DM for B2B Companies (3)

I am continuing to explore the importance of Digital Marketing for B2B companies. In addition to SEO/SEM, paid search is also a key channel for B2B companies. Paid search allows for a company to show up in the top couple of ads when entering a search into google. This is important as potential customers will almost always begin with a google search when they are looking for a B2B service. I have previously discussed the fact that most initial business will come from referrals, but once a B2B company grows, there is the opportunity for inbound web inquiries and paid search is an important way to capture those leads. A B2B company should buy keywords associated with the service they are providing and the company should also buy keywords associated with competitors in the space.

Brands Partner with Snapchat to Bring Promotions to Life

At South by Southwest, Snapchat recently shared that they are teaming up with companies like Amazon and HBO to bring promotions to life with its unique lens. According to AdAge, Snapchat is deploying what it calls "marker" technology, which is a next-generation QR code that brands put on their packaging and outdoor ads so people can bring them to life in the app. For example, Game of Thrones has posters for the show that can animate using AR to bring the poster to life. Using this technology, Snapchat is continuing to find ways to differentiate their value proposition for advertisers as competitors such as Facebook, Google and Apple have encroached their social space in recent years. 

In my opinion, I think this technology is a fantastic way to activate what would be considered more traditional marketing tactics, print and outdoor as a for instance, and leverage modern digital marketing techniques to engage and inspire target audiences. Although I'm not sure this will truly become a competitive advantage for Snapchat given that other companies are also within the AR space, I am impressed that they have continued to find ways to stand out in a very crowded field. 

Ice Cream. You scream. We all scream for ice cream.

When I look back on my childhood, ice cream was definitely a part of it and always associated with positive feelings of joy.   As we get older, ice cream and other pleasure foods have gone from being associated with celebrations to either rare treats or emotional binge eating to drown your sorrows.

Halo Top, which has become well known for making great tasting ice cream with fewer calories and fat which adults have gravitated to.  Their first national ad campaign, by 72andSunny, brings to the front of discussions the flip in sentiment and association that adults have with ice cream versus children. 

The commercial brilliantly hits on the trend of using the emotional connection with the target audience in an entertaining yet oxymoronic approach as the storyline is sad, but the colors, music and setting are happy.  The children are confused as to why they can't get Halo Top ice cream, but the adult man in the story was able to get ice cream and the explanation circles around the realities of life for adults and the subtle innuendo to eat away your emotions or turn to ice cream when things get back.

The commercial is entertaining and distinguishes the Halo Top brand from any other ice cream product out there.  Ice cream for adults - who would have guessed!

Harness the Power of AI for Your Customer Service Needs

Do you or your customer service departments ever feel like you are drowning in a never ending queue of requests? In this day in age there must be a better way to meet these demands, right? The eBook published by msg.ai (available here) offers insights into how you can leverage artificial intelligence to further empower and enable your customer service personnel.

"As Forrester points out in its Predictions 2019: Customer Service and Sales report, “Companies need to retain human talent in customer service...as customer needs become more complex.” A strategy that relies solely on AI will fail; AI needs to be used in tandem with human agents to deliver exceptional support. Focusing on one, and not the other, will be a detriment to your customers and your agents."

Based upon this research, it's clear that AI and humans need to work together in order to be successful in serving customer needs. Solely relying on AI would diminish the customer experience and ultimately result in dissatisfaction. msg.ai recommends using AI as a workforce multiplier by delegating only the issues that AI can handle with high accuracy. This requires identifying specific issues that can be resolve in an automated fashion easily with relatively lower levels of risk and exceptions. Furthermore, AI should learn from historical cases to maximize the chances of successful resolution.

Would you like experience this technology in action? Check out https://www.facebook.com/westjet/ and click send a message. I tried booking a flight to India and you can see my chat results below. When prompting me for information such as my preferred airport, the chat both would give me button options that I could click on (e.g., one button for LGA and another for JFK). Furthermore, when you start the chat it provides you with information on how you can request a live customer agent at any time by typing "customer service" at any time. The technology looks promising and I can see how it can help expedite customer requests or at the very least some of the tasks an agent must complete today (e.g., determine customer intent, request more information).

What Can Apple Do with Data Tiger?

Apple reportedly acquird UK-based marketing startup Data Tiger in February. Combined with its recent launch of Apples News and Stocks and an expected lauch of a new video streaming product in April, the acqusition seems to signal Apple's intent to sell more services and provide more personalized content. 

On Apple's current advertising and privacy page (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205223), it says: "Ads that are delivered by Apple’s advertising platform may appear in the App Store on iOS, Apple News, and Stocks. The following contextual information may be used to serve ads to you,...... Apple News and Stocks: The type of article you read is used to select appropriate ads."

Then let's see what Data Tiger does. According to Bloomberg, Data Tiger's technology can "optimize the marketing journeys" of customers by using data to more accurately send materials to consumers as well as push notifications. DataTiger’s services could help Apple better understand what people want to consume on their devices, and target the right content to them. And then the articles people actually read will be used to select the relevant ads shown to them. It would be interesting to watch how Apple's advertising strategy pans out. 

Takeaway from Scentbird CMO about Digital Marketing

I attended a breakfast talk with Rachel ten Brink, co-founder and CMO of Scentbird last week. A veteran in the beauty industry, she leveraged her personal and professional connections from her previous jobs at Elizabeth Arden and Estee Lauder to build an online perfume subscription business Scentbird. The e-commerce subscription company has raised a total of $28.4 million so far. 

She mentioned a couple of things that I found interesting: 

1. Traditional advertising used in the right way is still useful for online businesses. When asked about the ads in New York City subways, she says those ads actually helped boost Scentbird's status in the early days. When she went to meet with executives at those big beauty companies, they would say to her, "Oh, I saw your ads in the subways". Subway ads shown physically to viewers make them perceive the business/brand as more established and doing well. 

2. Take digital marketing into consideration when designing your product. Scentbird's products are perfume sample sprays from both designer brands and niche brands. It's harder for an influencer to market perfumes in a video than makeups because the perfumes are colorless and viewers cannot smell them through the screen. So Scentbird uses a colorful perfume case to hold the vial, which also makes opening a perfume more fun and visual to watch. 

3. Podcasts are on the rise but performance is uneven. It has been becoming more expensive to advertise on Facebook. Although Scentbird still has to advertise on the platform, they tried to find new ways to reach users. One way is podcasts. She found midroll ads especially effective because the messages sound more genuine and natural from a host whom the listeners already like. But it involves a lot of testing to find out which hosts or influencers are effective. 

How to Handle Ad-Blockers

Who doesn't love Adblockers? They limit your interruptions, make your overall online experience smoother and faster, and help you avoid irrelevant ads that can often lead to embarrassing talks with your parents when they think the game site you're on isn't very appropriate for an eleven year old when there's an advertisement for boosting your sex drive (or was I the only incredibly unfortunate one?). 

Every marketer, given their choice, would want to sell ads on their page if people let them. Unfortunately, the choice is now moving in the consumers' hands - who make it very clear that ads are disruptive. The growing number of ad blockers is putting pressure on marketers to improve their online advertising structure and advertising as a whole. 40% of all users use adblockers on their desktop while 75% of people use at least one form of adblocking every single day. 

Marketers are put in a bind: how to balance their duty to earn meaningful engagement and maintain revenue without sacrificing user experience. After souring the inter webs for tips on how to circumvent these, three main methods seemed to make the most sense: 

1. Beg to be whitelisted, which may seen transparent but I think you really need to build that connection and loyalty with the consumer to get them to do this. The only website I willingly whitelisted for citethisforme.com - the real MVP and sole reason I submitted 99% of my college essays in on time. 
2. Block your own content - although this strategy would only work for websites where traffic is heavy and content is continuous so demand is consistently high. This, along with the fact that subscription based services are on the rise make this a good tactic - although you do risk people losing people who were turned off by the wall and bouncing.
3. Incorporate new advertising forms. Native advertisement are the new answer to ensure the user experience isn't interrupted while still making your advertisers happy. Native ads aren't always blocked by adblockers. They can, however. sacrifice the integrity of your site, but if you were transparent and honest about the content policies, this shouldn't bother you too much. Native advertising is a very selective game: the content needs to be as relevant to your audience as the content on your page.

All in all, ad blockers are not going away. The worst thing you can do is be unprepared for the potential impact they can have on your user experience.

Morning Brew’s secret to success – focus on a single target persona

While marketers generally try and break down their target demographic into multiple personas, some successful startups have gained major traction following the opposite strategy. Morning brew the popular newsletter company recently hit 1 million subscribers. According to its founders Alex Lieberman and Austin Rief one of the major reasons for this success is their focus on one persona. 

The demographic they decided to go after was the one they best understood because this persona was a lot like themselves. The newsletter is designed for young business professionals. It’s also delivered in a very convenient and consumable way that a busy urban professional would like. An email is sent out to subscribers each morning. It contains a few short briefs on the most important business news of the day and a small section with lifestyle content. It provides a quick update on latest business and tech news.

The advantage of this focus on a single persona is the resulting content which is extremely relatable.  The strong brand that Morning Brew has built is largely based on word of mouth due to their great content. In April 2018, three years after its launch at the University of Michigan, it had 180,000 subscribers. By November, that number had shot up to more than 700,000. A plan to launch a new line of specialized industry focused newsletters is being crafted to expand on their success so far. Knowing their audience intimately and strong focus on producing relatable content rather than pursuing multiple distinct personas has turned out to be a winning strategy for startups like Morning Brew.

Amazon Takes a Crack at Solving the Attribution Problem

Amazon’s Attribution program aims to provide brands with data on which ads are best converting to sales on the Amazon platform. This information will allow brands to allocate funding between search, display, and video channels. The program is still under beta and enrollment has closed but will be unveiled to opened up to more brands in the future.

Brands are able tracking pixels on other sites which would redirect the user to Amazon and Amazon is able to let the brand know who ended converting, who left an item in the shopping cart, or who did not make it past the product page.

Although the Amazon Attribution program is a nice step forward in the attempt to close the last mile attribution gap but for digital marketers, it is not the holy grail which many marketers. For example, the classic attribution program remains where any level of prior engage the consumer had with other ads from the brand are not accounted for. Additionally, due to their rivalry Amazon is not able to gain access to whether a consumer was shown a display add on Facebook and then decided to browse to Amazon.

With Amazon, Facebook, and Google are all fighting for ad revenue, will they ever want to share their data to give the advertisers a complete picture of the attribution problem?

Tesla is closing stores, shifting all sales online

I recently had my car serviced and as the lease is up in 2 months, rather than take a loaner vehicle I thought it made sense to hang around the dealership and look at the most recent offerings.  I spent nearly 2 hours checking out vehicles, sitting in the backseat, trying the automatic trunk, all of this work, without even a test drive.  Maybe I am old school, but for a car I plan to have for 3 years, I want to make sure it’s the right one….

Never mind I intend to purchase a vehicle, it would likely take me much longer to come to a decision on a vehicle and I certainly wouldn’t do it without a test drive.  This makes the decision for Tesla to shutter most of their stores and go to a mostly online platform an odd one, at least in my eyes.  I can’t imagine purchasing a car online, but then again, I don’t really do many things online, such as purchase a mens suit. 

One could assume that most people buying Tesla’s are likely far more tech saavy than me, so perhaps they are more open to this, however it certainly seems like a desperation move than one that they think most customers would prefer to purchase a car online.  Only time will tell but this is one of the stranger decisions I have seen in the digital space lately.  

The New Facebook – 2 types of Digital Platforms:

“The future of communication, will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure.”  Mark Zuckerberg put out a 3200 page memo on Wednesday afternoon laying out the future for the Facebook companies and potentially all of social networks. 

Zuckerberg argued that there will be 2 types of platforms going forward, one more open like a town hall which would be like Facebook and Instagram, the others more private like Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger.  Zuckerberg mentioned that there will still be ways to monetize the private side of the business but did not give any details into how to do so, and what form that would take. 

My initial thinking is that no matter what Facebook does there will be an element of distrust into how private the information is, but at the same time, does anyone actually think their data is private anymore?

DM for B2B Companies (2)

For B2B companies, Digital Marketing is very important. The channel mix is not is not exactly the same as B2C companies, but B2B companies need to have a strong digital presence in order to win new business and maintain market share with existing clients. Through some research, I have found that the most important channel for B2B companies are SEO/SEM. For B2B companies, at least initially, most new business comes through founder networks and through referrals. When a potential client hears about a B2B company/solution, the first action they take is to Google the B2B operation. It is very helpful if the company in question comes up high on Google. This is where SEO/SEM comes in to play. A strong content strategy and link building helps a B2B company show up high on Google. Examples of content that a company can product to increase their Google rank include publishing white papers, blogs, and other articles that receive views and traction digitally. In subsequent blog posts, I will explore some of the other channels that B2B companies should explore to increase their awareness in the marketplace. 

Nielsen believes in addressable TV

 Even though an average person nowadays have multiple devices and more and more time is spend looking at a phone, TV remains very important channel of interaction with potential customer. Average TV watch time per day is forecasted to be 46 minutes in the US (Nielsen). Addressable TV is one of the most discussed topics in this field. Sceptics often argue that it is impossible since many households have multiple viewers each of whom needs individual approach. Moreover, they claim that it is difficult to measure the effect of this tool and that it is quite expensive. However, according to adage addressable TV has a higher CPM then traditional television.

Nielsen strongly believes in the future of addressable advertising and highly invest in this idea.  The company acquired Qterics (Smart TV software and privacy management company), Gracenote (automatic content recognition technology) in 2016, and recently Sorenson Media for $11.25mln (leading addressable TV technology). The idea is to leverage the best technologies to provide real-time optimization, deliver relevant content, and make results measurable.

Down With the Ad Agency! Long Live the Ad Agency!

Ad agencies have lived a long and glorious life with plentiful profits and very high margins for years from big-name client accounts promising guaranteed annual revenues.  During recent years as clients have become wise to the fraudulent ways of the ad Agency world and started developing their own internal MarTech capabilities the landscape has shifted from outsourcing everything to an Ad Agency to hiring them for project-based work. 

One of the most well known agencies, 72andSunny has gone through their second round of layoffs in twelve months as a result of shift in client demands and behavior.   Like many ad agencies, they have found themselves in a place where the Customer Data, Customer Experience and other Marketing and Media strategy and operational execution activities, are being brought back in-house with a focus to use Ad Agencies for their areas of strength - creativity and ideation.  Clients are looking to be more effective, efficient an cost conscious but use the agencies for campaign ideas and creative development.

What does this mean for the agency world?  If agencies want to survive, they need to realize that the days of 'skimming off the top,' fraud and other non-value add activities are gone.  Clients have learned the game and if they want to continue working with an agency, the agency needs to be honest and transparent about their cost structure, fees and where the client's money is going as well as improving their own internal operations to keep pace with an agile business world.  They need to improve their internal capabilities and build up strength in areas clients will demand from them - creative design and campaign strategy.  If they do not evolve and adapt to the new ways of working, they will eventually fade away into the business history books as another example of industries past like coal and steel in the US.

Digital Marketing bigger than traditional Ads for the first time in '19

Digital marketing spending will surpass traditional ads for the first time in 2019 based on the latest forecasts and trends.

It's pretty interesting to look at the trends, where the mobile is by far the fastest and largest component captured almost two-thirds of the market. The growth of Amazon is a positive sign for a lot of advertisers as a way to diversify away from Facebook and Google and adds more competition to the marketplace. As a number of subscribers for traditional media shrinks, online streaming services like Hulu and Netflix can be another way for them to monetize their offerings.

Finally, while both Facebook and Google have been extremely profitable, their market share stays flat and the growth has come from an overall larger growing digital marketing pie. Once digital marketing fully reaches its potential, it will be interesting to see where the tech giants turn for their next growth opportunities.
 

Facebook strategy shifts away from public posts to private encrypted messages

Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg announced this week that the company would increase focus on private, encrypted services shifting emphasis away from public posts. Zuckerberg said he was changing the company to focus less on sharing and more on creating private experiences. This reflects the shift in behavior of people online which has shown a reduction of growth in social media. While public sharing of data is slowing down, growth of private messengers such as WhatsApp and WeChat have seen strong growth, especially outside the US. Zuckerberg said Facebook would achieve the shift partly by integrating it’s multiple existing messaging platforms -  Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger.

Zuckerberg in a Congressional hearing few months back famously gave a one-line answer to describe Facebook’s business model saying “Senator, we run ads”. The social media giant, valued at $490 billion, currently depends on people openly sharing posts to be able to target advertising to them. While the company will not eradicate public sharing, a proliferation of private and secure communications could seemingly hurt its business model. Other firms that depend on Facebook to harvest data based on material that people openly share will also need to evolve based on this new strategy.

However, some analysts believe that the advertising business model which Facebook has created over the years may not need to change too much. Facebook doesn’t need to know exactly what people are messaging to each other. According to Zuckerberg, Facebook doesn’t use message content to target ads. Many app developers unconnected with Facebook share personal data with the social media giant. This sharing has become so common place that its considered as “industry standard practice” to share data with Facebook. This means you might be seeing an ad based on activity completely outside Facebook. This coupled with techniques such as location targeting makes Facebook quite independent of public posts on its own platform to profit from ads. Also moving to private messaging may result in a higher conversion rate. It allows for much more granular targeting. The potential of someone paying attention to an add on a private messenger is higher than on a public platform. This new strategy shift will create unique challenges as well as potential opportunities for the digital marketing industry.

Will Anyone Beat Google and Facebook?

With Google and Facebook taking a HUGE percentage of all the digital advertising revenues, leaving the rest of the world to fight after the ad revenue. The question is, looking 5 years ahead, will there be anyone else that can compete with them? Will there be a new venue for advertising? Will Google and Facebook lose market share? And if so, will they make moves to acquire those companies? Only time will tell.

Google Shifted Ad Manager to First Price Auction

In a timely announcement on March 6, 2019, Google announced that programmatic ad sales through Ad Manager will be shifting from second price auction to first price auction. In a first price auction the winner pays what they bid. In a second price auction the winner pays what the second highest bidder bid.

Programmatic display is the ability to automate ads for your target audience. Traditionally sold in a second price auction, the changing landscape, complexity and nuance of the advertising space has created a need for more accurate pricing. Advertisers can purchase impressions for advertising space on chosen websites, with the auctions happening in a fraction of a second.

In general with this type of auction, clearing price will rise which will benefit the seller. However it will also allow buyers to target their money at ads that are the most worth it to them and yield the best results.

Google will be giving time for bidders to adjust to the new market rules and necessary technical requirements to adapt to the new auction format.

Mediums For Digital Marketing

Currently, there are some pretty standard mediums for digital marketing, being computers, smartphones, tablets, and to some extent, television. But how will this change in the future? How will marketers find new ways to market their product to consumers outside the normal venues. When you think about the rapid changes in technology today, I believe there are huge opportunities for new mediums. Digital marketing is already being used in planes and elevators, but what is next? How about cars (with larger screens like Telsa)? Could you one day turn on your car and before the screen opens up you are hit with some digital marketing? What are the limits?

$170 Million in Advertising Attrition for Publicis Groupe

A recent article by Fast Company reported that major advertising conglomerate Publicis Groupe announced $170 million in attrition in traditional advertising in 2018. This is mostly to do with current consumer goods clients moving significant portions of their advertising dollars to digital advertising.

Luckily for Publicis, they were well positioned for this transition, with their digital transformation division, Publicis Sapient. This group reported a 28% increase in revenue in 2018, impressive having been one of the original leaders in digital since 1998. They mention a couple important notes about how the industry and competition is changing. The first is that every interaction we now have with a brand is considered marketing. This ranges from traditional consumption of print or TV advertising, to a customer’s experience in a store, to the seamless process of ordering or returning goods from online or a mobile app. Agencies can no longer provide just one portion of what a company needs to guide a user through their brand journey. Second, because of the necessity to deliver the full experience, agencies have been in a rush to incorporate digital as part of their suite of deliverables for clients. This has led to companies traditionally outside the realm of digital advertising to jump in for massive market share (Accenture Interactive, PWC Digital Services, Deloitte Digital). Accenture Interactive leads the revenue game at over $6.5 billion in 2018 and Publicis Sapient is ranked number 12 in the annual revenue list.

All of this is to say it is not a simple as saying advertising agencies are going digital – this is a market to be disrupted (and really has been disrupted already) by players who have diversified business lines like Accenture. Time to get in the game.