The 6 Biggest Takeaways From Amazon’s Dash Button

Here is an article about Amazon's Dash Button, where the author lists out a few takeaways from the new product.

While some folks may find the product/service to be intrusive, I actually do not mind a little extra convenience that's being offered.  With work already consuming a significant portion of my time, having that extra bit of convenience to get things when I need them is really valuable.  It is either that, or make those late evening trips to nearby Walgreens.  So I think it is a very smart marketing strategy from Amazon to connect the digital eCommerce world with the everyday needs.

Full article here:

Amazon's Dash Button is set to take the future of e-commerce by storm. What can we expect from the new technology?

When Amazon unveiled its new Dash Button, which places an order for a specific product with just one press — people thought it was an April Fool’s joke. But while the promotional video Amazon released felt a bit playful, and the concept seemed maybe a tad ridiculous, the truth of the matter is that the Dash Button is real, and it’s well on its way to becoming a household item.

While everyone’s been out arguing about whether or not the button’s ever going to catch on, scarcely anyone has stopped to really pick the thing apart to create some useful takeaways. For instance, is there such a thing too much convenience? Or does the Dash Button demonstrate the opposite? With a product like the Dash Button it’s important for us to step back and take a deeper look, because the biggest insights are often hidden in the details. As it turns out, some of the most downplayed aspects of this new technology might actually tell us most about Amazon’s intentions and, in turn, the future of e-commerce.

1. The Biggest Takeaway Is…Not the Button

While it’s been rolled out as a revolutionary new product in its own right, Amazon has a very clear-cut growth plan for its Dash Button. With the Dash Replenishment Service, which Amazon unveiled alongside the Button itself, they provide an API for smart devices. This means that eventually, any smart device will be able to implement an "order more" option within its own interface.

While the Amazon Dash Button is a great first step toward this, the Dash Replenishment API represents the real future of the Amazon Dash Button, and I’m excited to see how brands will take advantage of it in the coming months.

2. There’s No Pricing Display

The design of Amazon’s Dash Button is brilliant in that you can easily understand its function just by looking at it. All it takes is one glance at the bold branding and prominent white circle to know that this is clearly a "push-to-order" button.

Conspicuously missing from the Dash Button, though, is any sort of pricing display. It may have been more expensive to produce, but Amazon could have easily included a price readout to show how much the item’s going to cost the customer. Still, the lack of display is actually a huge win for Amazon and retailers who want to encourage impulse buys. By sending customers the details of their transactions after the fact, it allows sellers to convert first, and answer questions later.

3. Mastering the Recurring Purchase

One of the most striking features of the Amazon Dash Button is how specific it is. For starters, the entire button is boldly branded, meaning that frequent users of the button will become loyal to one particular business whether they like it or not. This specificity is important for other reasons, too: In its ad messaging, Amazon doubles down on recurring minor purchases, and even goes so far as to name off the specific scenarios where it sees the button working best, namely, the "kitchen, bath, laundry, or anywhere you store your favorite products."

In addition to encouraging more regular purchases, the focus on recurring transactions has a second implication for Amazon — it could pave the way for all-new brand partnerships and revenue opportunities.

4. Knocking Down the Barriers to Entry

It’s unclear whether the Amazon Dash Button will cost money in the future, but for now, Amazon Prime members can get up to three of them for no charge. This extremely low barrier of entry makes the Dash Button at least worth trying out for Prime users who have products they like to replenish on a regular basis. This will be a key factor for these types of systems in the future – the lower the entry point, the more likely they’ll be to catch on.

5. Friction Can Always Get Lower

A lot can happen in a year’s time, and it’s worth noting that last year Amazon went for something similar to the Dash Button when it announced its AmazonFresh Dash system. Similar to the Dash Button, the device allowed users to place quick orders from home, but its functionality was entirely different. First of all, users had to scan or speak their desired items into the device, which would then add them to an online shopping list. From there, the customer would log into their Amazon account and place their final order.

While this would seem to make the shopping-from-home process extremely easy, the Amazon Dash Button is a sign that perhaps the original Dash device wasn’t quite frictionless enough. So there’s a lesson: Regardless of how much we streamline the purchasing process, there can always be less transactional friction.

6. Dash Button as Stepping Stone

As of now, it’s difficult for me to view the Dash Button as anything but a first step toward something greater. The button itself is full of little flaws: For instance, most recurring purchases, like toilet paper or shampoo or toothpaste, are for items that you need right now. There will be many situations in which even an expedited delivery won’t be fast enough for the customer, and for those situations, the button will fail. The better application is for smart devices. In the use case they offer for the Dash Replenishment Service, Amazon talks up a coffee maker that tracks the amount of beans, and offers a "buy more beans" button for customers when the supply is running low.

Even though this tech is already available for retailers, it seems to undermine the usefulness of the button itself. Still, if there’s one thing we take from Amazon’s new Dash Button — it’s the potential that this tech can offer when we pair it with smart devices in the home.

Four Technologies That Are Powering Storymaking

According to an article published this week in AdvertisingAge,  here are four technologies that are powering storymaking and how brands can use them:




1. Video streaming:  Streaming technologies can be used for broadcast purposes, but it's a superior experience when the person or brand doing the streaming starts responding to the audience, and even changing the flow of the footage.

2. Wearables: wearable devices where data is generated from people's bodies (heartbeat, gait, brainwaves, etc.). These devices are personal and can be thought of as extention of people's bodies.

3. Virtual reality: Immersive creative experiences such as those possible through Oculus Rift, Magic Leap and other technologies could be very controlled and rigid, or they could be totally different for each person every time. Even more straightforward approaches like touring a distant hotel property or getting backstage access at a concert could turn into stories that are co-created with participants.

4. Messaging apps: Messaging apps can deliver generic branded experiences that are the same for all users. Different messaging apps allow marketers to offer branded stickers and other content that can lead to customized experiences. For example, a chat bot can be created within a messaging app to allow people for example request stories on various topics such as politics and technology.

Ways Content Marketing Will Change in 2015

Like the 29.6% of respondents to a Smart Insights survey, I too believe (I know) content marketing will be the biggest part of marketing for my company in 2015.

One of the major changes highlighted in the article is an enhanced focus on personalization. With the increased volume and depth of data attributable to your profile following you around the internet, marketers now have the ability to personalize content to your specific interests/profile.  At my company, we just evaluated a couple of automated marketing tools (Pardot and SharpSpring) that have the ability to reverse look up a users IP address, identify when you visit our website, download a whitepaper, click on our ads, etc.  Either of these platforms will pull data from social media sites and elsewhere into our CRM tool and build a full profile so we can then personalize emails, landing pages, and other messages they receive.

A second change mentioned in the article is "better use of visual content" - both videos and infographics - since these mediums typically perform better than static text.  We learned in class that 2015 would be the year of video content, so this article supports that point.  While video may not make sense (at this point) for my firm, we definitely will be increasing our use of infographics (and graphics in general).

Email marketing

Christian Lowe Blog Post - 4/10/2015 Essential for a company to achieve its goals of increasing its user base as well as user engagement levels is to source a robust list of emails of individuals with interests aligned with the company's core product offerings. Once the company has compiled this list, it will be able to construct and implement a series of test email campaigns to identify the correct messaging to employ for specific customer segments. The goal is to identify which messaging provides the most statistically significant lift in conversion rates as well as in engagement levels. The first step in this process is for the company to answer the following key questions: 1. How can we grow our email marketing list? 2. What's the best way to improve our email marketing deliverability? 3. How can we make social media applications like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, GooglePlus, etc. part of our email marketing. For marketers who don't have the option to test these offline tactics, consider implementing parallel tactics online, such as: It can often be difficult in generating a list of emails from which to conduct an email campaign. With approximately 72% of US consumers identifying email marketing as the number one way they’d prefer to receive permission-based promotions from businesses , it is essential for the company to compile a comprehensive email list as possible. 1. Require email to create an account on website and/or register mobile app 2. Registration with incentive on website 3. Promote content via social media that requires email registration to access 4. Option to opt into email when viewing mobile app content 5. Paid mobile ads A company can focus its subscriber growth strategy both online and offline, it depends on how its customers prefer to interact with your brand. Marketers needs to know more information about its customers, namely where they are, how they prefer to consumer media and then refine its strategies to connect with them. An important consideration in building its list is to understand the important and increasing role that mobile is playing in how customers consume media (i.e. read emails). It has been an increasing trend that consumers are buying smartphones at a rapid pace, with approximately 50% of consumers now reading email on their smartphones. The use of mobile devices is particularly important to the company based on the very nature of the company’s product offering, which is in and of itself best experienced in the mobile environment. Therefore, the Company marketing team must understand which smartphones their subscribers (and potential subscribers) are using to ensure that their emails are compatible and responsive to the mobile experience. As such, the company should be focused on designing its emails to convey the right messaging that will improve click-through rates on a mobile device. Furthermore, the marketers should focus on reaching its customers through email improve its key metrics of conversion and engagement because email has been proven to be the preferred vehicle for consumers to receive messaging. Consumers prefer email marketing because they are in control and they trust brands to respect their preferences. And they’re in control of email because marketers have rightfully given them that control, allowing customers to manage preferences and unsubscribes. Consumers get special offers that they actually want—more so than other channels—and trust that these messages are from the brand. The industry has become so trustworthy and spam is declining because internet service providers have put smarter algorithms in place to block spam and unwanted emails. The bottom line is consumers trust the inbox because marketers respect their permission. There aren’t many other media that allow consumers to manage communication with brands like that.

Advertising to Kids

Article talks about ads being shown on the YouTube Kids app and how it is wrong.  Now YouTube says that it disallows ads for specific things like food and beverages but those that are upset with YouTube are saying they do show ads for candy and toys.  Either way, it does seem to be a bit much that there are ads being shown to kids at such a young age on the app.  However, is there really a difference vs. what they are being shown on TVSaturday mornings?  I am not sure when the last time you watched a children’s cartoon show on a weekend (or even something on the Disney channel on a week night) but they are jam-packed with ads and they are all targeted at kids.  To me, it feels like the majority of the 30 minute time block is ads.   So, while I see where these folks are coming from, I also can see why they might be wrong (full disclosure: I have not seen the ads shown on the app).

 

Source: http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/07/technology/youtube-kids-app/index.html

The Enterprise Software Powering Digital Marketing

In 2012 Gartner released an oft-repeated prediction that CMO's will spend more on IT than CIOs by 2017. It is a well-founded prediction, as growth in digital marketing has ramped up dramatically over the past few years. Over the next few years, double-digit CAGR in spending on marketing technology is predicted, supporting this assertion.

With all of the activity in digital marketing today, it is crazy to think that Omniture was the only marketing technology company valued over $1 billion just  a few years ago. While no marketing-specific "decacorns" have emerged, several companies have racked up serious valuations in private markets, acquisitions, and IPO's, attesting to the growth in this area.

Marketing automation has led the way, with companies like ExactTarget and Pardot (B2C and B2B marketing automation companies, respectively) being acquired by Salesforce and Responsys and Eloqua being bought by Oracle. I have personal experience selling ExactTarget and Pardot through my role at Salesforce, and experience using Eloqua in my previous roles at Dell and Quest Software.

These technologies make connecting sales and marketing so easy that any company not using these tools (or something similar) is putting itself at a gross disadvantage. For example, using either Pardot or Eloqua, a company can automatically capture inquiries from its website, assign a lead score based on the user's activity (and past history with the company), and route to the appropriate sales rep based on location, size, industry, etc. These tools can also handle things like automated drip email campaigns, freeing up marketing staff from manually managing tasks like this.

Outside of the ego-fueled battle for supremacy in the marketing and CRM technology market between Oracle and Salesforce, many other technologies of great potential are emerging. Newcomers are building businesses on predictive analytics, 1:1 marketing (personalization), and optimizing tracking/targeting.

There is huge potential to leverage these technologies to transform things like customer acquisition cost, customer satisfaction, loyalty, and other key marketing metrics. If I could give any piece of advice of to marketers today, it would be to spend a little less time reading AdWeek and a little more time reading TechCrunch. There's a good chance that tomorrow's headline about a marketing startup landing a Series A could have a tremendous impact on their job in the coming years.



Source: http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/03/theres-a-10-billion-opportunity-as-marketing-hits-the-big-time/

Digital Marketing in the Internet of Things

Marketing has become more complex very quickly in the last 2 decades. We went from worrying about how to make clever and funny commercial to being worried about how our ads and message is consumed across multiple platforms and screens. With the arrival of apple watch the landscape grows only more complex.

Apple watch may not be as ground breaking as the iPhone, but it does provide another device and screen for marketers to worry about. It is not just another screen that is increasing the complexity it is our interaction with the additional device. The use case for an Apple watch is different from our phones and tablets... it is even different from other wearable devices such as fitBit.

The review of the apple watch hints that not all companies have figured out how to build an app for this new channel and I am sure it will take some time before people perfect it just like it took a while for iPhone apps to reach their full potential. I am also sure that some marketers are going to completely miss how to advertise on this channel but it will be interesting to see who will be the first to get it right and how they do it.

http://venturebeat.com/2015/04/08/the-initial-apple-watch-reviews-are-quietly-brutal/

Evolution of the newspaper business model

Savvy newspapers have finally realized their business models need to change and simply relying on driving users to their site to generate clicks and impressions is not nearly enough. The Chicago Tribune understands they have creative talent capable of producing content that can be used to help marketers. Marketers may understand the power of a great story, but journalists know how to tell a great story. The fusion and collaboration of these two professions can be quite powerful and help marketers solve the problem of consistently coming up with great content.

This article also briefly  touches on the issue of the separation of editorial and advertising during our last class. The Chicago Tribune seems to be taking the high road on this topic, but this article highlights how easily news sources can blur the lines.


http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/breaking/ct-tribune-digital-marketing-0401-biz-20150331-story.html#page=1

Swiping on Tinder will now get you a Bud Light Ad

Tinder ran it's first video ads on Thursday.  The first brand to place the ads is Bud Light, promoting its "Whatever USA" campaign.  Right now, the companies are experimenting with different video lengths.

For Anheuser-Busch Inbev this may make sense.  They have been making a big digital marketing push with it's "Whatever USA" campaign.  The campaign lets followers on social media compete for a an invitation to a boozy party in "Whatever USA".  The Tinder ads lead users to the website where they can enter to win.

Tinder has been increasingly forming relationships with brands. For example, TV shows, like Fox's "The Mindy Project," have run promotions on the app.  Cleverly, they built faux profiles of its lead characters.  Bud Light's ads, however, are not meant to look like dating profiles on the app.  

Check out the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FW-5y1fCL8
Artilce here: http://adage.com/article/digital/tinder-launches-paid-ads-bud-light-s-usa/297906/

How to leverage video for your company

As part of the latest trend towards video, the question as to why and how to exploit video content - and to what end emerges? What do companies have to gain from this trend?

Seeing this as less than obvious i thought worthwhile to explore where the opportunities lay. what exactly does a marketing video look like? Ultimately, it's not just limited to an ad that can make be placed everywhere. Rather, the opportunity appears to be broader - emphasizing opportunities to engage with existing and potential customers via tutorials, webinar videos, reviews, public service announcements of all varieties, culture, and testimonials, and lastly via social media to detail such as instagram.

Perhaps the broader question is how companies can leverage video to create a responsive environment, through which consumers will opt to engage, respond, and add content of their own.


 http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2308065/8-video-types-to-add-to-your-content-marketing

Facebook video traffic overtaking youtube

The latest trend towards video can be seen in the shift towards video by Facebook, which saw its traffic towards native uploads exceed that of youtube content in january, making links to youtube posts a declining portion of its overall traffic. there appears on an ongoing challenge to grab market share on who is hosting and pushing up the most traffic.

along the same lines, facebook has also illustrated its commitment to video content, going to the extent to prioritize the content in the 'news feed' functionality. the purpose here is to clearly emphasize the opportunity.

taking video to the next level, facebook appears poised to push video into colloboration, a first for one of the major sites, in an effort to encourage greater sharing of video content. it appears all of the sites see video as an emerging winning trend in social media. i'm not so sure however,


http://www.socialbakers.com/blog/2351-the-rise-of-social-video-in-2015

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kathleenchaykowski/2015/04/01/facebook-lets-friends-collaborate-on-videos-with-latest-app-riff/

The Age of YOU: the Future of Business Is Personal

Last month, the worldly renowned brand consultancy firm, Interbrand announced their list of the 100 Best Global Brands. With it, the company also declared that the future of business is personal. The Age of You has arrived. See the full article on the website.

On a short 1.5-minute clip, Interbrand's Global CEO Jez Frampton congratulates the top 100 brands and addresses the increasingly complicated nature of building brands in today's minutely transforming society. He says, "It's not just about having a great idea, a great identity, fantastic communications. Nowadays it's about building a tight, seamless experience -- an ecosystem if you'd like."

That is, the Age of You signifies customers' increasing expectations on getting personalized services. Frampton calls this the "mecosystem."

As soon as I saw this, I instantly thought -- digital marketing! Digital marketing strategies actualize the mecosystem in businesses through tactics that target intent-driven searches and activities. But how is this manageable to YOUR business? And how does this affect YOU as a customer?

Watching Videos Watching You

How many people, if given the option, would allow an advertiser to control their computer cameras?

A good few, apparently -- between .5 and 3 percent.  Virool, a company built to help companies make their videos go viral, has launched a new tool that allows the emotional reaction of audiences while they watch ads through customer lenses.



Here's how it works: an Internet user starts watching an ad. A pop-up requests that the user grants access to the computer camera.  If user declines, the ad plays.  If user opts in, the ad plays, and the brand agency gets immediate analytics for every facial expression the user conveys through the camera.  Ideally, eIQ will help them answer "What are people actually feeling when they watch my video advertisement? Did we make them laugh? Did we tug at their heartstrings?”  And ultimately, help them target new audiences or adjust the ad if they get negative reactions.

But, I question the type of user who opts in.  Someone bored?  Someone savvy about what the brand is trying to ascertain?  Or someone who will put on a show for the camera, not knowing who is on the other side?  I think it's a great idea, but given that most people don't opt in, I wouldn't rely on the analytics collected just yet.

When Stores Stop Selling

Within the past year, online retailers Amazon and Birchbox have each opened their first brick-and-mortar stores.  This move is a sign that online retailers are acknowledging that many shoppers, at least for now, still prefer some sort of in-person buying experience.  But it also points to another trend..



Warby Parker, as called out by Advertising Age last week, uses one location to create an entirely new brand experience.  The Company's store in Soho, New York, looks like a library.  Not at all like a store.  Why?  Because Warby executives think it's a turn off "to be sold to."  In a store?  Yes.  The way they see it: physical stores are just a part of the marketing channel to promote the brand.  They are not always just a location to actually SELL.  So Soho strollers can come in, take a load off, crack open a book and relax a little.  That's it.



Amazon, Birchbox and Warby Parker have all been moving in a similar direction, the opposite of conventional marketing wisdom: rather than creating digital campaigns to drive customers to stores, stores are being built to drive buyers online.  The in-person experiences are meant to draw people in and to create real ambassadors.  Then they can go on to shop, pin, text and post on their own time.

Dude, What Are You Doing On Pinterest?

Over the course of the semester and in our final group project, I explored the notion of social media across multiple channels, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterst, Tublr, just to name a few. In both class discussions and in my group project team meetings, it was impossible to not laugh at notion of men on Pinterst and the inevitable   joke about an Alpha male using his Pinterst page to share a baking recipe or his favorite outfit. However, in a recently published article by Pinerest, in an effort to celebrate their 5 year anniversary, they published their growth stats, with particular attention on the numbers of male users on their website.

According to the article, the growth of their male users is significant.

"We doubled our male user base in the U.S. this year," Pinterest says. "Last year our male user base in the U.S. grew 73% year over year, and has been picking up in the past 6 months (54%) vs. the prior 6 months (40%), which is outpacing overall Pinterest growth."

The rest of the article goes into detail around the most popular uses of male Pinterst pages, such as:

1. Reading Lists
2. Fishing Spots
3. Ideas for Man Caves
4. Travel
5. Tattoos
6. Comics

As advertisers and marketers try to target males, it is important for them to recognize their increased interest in Pinterest and leverage this to their advantage. As Pinerest tries to sync products to seamless purchases, it is important to move past the stereotype Pinerest user to really look at the numbers and recognize that this is a valuable channel to explore to target the male demographic. 

Takeaways from Facebook’s F8 Developer Conference

Mark Zuckerberg presented at Facebook’s third f8 Developers Conference in San Franciso last week. It was one of the major conferences of this year which may act as a stepping stone for the evolution of Facebook. Some of the key highlights of the event were focus on mobile user experience and enhancing user privacy.

My Top 5 key takeaways from Digital Marketing perspective would be

1. Bridge between Mobile Operating Systems
 
At F8, Zuckerberg seemed to address to the marketers how Facebook would be helping to reduce siloes in the marketing channels by augmenting its suite of developer tools. Facebook aims to do this by helping mobile apps run cross-platform operating systems (e.g. Google's Android, Apple's iOS, Microsoft's Windows etc.).

Currently, it is tough to imagine the Mobile operating systems working nicely with each other. Thus, Facebook wants to be the glue that would help stick them together. I think this would be a smart move by Facebook as brand marketers will need to rely on Facebook even more, especially for understanding customer experience and gaining that elusive personalized view of a customer.

2. Focus on Mobile and Mobile Apps"Like" Button

Facebook announced that it would release new mobile "Like" button where users could Like and share directly from a company's mobile app. This would also include a "send to mobile" feature to drive app downloads from Facebook and the mobile web as well as a new message dialogue for developers. Additionally, considering that 86% of time spent on internet is on Mobile devices and not on browsers (as per the chart below), Zuckerberg envisions Facebook on virtually every mobile app by indicating successful apps are bound to have a social media community.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. Facebook Messenger opened to Third Party Apps

This is a major announcement from Facebook where it would revamp (find different word) its Messenger service, allowing users send content like GIFs, photos, videos,and more from third-party apps within the Facebook Messenger app.

The move would mean that app developers could now build Facebook Messenger support into their apps, making them directly accessible within the Facebook Messenger app.  The objective of allowing other social networks and services to directly post to it is supposed to make conversations even better and more seamless.
This is the major next step after allowing US-based users to send money to and from each other via Messenger. Zuckerberg also revealed plans to launch an associated service called Businesses on Messenger but the corresponding details are yet to be revealed.
Using the mobile app, people would be able to hold conversations with companies they interact with including the ones they buy goods from providing a seamless conversation through app instead of email.

4. User Privacy

One of the biggest announcements at the conference was the introduction of anonymous login. As privacy concerns continue to grow among consumers, Facebook is pushing to instill further trust with its users and give consumers more control. The anonymous login will allow users to log in anonymously to third-party apps so that they can try out an app before providing their personal data. This would help a person to test out an app or service that requires a Facebook login without the fear of the rogue Facebook posts. Facebook also announced advanced permissions and the ability for users to be more selective with the information that is shared with apps through a Facebook login.

5. Integrated Ads

Today mobile comprises for over 60% of Facebook's revenue. Around 90% of this is from advertising, but Facebook wants ads with good creative content that are targeted so well, that they do not upset users. Zuckerberg used F8 as a platform to help marketers and the developer communities understand that they would make more money only if they are respectful and value the users. At the moment, Facebook's average revenue per user is $2.44 in Europe. Interestingly it's $5.85 in the US but only $0.70 in the rest of the world.
There is a huge opportunity for Facebook to make considerably more money than they already do but according to me, the takeaway from F8 is to build a strong community first and subsequently plan how to monetize it properly later.

References:

http://www.netimperative.com/2015/03/facebook-opens-messenger-to-third-party-apps/

http://www.exacttarget.com/blog/uk/8-things-all-digital-marketers-need-to-know-from-facebooks-f8-conference/

http://www.exacttarget.com/blog/facebooks-f8-conference-announcements-focus-on-privacy-and-mobile/

3 Strategies to Segment Audiences and Personalize Digital Marketing

Recently I came across an article on the Social Times (http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/3-strategies-to-segment-audiences-and-personalize-digital-marketing/617284). Today’s consumers are not silent spectators or passive listeners. Instead, companies are dealing with an empowered audience — engaged in real-time social and mobile conversations, but fragmented across many digital platforms.

While digital marketers are well aware that they must segment their audience and deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time, many struggle with tactical yet effective ways to pinpoint audiences based on needs, expectations and behaviors.

Use Digital Platforms to Build Consumer Personas

Customers are more than just a gender, age, and location recorded in some database. Marketers need to also understand the behaviors and preferences of customers in order to provide them with the best possible experiences while simultaneously influencing their purchasing plans.

STA Travel, a youth-focused travel company, used an Offerpop quiz to better understand the interests of their audience and direct them to personalized travel options. The quiz placed participants into one of five personality-based “Travel Tribes:” Life & Soul, Thrill Seeker, A-Lister, Free Wheeler, and Live like a Local. The campaign yielded over 40,000 responses, providing a wealth of persona data that STA used to target offers to customers.

STA’s website traffic increased, sales grew and they gained more than 10,000 new potential customers using a fun and engaging campaign.

Persona building is a great way to avoid pitching irrelevant marketing content to consumers. For instance, travelers interested in yoga, meditation and soulful retreats most likely are not interested in VIP club access or weekend party yacht rentals. Being more targeted will ensure your content resonates with your customers.

Integrate unique experiences for real-time consumer journey insight

Forrester’s report on Competitive Strategy in the Age of the Consumer emphasizes going beyond consumer historical data, and expanding analysis to better understand “the next step a consumer may take.” Customers come into contact with brands at varying stages; some are ready to purchase, others are there to gather information, and it’s up to brands to offer experiences that cater to each specific situation, and move the consumer closer to conversion..

Brand-to-consumer experiences help brands gain a real-time understanding of where an individual is in the buying cycle, and how the brand can move them along the path to purchase.

Be generous with content and rewards by incorporating contests and discount offerings to consumers, but keep those offerings pertinent to the needs, wants, and desires of each audience segment.

Advocate Health Care, one of the largest hospital and health systems in the Midwest, launched a GoPro giveaway and integrated marketing campaign to promote local health and wellness. Grounded in a hashtag to collect and display user-generated content, and promoted around the city with billboards, TV ads, and digital advertising targeted at outdoors and fitness enthusiasts, #HealthiestLife aggregated more than 3,000 pieces of repurposable user-generated content. Advocate Health Care was able to collect opt-in permissions and deliver follow-up marketing initiatives relevant to the audiences activity. The well-catered messaging ultimately resulted in a 26 percent increase in physician appointments, not to mention a 126 percent jump in traffic to the user-generated content gallery on their website.

Identify new touch points for audience segments using an omni-channel approach

Different audiences open their doors to brands at varying stages of the sales cycle. By including utility-focused content and engagement tools into your strategies, you will find previously unknown avenues to interact with consumers. Tracking targeted content allows marketers to see when different audiences are activated — a great building point for future campaigns.

Following an incredibly successful user-generated content campaign, tote bag retailer SCOUT drove e-commerce sales by repurposing UGC in various touch points across their digital marketing channels.

The SCOUT marketing team discovered that featuring user-generated content in an online holiday gift guide and their email marketing resulted in a significant increase in web traffic from existing fans. Additionally, they experienced such a high volume of web visitors and social media fans visiting the gallery, that they replaced the ‘SALE’ tab in the header of emails with the #scoutbags user-generated content gallery, which effectively drove more consumers to in-season products. Finally, SCOUT included a print promotion for the campaign with every order to remind customers to continue sharing their SCOUT moments.

SCOUT tracked which content generates the most clicks and shares and used this information to optimize their visual marketing strategy and cater to their audiences needs and preferences. And it worked – sales from social traffic increased an average of 67.5 percent by the end of 2014.

Audience segmentation has gone real-time. Brands are building consumer profiles that are constantly tracking what you like, what you buy, how you buy it, and millions of other digital interactions on an ongoing basis. But the potential of this power is lost if marketers aren’t tracking, segmenting, and revamping their messaging to match their audience. Sending the wrong message to the wrong audience is not only wasted time — it can also harm your relationship with potential customers.

The Data-Driven Art Of Digital Marketing

Recently I came across an article on the Marketing Land (http://marketingland.com/data-driven-art-digital-marketing-121667). I love tech and data. In fact, there is nothing I like more than utilizing data to make informed decisions. Magnetic (my employer) has run at least a hundred thousand campaigns, and we are accountable for every last one of them. The metrics and analytics we see for each campaign flight provide a compelling view on how to best optimize each campaign for maximum ROI.

What makes the conversation interesting is that sitting right next to the science of marketing is her sister, the art of marketing. Figuring out how to best utilize all these data points is truly an art form. Let’s delve into some of the finer arts of digital marketing.

Multiple Devices Means More Data

As digital marketers, we’ve shifted from targeting a shared family computer to targeting a single person that uses multiple devices. The obvious impact of this evolution is that many companies now have more user profiles than there are consumers. In response, marketers must apply a cross device targeting strategy, giving advertisers the ability to measure for cross device attribution.

So far, so great; however, if you target across devices, but your attribution model can’t give credit for that mobile ad that drove a desktop conversion, then your campaign will appear to be performing poorly. This shortcoming makes it impossible to optimize campaigns properly.

We are huge advocates of fractional attribution, and marketers can work with external companies to achieve this. However, if it’s not possible for whatever reason, your results or return on ad spend (ROAS) will improve by turning off cross-device targeting and keeping your mobile and desktop campaigns siloed until your attribution problem is fixed.

The Most Important Metric: ROAS

Return on ad spend (ROAS) is the most fundamental metric. It is also the one most open to artistic interpretation because you can’t calculate ROAS without making assumptions about attribution. Even if you use the most successful attribution system in the world, you still won’t achieve perfect results. This is because different campaigns perform differently during each stage of a consumer’s purchase journey.

For example, branding campaigns are not going to get the same result as a targeted, lower-funnel sales promotion designed to move goods immediately. Further, we commonly see campaigns use the wrong metric to measure the desired result.

Andy Frawley wrote an interesting article about how we should move away from simply measuring ROI. He proposes a new measurement: Return on Experience and Engagement. Broadly speaking, Frawley addresses how measurement metrics are often too narrow. For example, performance marketers hold their measures too tight, e.g. last click before purchase gets 100% credit, and awareness campaigns look at a set of digital metrics rather than a broader change in consumer intent.

Dynamic Creative Is Key for Personalized Ads

Almost any programmatic campaign today uses massive amounts of data and extraordinarily sophisticated algorithms to decide whether or not to deliver an ad. But, there are few campaigns outside of site retargeting that use data and apply it to ad customization. I suspect that much of this comes from industry inefficiencies: creative agencies are separated from media buying organizations.

That said, you don’t have to be a huge retailer with millions of products to use dynamic creative. Small to mid-sized retailers can also take advantage of data to help customize their creative messages, creating a more personalized marketing experience, which ultimately will lead to better results.

Don’t Rely Too Heavily On Click-Through Rate (CTR) As A Metric

If you ask an algorithm to optimize to a CTR goal, it will optimize to the consumers who click more often. This is just an arbitrary section of the general public, the same as people with brown hair, those that are 5’9’’, or people from Fargo, North Dakota. These people may or may not have anything in common with your best customers.

We’ve all talked about the collapse of the purchase funnel and how a consumer’s path-to-purchase has become fuzzy and difficult to follow. What has yet to happen is the widespread use of dynamic campaigns that run from awareness to purchase. The industry is still under the assumption that campaign strategies should be siloed: my awareness campaign will run here, my in-market campaign will run there, and I will use site retargeting to close the deal.

The future of our industry is combining these separate strategies into one. And technology will infer by the actions you take where you are in your decision making process. Many companies can do this for marketers today, but few actually take advantage of this.

We know that in our digital indulgent world, some consumers will take thirty minutes to make a decision while others will take thirty days. Some people will only shop online, while others prefer the in-store experience. Most people will be seen online and offline using multiple devices.

Data and device information can be used to figure out which ad to show and what the message should be. This can be fully automated from beginning to end, but you’ll always need a partner to make sure that the measurement, analysis, and messages make sense together, performing in harmony. That’s art.

REPORT: Key Players in Digital Marketing Are Shifting

Recently I came across an article on the Social Times (http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/emarketer-digital-marketing/617758). For many tech companies, like Google and Yahoo, digital advertising has become an important part of their business models. Companies that can capitalize on digital ads can push themselves to the top of the market, as Facebook has done in recent years. New data from eMarketer examines how digital marketing’s key players will shift positions in the coming years.

The revenue generated by digital marketing is growing every year, so it is no wonder that social companies would attempt to leverage their user bases to cash in. eMarketer predicts that the combined expenditure on U.S. digital display ads in 2015 will top  $27 billion, and that spending could increase to more than $37 billion by 2017.

Facebook is predicted to capture 25.2 percent of the revenue in the market this year, possibly a result of aggressive expansion. This represents growth of 1.4 percent compared to 2014; however, the growth of market share will increase revenue 29 percent to $6.82 billion, according to eMarketer’s predictions.

Twitter’s share of the market is predicted to increase its by 1.3 percent, with a revenue increase of more than 62 percent. Emarketer expects Amazon’s revenue to grow by more than 23 percent to $820 million, but there is no predicted growth in market share this year.

Google, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft are all predicted to lose market share and revenue in the coming years. According to eMarketer, Google’s market share is expected to shrink 3.3 percent between 2013 and 2017, while Yahoo will lose 3.7 percent, AOL will slip 1.1 percent and Microsoft will lose 2.7 percent.

During the period between 2014 and 2017 desktop ad revenues are projected to decline slightly while mobile revenues skyrocket. Desktop ad revenues are expected to fall from $12.56 billion to $11.67 billion, while mobile will increase from $9.65 billion to $25.69 billion — an increase of more than 266 percent.

Facebook is predicted to generate $4.91 billion this year, and $7.52 billion by 2017 — an increase of 50 percent. Google will grow at a slower rate, increasing from $1.47 billion to $2.37 billion, and Twitter will grow from $1.19 billion to $2.29 billion by 2017.

It seems companies that have invested in advertising, and especially in mobile advertising, will be dominating the market in the coming years. If Google hopes to maintain its position of dominance, and if the likes of Yahoo and Microsoft want to stay relevant, they’ll need to make a serious investment in mobile.

10:09 (Apple) vs 10:10 (Everyone else)

Most watch ads use 10:10 as the watch’s default set time.  Some of the more famous watch makers have a preference for an exact time, for example, Rolex uses 10:10:31, TAG Heuer likes 10:10:37 and Bell & Ross opts for 10:10:10.  I didn’t know this, or never paid it much thought, but watchmakers have been using 10:10 in ads because it appears symmetrical and does not cover up the brand logo, which are usually engraved beneath the 12.

So why do all the Apple watch ads display 10:09?  And you know there is a deliberate reason.  It’s because they’re always ahead of the times! According to the Business Insider article, “It all boils down to Apple using a cheeky pun to symbolically stake its claim to the smartwatch market, all while tipping its hat to an age-old watchmakers tradition.”  Apple has been known to use display times that have a significance meaning.  Apple uses 9:41 on all of its iPhone ads and promotional materials because it was the time when Steve Jobs first unveiled the iPhone in 2007.

 

There are some other theories on why Apple is using 10:09, saying that 10:09 is more symmetrical.  But the pun theory is my favorite.  Either way, we know that Apple pays attention to every detail and the choice was no mistake.

Check out the article here:  http://www.businessinsider.com/why-apple-watches-all-display-1009-in-advertisments-2015-3