing campaign should be an emotional one. Focus on the feelings that fit the season, including friendship, “home for the holidays,” good will, giving back and gratitude.

TD Bank’s #MakeTodayMatter campaign featured these emotions, and as a result generated 3.5 million hits and gained media coveragearound the world.

4. Create an easy-to-share campaign.

While it’s hard to predict what will go viral, it’s possible to maximize your chances. One important element is that the campaign is easy to share. Consider that 74 percent of consumers rely on word of mouth as the top influencer of their purchasing decisions. When someone receives your campaign from a friend, it means so much more than seeing it in a commercial or Facebook ad. 

Related: Why Dynamic Content Will Deliver for the Marketing Industry

Some ways to make content shareable include adding social icons to emails, allowing recipients to share with a single click and creating engaging tweets that are begging to be shared.

5. Include online deals.

People like to make a big deal out of Cyber Monday, but millions of Americans shop online on Black Friday. In 2014, $1.5 billion was spent online on Black Friday alone. Online networks make it easy to feature deals with fun campaigns such as countdowns, contests and games. Don’t discount the power of email when reaching out to customers and advertising your deals both online and off for tempting in-store deals.

6. Create a consistent experience across all channels.

Multi-channel marketing is the norm for professionals from retailers to insurance agents. However, it’s crucial to create a consistent user experience regardless of which channels your customers are using. But there’s more to it than recreating your branding and color scheme on social media. The deals you’re offering should also stay consistent. Train your staff to fluently understand your individual deals, online-only offers and any restrictions that apply.

The holidays are the perfect time to build an emotional bond with your customers. The positive feelings of family, giving and gratitude are already at the forefront of the season and your marketing campaign can piggyback on those emotions. In addition, personalize your campaign to your customers and get your staff involved. With a sharable campaign, hot online deals and a consistent multi-channel experience, you’ll be positioned for maximum holiday-season success.

How do you plan to market this holiday season? Share your thoughts in the comments comments section below.

10 Ways to Turn Online Marketing Into In-Store Sales

It may be somewhat easy to increase your brand awareness through the investment of digital marketing. However, driving in-store sales using digital marketing always has been an unsolved homework for organizations. The below article points out that how difficult it is to develop strategies that do more than just build brand awareness. It also articulates that organizations must provide more targeted and personalized messaging in order to successfully drive in-store sales using digital marketing.

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10 Ways to Turn Online Marketing Into In-Store Sales

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The best way to increase your in-store sales is to boost your online messaging, new research finds.

Businesses that are able to best align their marketing strategies to leverage technology that delivers local, shopper-specific, actionable content will see in-store sales increase, according to study from the Altimeter Group and Cofactor.

Many businesses, however, have difficulty developing strategies that do more than just build brand awareness. In order to successfully drive in-store sales using digital marketing, organizations must provide more targeted and personalized messaging, the research reveals.

Rebecca Lieb, the study's author and an industry analyst for Altimeter Group, said digital marketing strategies should be local, personal and contextually relevant to draw in shoppers.

"'Local' must be redefined to include more than mere location," Lieb wrote in the study. "It now encompasses context and connectivity: who, what and when, in addition to where."

While sending messages to consumers when they are near a store can help draw them inside, messages that target shoppers based on who they are, and the previous actions they have taken are far more effective in getting them to spend money once they enter, Lieb said.

To often, businesses aren't doing a good enough job blending all of their digital marketing efforts, the research revealed. The study shows that many organizations have different teams working on mobile marketing, while others work on social media marketing, with still others focusing on Web marketing. 

"The social, Web, mobile and e-commerce teams all operate on their own terms, with their own creative content, budgets and strategies," Lieb wrote. "However, customers want to be recognized as unique individuals across all touch points with a brand, and the only way to fulfill that demand is to coordinate the efforts of all channel silos with a single, unified strategy."

Although brands typically craft messages designed to drive shoppers into stores, these companies often lack a clear strategy for doing so effectively, especially when it comes to coordinating all the channels of communication. The research discovered that while 60 percent of the brands surveyed created digital messages to drive in-store purchases, just 37 percent of those organizations had a strategy to provide a unified customer experience in the path from online information to in-store purchase.

According the research, businesses that fail to better unify their digital strategy run the risks not fulfilling the needs of their customers, frustrating loyal customers and seeing in-store foot traffic drop.

To help businesses create a cohesive digital marketing strategy that increases in-store sales, the research outlines several steps that need to be taken:

Give shoppers a reason to shop in-store: You want to incentivize shoppers to visit your business. This can be done in a myriad of ways, including by offering options to order online and pick up in the store, along with in-store-only coupons and sales.

Be mobile: When creating your content strategy, you are best served by focusing on the mobile experience. Few channels are better than mobile at reach and right-time-location targeting.

Online to offline: This type of thinking and planning with your digital strategy is criticalwhen mapping the customer journey.

Rethink print ads: Print ads today can provide more value when they are used in conjunction with other types of communication. Boost the value of print ads by spreading the content across digital channels in order to reach customers where they are actually gathering information to make purchasing decisions.

Unify digital efforts: You need to break down the silos between departments and digital channels. Doing so makes it easier to create a unified strategy for the best customer experience.

Coordinate offline and online: Plan for online content with similar teams and processes that are in place for delivering offline content. This enables a more coordinated strategy.

Measure what works: It is critical to implement a method of tracking your digital marketing success. Rather than using metrics like impressions, you should focus your measurements on specific customer actions.

Use loyalty data: Leveraging this information allows you to personalize and contextualize your messaging.

Define local at every stage: When creating targeted local messaging, think about more than just geographical areas. Consider how local can be applied to who, what and when, in addition to where.

Be tactful: Although you might have a treasure trove of great digital campaigns you want to launch, you don't want to turn off customers by constantly bombarding them with personalized messaging.

The study was based on interviews with individuals from 20 consumer packaged goods and retail brands, as well as agencies that are responsible for or influence advertising or content strategy within their organizations. The research also included data from a survey of 500 consumer packaged goods and retail brands concerning the topics of digital advertising strategy, maturity and challenges. 

URL: http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/8434-online-marketing-tips.html

Is it really fare to bundle google services into Android?

Well, there must be reasons why Google(Alphabet Inc.) has been sharing Android platform to vendors for free. One of them is definitely a taking advantage of pre-installation of google services including Google search. On the other hand, the below article make us to re-think about who should be allowed to enjoy the benefits from pre-installation.

Boosting local search engine, Russia tells Google to unbundle services from Android

Russian authorities have accused Google of violating the country’s anti-trust regulations by having Google services pre-installed on its Android-based phones and tablets. The Russian Federal Anti-Monopoly Service ruled that Android users should be able to buy a phone pre-loaded with the Google Play store and without any of Google's other products.

The ruling gives a boost to Yandex, a Russian search engine that competes with Google in key areas. Today, the public company's stock climbed for a few hours after the news of the decision.

Earlier this year, Yandex asked Russian authorities to order Google to unbundle Google services from Android. According to Bloomberg, Yandex has been losing market share to Google rapidly in recent months. "Yandex’s share of Russian searches fell to 50 percent last month compared with 54 percent in January of 2014, according to LiveInternet.ru, while Google’s share rose to almost 42 percent from 34 percent,” the news outlet reported.

Russia’s Federal Anti-Monopoly Service said that it would issue detailed instructions to Google within the next 10 days on how to proceed. In a statement to Ars, a Google spokesperson said, "We haven't yet received the ruling. When we do we will study it and determine our next steps."

Google has faced similar anti-trust accusations in Europe where regulators say that Google unfairly favors its own comparison shopping tool. This April, European Union regulators also launched an investigation into Android to see if Google "abused a possible dominant position in the field of operating systems, applications, and services for smart mobile devices.” Google has vehemently rejected the EU’s characterization of its business.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/09/boosting-local-search-engine-russia-tells-google-to-unbundle-services-from-android/