Marketing Day: April Fools pranks, Snapchat story search & Reddit ads

Here’s our recap of what happened in online marketing today, as reported on Marketing Land and other places across the web.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

from Marketing Land - Internet Marketing News, Strategies & Tips http://ift.tt/2nTxGD8
via IFTTT

Search & social integration: Takeaways from SMX West

Search and social don't have to live in separate silos. Contributor Caitlin Jeansonne recaps SMX West sessions that looked at how SEO and social media teams can complement each other to provide stronger results.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

from Marketing Land - Internet Marketing News, Strategies & Tips http://ift.tt/2nrEVPt
via IFTTT

Reaching users wherever they are

Columnist Josh Todd explains why omnichannel marketing will be increasingly necessary for keeping your customers engaged and moving them through the sales funnel.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

from Marketing Land - Internet Marketing News, Strategies & Tips http://ift.tt/2nnyrAp
via IFTTT

How to decide ‘Should I bid?’

Are your paid search ads cannibalizing your organic search traffic? Columnist Kevin Lee explores the problem of determining when it's worth it to bid and when it's better to let organic do the work.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

from Marketing Land - Internet Marketing News, Strategies & Tips http://ift.tt/2oHCqIW
via IFTTT

Snapchat makes it possible to search for Stories by keywords

The change should make it easier for people to discover more content on Snapchat, leading perhaps to more time spent in the app.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

from Marketing Land - Internet Marketing News, Strategies & Tips http://ift.tt/2oHf7z0
via IFTTT

Google Maps ad traffic steadily growing

Columnist Andy Taylor of Merkle shares data on the growth of ad traffic from Google Maps, including conversion rate and CPC data by device.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

from Marketing Land - Internet Marketing News, Strategies & Tips http://ift.tt/2nnekm4
via IFTTT

Baidu becomes Google’s biggest ally in mobile page speed

Chinese search engine Baidu will soon support Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) in its search results, expanding the reach of AMP significantly. Columnist Hermas Ma believes the worldwide impact on mobile page speed will be notable.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

from Marketing Land - Internet Marketing News, Strategies & Tips http://ift.tt/2nSUzq2
via IFTTT

Are you grateful for digital?

In a world where we're bombarded with digital interruptions, it's hard to feel grateful for digital. So what's a marketer to do? Columnist Lewis Gersh has an answer to the conundrum.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

from Marketing Land - Internet Marketing News, Strategies & Tips http://ift.tt/2nnl1EG
via IFTTT

April Fools’ Day 2017: Google Maps gets it started with Ms. Pac-Man

The annual day (or days, as has become the case) of pranks from major search/marketing/tech companies is underway.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

from Marketing Land - Internet Marketing News, Strategies & Tips http://ift.tt/2nn9KUI
via IFTTT

How Any Digital Business Can Explode Using Word of Mouth Marketing

We live in a digital age.

Each day we’re bombarded with an endless stream of online ads via social media, websites, search engines, videos, and so on.

Marketing companies spend billions upon billions each year researching, analyzing, and pushing ads to consumers.

But you know what?

No matter how sophisticated and streamlined digital marketing becomes, it still pales in comparison with the power of good old-fashioned word of mouth marketing (WOMM).

According to in-depth studies from Nielsen, “WOMM recommendations still remain the most credible.”

Just look at this graph that ranks consumers’ trust, depending on the form of advertising and the action it produces.

Positioned right at the top as the number one trust factor is “recommendations from people I know.”

It heavily shapes consumers’ opinions on brands/products/services, and this is unlikely to ever change.

Here are a couple more stats that demonstrate the power of WOMM:

• “74 percent of consumers identify WOMM as a key influencer in their purchasing decision.”
• “WOMM has been shown to improve marketing effectiveness by up to 54 percent.”

Just think about it.

Would you feel more comfortable buying a product recommended by a close friend or by a marketing message shoved down your throat by some slick marketing guru?

I would bet the former.

The full impact

There’s another important detail I’d like to point out.

It has to do with the long-term impact of acquiring new customers through WOMM.

According to the Wharton School of Business,

a customer you acquire from WOM has a 16 – 25 percent higher lifetime value than those you acquire from other sources.

This means you’re far more likely to get repeat business from an individual who’s acquired through WOMM than otherwise.

They also have a higher likelihood of becoming brand advocates or even brand ambassadors.

Consumers trusting other consumers

And there’s one more thing.

You don’t necessarily need to have a person recommend your brand to someone they know directly to benefit from WOMM.

In fact, the overwhelming majority of consumers trust recommendations from other consumers.

According to Nielsen,

68 percent trust online opinions from other consumers, which is up 7 percent from 2007 and places online opinions as the third most trusted source of product information.

Bright Local also reports,

88 percent of people trust online reviews written by other consumers as much as they trust recommendations from personal contacts.

The way I look at it, old school WOMM has meshed with the digital age.

Many people now turn to other online consumers, whom they don’t actually know, to find out whether a brand is worth purchasing from.

If you can impress a handful of consumers and turn them into brand advocates, it can have a domino effect: they spread the word, which can lead to a surge in sales.

It can set off a chain reaction.

Have we forgotten about WOMM?

There’s a paragraph in a Forbes article I really like:

The problem is that for the last few years, marketers have been focused on ‘collecting’ instead of ‘connecting.’ In other words, brands are too caught up in collecting social media fans and they are forgetting to actually connect with them.

I think this really hits the nail on the head.

Many marketers (myself included) are guilty of it to some extent.

I feel we’ve gotten so caught up in the latest and greatest marketing techniques that we sometimes forget about what good business is founded on in the first place: relationships.

Before there was social media, SEO, PPC, or even radio/TV commercials, most businesses gained new customers from old school person-to-person recommendations.

But it’s never too late to cash in on WOMM.

However, it does require a slightly different approach from the one used in the past.

The great thing is there are some really potent resources and platforms out there to streamline WOMM and maximize its impact.

I’d now like to discuss some fundamental tactics you can use to make your digital business explode using WOMM in the modern age.

Focus on your core audience, not the masses

The first step to making this strategy work is to understand who your core audience is.

Founding editor of Wired Magazine, Kevin Kelly formulated what I think was a brilliant hypothesis in 2008—the 1,000 true fans theory.

His idea was that any artist, business, etc. could survive on having only 1,000 true fans and that “returns diminish as your fan base gets larger and larger.”

In other words, you’re more likely to have success if you focus on gaining 1,000 true fans rather than tens of thousands, or even millions, of lukewarm fans.

Tim Ferriss has actually embraced this idea, and it has been a key part of his meteoric rise to fame.

Ferriss even talks about the concept of 1,000 true fans in-depth in his new book, Tools of Titans.

And I think this is a good approach to take in WOMM.

You’re far more likely to create brand advocates if you focus on truly connecting with your core audience rather than trying to appease the masses.

This basically goes back to Pareto’s 80/20 principle, which applies to many different areas of life and business.

The premise is that 80 percent of your customers account for 20 percent of your sales and 20 percent of your customers account for 80 percent of your sales.

What you need to do is put most of your attention on “wooing” the 20 percent and deepening your relationships with them.

If you stick with this game plan, your core audience should grow even stronger, and you’ll be creating the perfect environment for WOMM to take place.

Be authentic and transparent

I know saying something like this may sound a little generic and cliché, but it’s still very important.

I feel many brands are out of touch with their audiences, and they end up suffering for it in the long run.

I believe authenticity and transparency are two of the most vital traits a brand can possess.

Most people can spot any ounce of pretentiousness from a mile away.

And with so many sleazeballs out there today, most consumers have developed a sense of skepticism that isn’t easy to stamp out.

I also realize that simply telling you to be authentic and transparent is a little vague.

You might be asking: how exactly does one accomplish this?

Of course, this is a huge topic to tackle, but I really like these suggestions from Copyblogger on how to get your customers to like you and build trust:

When it comes to transparency, it all boils down to being yourself and making it a point to engage with consumers.

You want to “humanize” your brand.

Check out this post from Vision Critical for more on this topic.

It highlights five specific brands that embraced transparency and found success as a result.

Leverage reviews

As I mentioned earlier, most consumers are receptive to online reviews and trust the opinions of other consumers even if they don’t know them directly.

If you can get your satisfied customers to leave positive reviews, you’re almost guaranteed to see a spike in sales.

So, I suggest doing everything within your power to encourage your satisfied customers to leave reviews.

This starts by “claiming” your business on some of the top review sites such as Google My Business, Angie’s List, and Yelp.

I won’t go into all the details of this process, but I recommend you check out an article I wrote on NeilPatel.com on how to get more online reviews.

This will provide you with an in-depth look at and tips on how to make this strategy a success.

I also suggest looking at this post from HubSpot that talks about 19 online review sites that can help your business get more reviews and gain traction.

Add fuel to the fire with a referral program

If you really want to expedite your WOMM, consider implementing some sort of a referral program.

When done correctly, it can lead to an influx of new customers while giving your brand equity a nice boost.

Here is a great example of a referral program that got it right.

Several years ago, Dropbox started a referral program that offered customers up to 16GB of free storage for “inviting a friend” to join.

What was the end result?

• The refer-a-friend feature increased signups by 60 percent
• Users sent 2.8 million direct referral invites
• Dropbox went from 100k to 4 million users in just 15 months
• This resulted in a 40x increase, or a doubling of users every 3 months

This just goes to show the power a referral program can have.

The key is to come up with some way to reward existing customers for referring your brand to a friend.

This could be a discount, freebie, cash back, or whatever.

As long as the reward has genuine value and isn’t going to kill your profit margins, it should work.

The specific reward program you’ll want to implement will depend largely on your industry or niche.

That’s why I suggest reading this post from Referral Candy.

It goes over 47 different referral programs that totally crushed it and should give you some ideas on coming up with an approach for your business.

I also recommend checking out this guide from Referral Rock, which tells you pretty much everything you need to know on the subject.

Conclusion

With all the cutting-edge, sleek, and sexy marketing techniques out there, WOMM sometimes gets overlooked these days.

And that’s unfortunate.

If you look at studies involving research on WOMM, it’s easy to see that it’s still alive and well.

In many ways, WOMM is more powerful than ever when you consider the ease with which consumers can share reviews with one another.

I know I usually find myself reading at least a couple of reviews before I purchase something on Amazon or especially before I book a spot on Airbnb.

The way I look at it, it’s never been easier to harness the power of WOMM than it is today.

It’s simply a matter of bringing this old school concept into the modern marketing era.

By using a handful of fundamental concepts like the ones I discussed, you can absolutely make your digital business explode using WOMM.

The best part is that many of the new customers you receive will be repeats and will even recommend your brand to their friends.

And this is the very definition of creating a sustainable business model.

How big of a role do you think WOMM plays in business today?

from Quick Sprout http://ift.tt/2oGZaZH
via IFTTT

The (Unwelcome) Death Knell of First and Last Attribution

I gave the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe to our nephew for Christmas. Poe is a great American poet and author, who undoubtedly, left his morbid mark on many of us. I figured our nephew was about the right age to get freaked out about the amount of effort needed to creep across old floors without someone noticing.... 

First and last touch attribution is quickly dying.

Figuring out how to attribute performance to an asset or campaign is a tricky subject for marketers. In the olden days we had to decide which one-touch attribution we would use – first touch was when a new lead was created and last touch was right before we passed the lead to the sales team.

Our dashboards and repots looked great. We could pull them up and present to management the ROI of any given marketing campaign. While we loved our attribution model, but I bet a lot of us (secretly) hate it now.

The rise of multi-touch attribution (measuring all touches across the buying journey) is challenging our ability to make informed decisions about our marketing channels, to incentivize our inside sales teams, and to make a case for ROI.

For B2B marketers, multi-touch attribution is an even bigger issue. As we take an Account Based Marketing (ABM) approach to plan campaigns, we acknowledge that not only is there more than one person at an account involved in the sale, but it takes many online and offline interactions to close the deal. With multiple people and multiple touches as the framework for ABM, we can no longer use any one touch (first, last or fifth) to measure our effectiveness.

 

Long live multi-touch attribution!

I am confident that we are not fully prepared for multi-touch attribution. And there are good arguments for continuing to record first and/or last touch – we should continue to track these metrics because they serve as a data point about the asset or campaign. But we can no longer rely on them to tell us the ROI of our assets and campaigns. For that, we need to bring all touches into the model.

This is the marketers’ mantra: ”Help us, world, find the right person, at the right time, with the right message!” As marketers, we are quick to take up promising new technology and methods, and so too must we be willing to give up our tried and true methods.

Multi-touch attribution is a gigantic effort. Many of us have been involved in a Lead Scoring or Lead-To-Quote process creation, and we know how painful it can be to operationalize, even with a simpler first/last attribution model. Multi-touch makes it even more complex, and you will need many cohorts across all marketing, sales and operations to make it happen.

I advise all of us to think of this as an ongoing process improvement. We don't have the technology yet to make this model push-button. But we can change the mind-set in our organizations and advocate for incorporating multi-touch attribution in our marketing operations. 

Let’s all channel our inner Edgar Allan Poe and let the death knell toll for one touch attribution.

Tried and True

As a B2B Marketer, you spend a lot of your time coming up with new ways to reach the right prospect, at the right time, with the right message. Account Based Marketing (ABM) is a tried-and-true strategy to help you do all three.

And for more ways ABM an help you up your marketing game, download The Account Based Marketing Guide For Modern Marketers. 

Image source: melbournefringe.com.au

from Oracle Blogs | Oracle Marketing Cloud http://ift.tt/2nDxkOB
via IFTTT

Reddit launches a new self-serve ad platform

New platform offers changes to how advertisers are billed, how campaigns are created and how metrics are reported.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

from Marketing Land - Internet Marketing News, Strategies & Tips http://ift.tt/2mVj32F
via IFTTT

Facebook expands branded content program, will mark posts as ‘paid’

Facebook is opening branded content to more brands, updating policies and making it more obvious when a post has been paid for.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

from Marketing Land - Internet Marketing News, Strategies & Tips http://ift.tt/2nDaVRx
via IFTTT

Online Marketing News: The Age of Mobile, Cheetos Snackware & Twitter Expands Pre-Roll

Why Creativity Matters More in the Age of Mobile [Infographic] Based on Facebook's new 'Why Creativity Matters in the Age of Mobile' report, this infographic shows four big shifts that are driving the way that we consume media, including that consumption is no longer linear, our visual-first evolution and more. Social Media Today Goodbye Forever, Orange Fingers -- Eating Cheetos Could Get an Epic Upgrade Cheetos and Betabrand are coming together to solve a long-time snack crisis -- Cheeto fingers. The mix of brilliant understanding of the user experience from a product standpoint, and creativity in finding a resolution involving user-interaction, is an inspiration for marketers everywhere. Inc. Expanding Pre-Roll Ads to Periscope Video Twitter is expanding their pre-roll ads as their video viewership continues to grow. The platform is now giving publishers the opportunity to monetize content while allowing brands to advertise against that content with pre-roll ads on Periscope. Twitter Mobile now accounts for nearly 70% of digital media time [comScore] comScore recently released a report that shows 70% of digital media time is spent on mobile, with less than one third being consumed on desktop devices. 60% of that mobile time is spent within ads. However, while less than one third of digital time is spent on desktop, 80% of ad dollars are being spent there. Marketing Land Introducing Pinterest Propel for successful advertising Pinterest has announced a new program called Pinterest Propel to help train soon-to-be Pinterest advertisers from agencies and brands alike. In order to qualify for the benefits, like 30-day one-on-one phone support, advertisers must be prepared to spend $100/day or more on Pinterest ads. Pinterest More Ways to Share with the Facebook Camera On Tuesday, Facebook rolled out two new ways to share photos and videos: a new Snapchat-esque in-app camera that allows users to add effects and dynamic objects to their photos, and they've added Facebook stories to the main Facebook app. Facebook Google AdWords Rolls Out 3 Important Upgrades to Dynamic Search Ads Google AdWords has released three new improvements to Dynamic Search Ads. These changes include page feeds that allow advertisers to specify exact URLs within DSAs, expanded text ads and showing more relevant ads by default. Search Engine Journal What Consumers Really Think About YouTube’s Offensive Content Problem and Its Advertisers AdWeek recently commissioned a survey of 502 consumer respondents to show what they really think of the ongoing controversy of advertiser's content being shown prior to offensive content: "the questionnaire shows that enough people (36 percent) view ads as endorsements by brands to cause concern among marketers. At the same time, 55.1 percent of survey participants said their opinion didn’t change about such brands." AdWeek What were your top news stories this week? We'll be back next week with more top online marketing news. Have something to add? Share your thoughts in the comments to Tweet to @toprank.

The post Online Marketing News: The Age of Mobile, Cheetos Snackware & Twitter Expands Pre-Roll appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

from Online Marketing Blog – TopRank® http://ift.tt/2ooBNVI
via IFTTT