How big data will change marketing

Article discuss five main ways big data will change digital marketing industry. 

• Large enterprises will be the first to  adopt bigtechnologies, but small and medium businesses will adopt faster and benefit more.
• Marketing spend will become much more accurate and targeted by leveraging insights and having account-based strategy
• data-driven methodologies to target high-value prospects will be widely adopted by salespeople. They will also use it to keep existing customers on board, and expand existing opportunities.
• Sophisticated algorithms will dramatically improve sales forecast.
• Real-time sales data visualization and decision making tools will intensify sales competition further.

Article

How IoT will change marketing

The article discuss how IoT will change all aspects of marketing. IoT enables three things - smart and sensor-embedded devices and software, machines as users of information, all connected through the Internet. Let's see how IoT will influence all four traditional aspects of marketing:

• Product - With IoT companies will have enormous amount of data on how customers use products. Manufacturers can use information to get crowd-based feedback in real time and marketers can use it to to better satisfy needs (like repair in time, suggesting optimal product for geography/environment etc.)
• Price - removing friction in the systems and lowering defects rate will low the price. Also IoT will allow price discrimination as "different prices to be dynamically offered to different buyers based on their purchase and credit history, loyalty, and importance to the company"
• Distribution - this space will be disrupted the least compare to smartphone experience, because main things just need location and screen (location-based marketing etc), which already exists with smartphones.
• Promotion - Main change is that customer gets marketing messages from everything - starting from Smart TV and adjustable billboards ending with fridges and other home appliances.

Business Insider article

Where Virtual Reality will help marketers the most

Some unexpected companies like Unilever and started to think about using VR in future marketing campaigns. The article discuss main areas where VR can make a big difference. They found out three main areas:

1. Travel industry. Before traveling to location/hotel etc you can go to a model of the place, check it out and make decisions more consciously.
2. High-value consumer items. customers can use "try before you buy" approach for jewelry, expensive furniture. It will not replace showrooms completely, because it will satisfy only visual experience - you still can't touch it, however it's definitely a big step.
3. Complex creative services - like apartments design, etc. It's the most obvious are but potential for having opportunity to see architecture project "with your own eyes" is incredible

Article

New video Ad technology and content marketing

The article basically describes new video Ad technology - Outstream. Compare to traditional pre-roll technology, outstream doesn't "rely on a windows player to run" - instead video just plays at "natural breaks" and when user scrolls down it just stops. After video is seen it disappears. Interesting thing about the article though is that it is sponsored by company "YuMe" and it was so organically integrated into search result so i found it only in the middle of the article. Definetly brands spend more and more on content marketing.

Business Insider Article

How to adjust your digital marketing strategy for 2016?

Forbes published interesting article on key trends in digital marketing for 2016. here are main main trends they expect and how to handle them:

1. Content should be more interactive - nobody reads long articles anymore. Forbes suggest have more content like "beautiful, Buzzfeed-like" quizzes, surveys, calculators etc. They recommend a tool Kuia for that (not sure whether Kuia paid for it or they sincerely believe in that)
2. Content should be created and distributed not only by yourself. The only way to be notice is using user-generated content and distribution. Recommended tool is Narrow
3. "Pay to play" is now used by more and more networks. Your posts are lost - only 16% of your FB fans are getting your news into their feed, and even lower number for Twitter - 10%. Solution - create some very custom content and share it with paying to networks
4. You have to have influence marketing. Again not to be lost in your customers' feed - find partners-leaders in your space, you don't compete with and spread your message through them.
5. Google SEO can't be your only source of leads anymore. And this is true for two reasons - more and more SERP real estate is going towards paid ads; and second Google is now changing its algorithm constantly. So you have to focus on traffic acquisition from multiple reliable sources.
6. "Having personalized conversations with each customer across multiple channels is now a must". Customers are now expecting having same dialogue with them across all platforms. Suggested tool to use - Autopilot, Customer

Article on Forbes

Affiliate marketing is already as big as email

There is a new report on performance-based digital marketing by BI. Here are key takeaways:

• 15% of the digital media industry's revenue now comes from affiliate marketing
• Affiliate marketing now accounts for 16% of US e-commerce orders - same level as email, outperforming social and display (still after SEO, SEM and Direct)
• 74% of of US shoppers say they visit two to three nonretail websites before completing a purchase

Business Insider article

Winners and losers of Cyber Monday

Who did perform  best and worst in last sales

Winners (selected list read more in the article)

• Online shopping - +18% on cyber Monday compare to previous year
• Mobile shopping - 36% of orders came from mobile and tablests (vs 30% last year)
• Amazon - +22% vs last year

Losers (selected list read more in the article)

• Physical shopping - Foot traffic fell on Black Friday
• Target.com - "The site went down a few times on Monday, and shoppers experienced tons of delays while trying to place popular items into their virtual shopping carts."
• Kmart - there were way less traffic than they expected

The article

community management in social media marketing

How community management should change?

• 1-2 pieces of content per week is enough
• make videos: video becoming most important form of content
• community managers are no longer primary source of content
• listen to consumers' comments
• stay true to brand identity
• don't blindly trust engagements reports on social - they might promise nothing

Guardian article

Apple & Facebook vs Google & Web

Google and the Web: How does the web earns money to exist? Well, most of the web with original content earns by ads. And who owns that market? Google does with its Doubleclick (Adserver), which is serving ads for every major publisher; with its AdX (programmatic apps, that follow you around the web). So basically Google owns the Web. So how would you disrupt Google's hegemony if you are Apple or Facebook? Fight not in the current market, but in potential spaces
Apple and the Device: What does Apple have? Mobile. It would be nice for them to take mobile ads further away from Google; and with people shifting more and more to mobile they can seriously damage competitor. AppleiOS 9 has its own AdBlock! They finally delivered what everyone wants - now you can "Plug that RSS firehose straight into your optic nerve and surf surf surf 'til you die". But, of course, it blocks all the ads, except ones, Apple wants you to watch. So now if you want to run ads, which often means survive - you need to partner with Apple.
Facebook and the app: What does Facebook have? Eyeballs inside their app. And of course, they want to show only Ads they want, and they  did their Ads unblockable inside the app.
Google vs Apple vs Facebook - who will win?: it seems that it doesn't matter for ordinary user. However"small publisher on the web ... can't invest in proprietary platform distribution, native advertising, and the type of media wining-and-dining it takes to secure favorable distribution deals on proprietary platforms. It is going to be a bloodbath of independent media". So how will they adapt? Read the full article below for free (yet):

Article by The Verge - Welcome to hell

Mobile Apps vs SEO - is there a threat?

Simon Khalaf said that "SEO, SEM, and blue links "are gone" on mobile because people are not using browsers". Indeed if we look at statistics we can see that about 90% of mobile time people actually spend inside apps, not browser. How that could affect impact of SEO? If we have a look on several years ago Search Engines were main point of entry for searching information, and now people look for restaurants in Yelp/Zagat/Foursquare, answers to sophisticated questions in Quora, start prefer voice recognition interfaces such as Siri and Facebook's assistant, which might be directly linked to services bypassing Search engines. Is that a real threat for SEO?

On the one hand, according to Sastry Rachakonda, CEO of iQuanti, a digital marketing company that specializes in search, it will just change the way search is performed on mobile, because now search engine can collect much more data (i.e. Geotagging, other apps running, screen etc) and thus provide with maximum relevant result possible.

On the other hand Google definitely sees that as something worth attention trying to incorporate apps to search results by indexing them (i.e if you look for smth in your Phone you can get directly to the page in the app you were looking for, not just main screen of the app), introducing now on tap for Android, which allows search engine to understand what do you see on your phone right now and act accordingly (i.e. if you ask who is the singer listening to a music, it will understand what are you talking about). So Google is definitely aware of the threat and is trying to mitigate the risks.

However we are probably still transiting in a better way of information organization

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