Email Marketing

During the class, I was surprised to hear that companies still devote a significant amount of their marketing budget towards those annoying emails that spam your inboxes each and every day.  Most of us either delete them in the mornings, or just create outlook rules to move them to a "junk" folder. 

Obviously, I am exaggerating.  There are emails you receive that you actually signed up for and look forward to receiving like my wife and her RueLaLa/Gilt/Hautelook etc. emails.

Here is an example of an email I received from Hotels Tonight that was witty, and had a link to a interest article..
 Hotel Tonight Email

..and it referenced an article on buzzfeed.com that interesting ideas about how to beat the heat in the summertime..
Buzz Feed Article

I thought this email was interesting and engaging, and referenced something cool to engage Hotel Tonight's customers. 

 

Where is Chromecast headed?

After Google announced a new streaming device called Chromecast this week, I found myself wondering what the future holds for the product.

In case you haven't read about Chromecast, it is a relatively inexpensive dongle device that you hook up to your tv. You can tell it what to stream from almost any phone, tablet, or computer through the chrome browser (or android app), and it streams the content straight from the cloud on its own.

As it stands right now, this doesn't appear to be much of a game-changer. It is a little cheaper than a Roku box, but is less functional at the moment (except for Roku's suprising lack of YouTube). And for iOS fans who have Apple TV with streaming plus mirroring, this is almost useless.

So why did Google build this device? First of all, once this technology makes its way into TVs, this may finally convince people to buy the smart TVs Google has been trying to push for a couple years. But I think the more important feature is that this technology is platform-independent, and makes it easy for people to stream from any source - Netflix, YouTube, Google Play, and probably Amazon and Hulu eventually. This gives Google Play some hope of competing with iTunes and Amazon, and also makes YouTube a more viable source for living room entertainment.

And if it convinces more people to use Chrome as their browser, that doesn't hurt either.

Twitter and TV commercial

So many marketers have become so obsessed with online advertisement and paying too much attention to create original contents for its online advertisement. In fact, the traditional advertisements are still very effective way to reach and convince consumers as we learned from OwnLocal who convert traditional advertisement to online marketing.

TV viewers watch TV program and commercials and when they like the it, they tweet. Twitter calls this "now moments," which is a successful real-time ad sales based on capitalizing on the way TV viewers use computers and mobile device. The article explains watching TV is very engaging and benefits derived from utilizing "now moment" on the twitter.

Creativity brings the traditional and the current marketing together. Companies do no necessary need to invest on creating totally new or what people think innovative. A spark of connecting two effective ideas can make something unique that can be more innovative than something that is totally new.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013/07/09/twitter-facebook-hashtag-ravenue-adam-bain/2501583/

Four Square - Levelling the playing field

Four square has launched a new self service advertising tool that makes it easy for local businesses to advertise easily on mobile phones. It brings to small businesses the unprecendented ability to advertise their venues on mobile platforms which was at one time restricted to major market share holders like Taco Bell and KFC.

With this new ability, local small businesses can comptete effectively with franchises with their marketing advantages. With more of the searches from consumers requiring relevant information from their immediate vicinity, Four square appears ot be poised to revolutionalize mobile searches.
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2284910/Foursquare-Opens-Self-Service-Advertising-to-Small-Businesses has mores information regarding the mobile advertising platorm.

Decoding Digital Marketing Intelligence

As more businesses are becoming “digitized” they are beginning to understand not only the importance of data collection, but also how imperative it is to gain actionable insights from the data.

Many businesses today are making major strategic decisions without using the data to tell them what is really happening. Businesses are building or shrinking marketing budgets based on limited information, and often the wrong information. With all of the advances in digital marketing and social media technology, it is crucial that companies use the right tools to gather information and the right people to intelligently decipher the data.

When businesses receive the “big data” intelligence, they should answer these questions:

·         What is the intelligence telling us?

·         How accurate do we feel that the information is?

·         How current is the information?

·         How can we decipher this information to help us make more intelligent decisions?

From a very high level, businesses are using analytics to track:

·         The performance of digital assets (websites, landing pages, blogs, videos, social pages, ads, search rankings, etc.)

·         User behavior (where are they coming from, what’s driving them to our web pages, what are they doing once they get there, how long are they staying, when and where are they leaving and why, and are they taking some kind of action?)

Google Analytics is an open source (free) analytics tool in existence and can be easily installed in most websites. Its capabilities include:

·         Content analytics

·         Conversion analytics

·         Advertising (marketing channel) analytics

·         Mobile analytics

·         Advanced segmentation

More advanced enterprise-level analytics tools require an investment. Some advanced analytics tools include:

·         Clearsailing

·         C3Metrics

·         Adometry

References:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/brentgleeson/2012/10/10/big-data-deciphering-digital-marketing-intelligence-part-1-of-2/

Cash Mob

We talked about Groupon today. Groupon is a best way for the shops to know how much inventory they need to prepare in advance. For restaurants, they can easily control the material they need and reduce the risk of stocking food material. Also, they can arrange the amount of staff, avoiding waste of human capital.

However, mostly we can't choose what store/restaurant we want. We can only wait and see what is coming up next. Some really bad restaurants have made deal with Groupon and provide good deal, thus people will still buy the coupon and go.

Is consumer sick of this? You have no power to choose the store you want to spend money on? (Of course you can, just without discount)

Some people start the anti-groupon activity. They choose the shops/restaurants they want to go, and invite many people to go there at the same time. The shops/restaurants do not know in advance. For them, it's a great surprise. Suddenly many people come and spend money.

This activity is arrange by a group of people called "Cash Mob" (from the idea of "fresh mob"). In order to support local products, they keep arrange this kind of activity to spend their money on those shops.

The event site:
http://www.cashmob.com/

 

Tips for Making it Big with E-Commerce

DIGITAL STRATEGY

Getting rich with hard work is the American dream. Kids born in the late 1970s and early 1980s may have started college with the prerogative of studying finance, finding a job on Wall Street, toiling for seven to ten  years, then BOOM- millions come rolling in.  However, with the financial crisis, many young people are considering career switches out of finance as layoffs, technology and lower payouts have become the new norm. Many more college students are not even considering finance at all. This brings to question: what is the new American dream for young, ambitious, smart young adults? Technology. Specifically, technology that can be monetized through web-based and socially enhanced commerce.

The quintessential industry movie Wall Street, has been effectively replaced by, The Social Network. Many 20 something are now wondering, how can the American dream be achieved in the digital commerce instead? A website is key. However, not all websites are created equal- especially in the case of marketing, the lifeblood of sales. There are a few key elements when building, designing and launching a website intended for e-commerce:

Analytics are key. One must never settle for basic, static analytics. Instead, go for the slight extra premium to discover real time metrics such as:

·      See how often people clicked on contact info

•  Identify how often people clicked on videos on the site
•  Assess contest and voting participation
•  See how far people scroll down each page
• Once a website is launched- after much sweat and tears- it then becomes essential to gather,  categorize and prioritize feedback. There will be bugs on the site and areas to improve- it’s  natural, don’t take offense. The mandate at this point is to find solutions. Specifically:
•  Categorize user feedback versus internal

·   At this point, prioritization is key. Everyone within the web marketing team will have different view 

ppoints on what’s important. As an executive, one must decide what will be key drivers of user 

eexperience, and, in turn, revenue.

BBuilding, designing and launching a website will not be easy; especially if the intent is for it to be used

aas a platform for a big e-commerce idea. Nonetheless, it will be the small steps of web development

tthat will be needed to provide for optimal impact on generating interested users, loyal customers and

powerful sales. 

Content marketing in social media

Businesses struggle to find out best social media strategy for their product. With plethora of online marketing tools to manage different channels, marketing executives can follow few basic steps while developing social media strategy, which can also affect search channel and help drive conversions.

First, the company should find out the objective of using social media i.e. brand awareness, brand favorability, increase traffic on the web, customer care or all of the above. Second, social media strategy will be successful when targeted effectively. The company should invest time in finding out right segment of market or customer for the product. In addition, since multiple outlets can drive up the cost of maintaining social media channels, appropriate tool such as Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, or Twitter should be chosen. Third, any social media tool such as Sysomos, Radian, Lithium6 etc provides analytics for the campaigns or for the company owned pages that can be further be leveraged for further insights and future improvement ideas.

Content marketing including creating articles, blogs, optimized product pages, creative copy, product videos and pushing them to all social media channels increases brand awareness, allows brand/product consideration and helps drive conversions. Increase in new visitors to the website indicates in increased awareness. At the same time, quality can improves search rankings, leading to higher sustained organic traffic to the website. Not involving customers is one pitfall to avoid as higher engagement on the in-house generated content or blogs or videos will increase relevancy of the posts in social media (or Edgerank of Facebook). In addition, content should posted should not always talk about the product but should highlight value to the customer and share success stories from within the community. When customer moves through the next stage of consideration, increase in average time spent on the web page or on mobile application, lower bounce rate, and other social metrics indicate that the customer is continuously engaged and considered buying the product. Articles, white papers, newsletters, FAQs, web page content and blog posts impact customer's consideration. Finally, increased conversion rate can be measured by sales, leads for each campaign or referrers. Once customers purchase the product, people share their stories on the social media, which further influence social media awareness and search.

5 Tips to Increase Your Following on Social Media Sites

1. Share Frequently
Don't let weeks pass between tweets and FB posts. Brands that share consistently have a better following than ones that only use social media sporatically. Social media is a direct channel to engage directly with your customers in a way that is more authentic than traditional media. Don't pass up the opportunity to increase customer loyalty through these outlets.

2. Entertainment & Inspiration
Inspirational quotes and photos make a brand feel more authentic. These tactics increase the likelyhood that posts will be "sharable" which is more valuable than likes and followers, thinks of "sharablity" as the digital version of WOM.

3. Promotions & Web Exclusives
Launching a "first look" or Twitter-only deal makes the customers as if they're in the inner circle. Do not underestimate the power of social posts to increase ROI. A good example of how to use social to create sales is Lolly Wolly Doodle using Facebook posts as a tool for immersive customer engagement.


4. Be Responsive
Reciprocation is key. Respond to others in your network and keep up with the dialogue. Warby Parker uses social media creatively by posting videos to respond to customer service questions.

5. Follow Likeminded People and Influencers 
Surround yourself with a group of people that value your brand and expertise, so that you can become an influencer among them. 

An attempt to go viral - Mini posts a selfie!

Although comments regarding Mini's recent tweet under the handle @CarlosDMotor was dubbed "sophomoric" and "contrived", I still think it was a pretty funny attempt to benefit from the recent firestorm surrounding former congressman Weiner's less than stellar judgement regarding his use of social media.
Just the picture alone of the towel clad Mini was enough for me to chuckle...don't you agree?











Not to mention the actual tweet!

It is interesting though that the tweet didn't inspire more people to follow Mini...seems a rather weak campaign with only 76 followers and 29 retweets.

But I don't want to ruin the whole thing for you - so here is the link for your viewing pleasure!

http://adage.com/article/digital/mini-mocks-weiner-selfie-carlosdmotor/243344/

Twiplomacy: Twitter Connects World Leaders

According to 2013 Twiplomacy study, 77,7% of the world leaders have a Twitter account and 68% of them interact with other leaders on the social network. There are 1/3 of these world leaders tweet themselves, but very few on a regular basis. 

This study shows that Twitter has become a formidable communication tool allowing the broadcast of short messages to millions of followers. 

Pinterest: setting the stage for ad revenue

Today Pinterest announced a couple of interesting additions to its service:

1. An Edit tool that allows you to personalize your feed
2. Recommended pins based on websites you've visited

All of this sets the stage to provide Pinterest with a tremendous of data about where users are traversing the web and what their core interests are.  This sounds quite a bit like the way search engines are indexing our preferences except that this is targeting the visual web. All of this data gathering seems to be leading Pinterest towards the one thing that (despite a $2.5bn valuation) is lacking, revenue.

Perhaps laying this ground work will pay off and Pinterest will be able to monetize its business through an ad-driven model.  Or perhaps the company will be wiped out by the next Silicon Valley photo sharing website that doesn't have ads. 

#Hashtags = $Revenue

I have to admit, I was a late adopter. I didn't really understand what hashtags were until about a year ago. But once I discovered it though, it has transformed the way I search and gather real-time information on the internet. Twitter has been able to use the hashtag phenomenon to be a disruptive (and lucrative) force in the social world.

Next year, Twitter is projected to rake in $1 billion in revenue- thanks in large part to their innovative ability to monetize hashtags. Their tremendous success has prompted Facebook to also join in on the hashtag craze. See more in the link below:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013/07/09/twitter-facebook-hashtag-ravenue-adam-bain/2501583/

Yay for startups!

Today the SEC voted in favor of a section of the JOBS Act that will allow private companies to advertise their fundraising.  Previously, news of raising money had to be passed around in a private fashion.  This lift on the advertising ban will allow startups and private investors better access to each other.

While private companies can now advertise, investment is still limited to accredited investors who must meet certain income and wealth requirements.  The JOBS act intended to make investments in startups available to everyone, not just accredited investors.  It is likely that we will see the SEC allow this to come to fruition in the near future.  Kickstarter has been a great crowdfunding source so far, but once the SEC gives its blessing, we should see a plethora of investing opportunities arise.  Like all investments, there will be some winners and some losers, but one clear winner is new startup ventures looking for seed money.

Read the whole article "SEC Lifts Ban On General Solicitation, Allowing Startups To Advertise That They’re Fundraising" on techrunch.

Hump Day (GEICO Commercial)

According to this article, GEICO Hump Day Commercial Dominates Social Video, At Least on Wednesdays, one of the more recent GEICO commercials featuring a camel walking throughout an office getting excited about the fact that it's Wednesday (Hump Day), receives an inordinate amount of traffic on Wednesdays and dominates in terms of social media referrals.  If you look at the chart in the article, you see huge spikes (or humps if you will) in social media shares on Wednesdays.

I wonder if this information will compel advertisers to begin "claiming days" trying to create a viral video that can be shared for specific days of the week.  It will be interesting to see how advertisers respond, if at all.

I think the Hump Day commercial is great by the way, but while I have your attention, here are some of my favorites from GEICO.

Tiny House - I'll tell you, the first 5 or 6 times I watched this commercial, I actually thought was a commercial for a TV show and I thought to my self "I have to watch this!"

Parker Solution to Hair Loss - Like Tiny House, the first couple of times I saw this, I thought it was real.  I kept thinking to myself, "are these guys serious?  Does this company think they're going generate customers by showing them?"

Baseball - I don't think this one is in the same league as the other two, but I think this was one of their first commercials in the "I've got good news for you" genre.

Tips for measuring a social media campaign

One of the biggest challenges businesses face with their online campaigns is measuring the effectiveness of their social media efforts. There are a number of tools available for measuring social media and managing online campaigns.

Measuring Social Media Begins with Understanding Online Campaign Objectives. Just like other marketing methods, a business needs to develop a plan and objectives before launching an online campaign and measuring social media efforts. The objectives for an online campaign should identify measurable goals a business hopes to achieve in their social media efforts.

Define the target audience for the online campaign. Develop a content strategy for the copy, videos, images and other elements featured in social media channels. Identify individuals within the company who will manage the campaign. Keep the social media objectives realistic and achievable.

Here is an article that describes the approach


http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidvinjamuri/2011/10/26/whats-it-really-worth-to-you-5-tips-for-measuring-social-media-campaigns/

Personalizing your marketing campaign with predictive analytics

Instead of selecting the right potential customer base for a marketing campaign it is a cool concept to choose a right campaign for a customer user predictive analytics.

Here is a cool blog that I found

http://blog.zopim.com/2013/06/25/personalize-your-marketing-campaigns-with-predictive-analytics/

Predictive analytics focuses on the preferences and requisites of your customers, and so, provides us with the right channel, right customer, right timing, and a profitable and effectual marketing campaign.

The traditional way of approaching segmentation is now changing. Big data and predictive analytics are changing the way business is traditionally conducted.

Google+ Turns Two

Even though it is a relative newcomer in the social space, Google has made some great inroads with Google+ in the past couple of years. As Google+ turns two years old, it has become more relevant and more important to any digital marketing campaign. So relevant, in fact, that Ad Age is publishing articles urging users to not ignore it.

With the power of all the data and resources of Google behind it, Google+ definitely has some clear advantages over other social networks to both marketers and users. The article below highlights some key features that make Google+ unique.


http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/google-turns-afford-ignore/242996/

PR vs Digital Marketing for a Start-up

I'm in the start-up world, and responsible for managing my entrepreneurial endeavors' sales, business development, marketing and PR efforts, I also take out the trash.  In my world you wear multiple hats and become a jack of all trades.  But I would like to address an issue we currently faced regarding PR or Digital Marketing or Both.  For the sake of this post lets assume I work for a social website, PS we are a social site!

Recently I've been debating where to allocate dollars to drive customer interaction and customer traffic specifically should I spend more dollars early on with PR, on digital marketing or both.  Ideally, it would be both but unfortunately I think it makes sense right now.

 So the question is PR or Digital Marketing?

Answer: Depends. Ugh!

For my business being a social platform we've elected to go the PR route.  Hoping to spend dollars on exposure rather than targeted individual marketing.  Its hard to calculate the ROI of a potential user if we aren't necessarily asking them to buy anything.

For an e-commerce business I believe the answer would be different if you have to chose one or the other.  I believe Digital Marketing would generate the most bang for your buck because you can easily calculate the ROI of an individual user.

What do you think is the right answer? If you were a social platform what is your argument to use digital over PR?

Top 10 Reasons for not reading the Top 10 lists

Top 10 Reasons for not reading the Top 10 lists

So, if you haven't noticed, the web has become saturated with Top 10 lists.  Whether it be "best rooftop lounges", "healthy foods that are bad for you" or one of my favorites from last week, "most overrated US cities" these lists seem to have become so ubiquitous, I've begun to wonder whether there's an ulterior motive at work here.   Turns out -- shockingly, there is.  Here are the perfect ingredients for advertisers, people seem to love these lists, companies are willing to pay to be on them and most importantly, why not get 10 clicks for the price of one?  Take the last point, if you've ever read one of these lists (which undoubtedly you have), you know that a simple one page list of "worst celebrity chefs in America" isn't what you're going to get.  Rather, it loads one item at a time requiring you to click next 10 times - not cool for reading on your phone or skimming a top 50 list.  But, for the website this means 10x the page views for the same content.  Next, in an effort to feed these lists writers have reached to the depths of editorial latitude, often even contradicting their own lists in back-to-back lists -- making one wonder, "Top 10 according to who??".  Lastly, and maybe most disappointing, many times these lists are paid for by the companies featured on them.  So, when we finally click through to the "#1 beach bar in the world" and it’s located in the Jersey Shore -- well you know....