Can you prove the ROI of your marketing? Here are the top challenges we’re all facing.

Chart of the day: Reporting the ROI of Social and Content Marketing proving difficult for marketers

As marketers we are constantly juggling more projects than seems possible at times -  planning the next campaign, delivering the current one as well as all the BAU activity of Email, Automation, Social, linking with the sales team and meeting…oh the meetings. It can feel like your in a whirlwind even with the most well thought out plans but one of the most turbulent times can be when you need to report on the ROI of particular activities. How do you find the right data? Is it accurate? How should your present it? It’s hard.

In a recent survey, TrackMaven asked marketers from 19 different industries what they were finding the most challenging when attempting to prove the ROI of their marketing. Of the many options, they could choose from attributing social and content to revenue leading the pack, followed up by aligning KPIs with overall business goals and attributing.

Proving the ROI on your investment in content production has always been particularly tricky to measure as all the analytics platforms (Google Analytics/Adobe Analytics) focus on reporting by channels e.g. Email, Paid Search, SEO etc. Even using the most sophisticated attribution models will not tell you if it was worth spending your marketing budget on a new long-form blog post or ebook.

That being said it is possible if you have a few things in place first:

1. An analytics platform (e.g. Google Analytics) configured to report campaigns
2. Tracking codes added to all you marketing activities utilizing your content e.g. UTM codes
3. A custom dashboard for reporting on your content

If you have all three of these you will be able to report on the impact of each piece of content has had on each marketing channel from impression through the click and lead to the final sale and beyond via combining your campaign report and your financial reports.

These challenges can all be conquered but it requires you to take a step back from your marketing production line, discover the right KPIs for your business and utilize the tools you and/or configure some new tools to fit your needs. It can be painstaking at the time to get it all working and be accurate but once it’s all working proving the ROI on your activities should take minutes.

• Source: TrackMaven 2017 Marketing Leadership Survey
• Sample: 217 marketers from 19 different industries
• Recommended Resources: Evaluating Content Marketing ROI Guide, RACE Analytics Dashboard and Marketing Operations Strategy Guide.

from Blog – Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/managing-digital-marketing/planning-budgeting/can-prove-roi-marketing-top-challenges-facing/

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3 Marketing Automation Strategies you can implement today

Simple recipes and tips to get you started with your Marketing Automation

Are you still sending out blanket e-shot campaigns to large, anonymous lists? The latest research from the Smart Insights - GetResponse Email Marketing and Marketing Excellence research 2017 shows that many businesses aren’t yet tapping into marketing automation. More than half (54%) rated their use of marketing automation as limited including around 20% who weren’t using it all.  If this describes you, then the ‘shot’ part might turn out to mean 'shot in the dark.’ In an age where PPC and SEO let you reach a target audience actively looking for companies like yours, blunt emails are rapidly becoming a thing of the past, or should be.

Most companies already have all the ingredients - an email platform, a CRM full of client data, and an incoming source of leads gives you everything you need. Getting started can seem daunting, but by starting off with a few basic recipes, you can build up a fully-fledged automated strategy in no time. That’s how I hope to help in this post. Dave Chaffey of Smart Insights has more in this post on 10 steps to get started with marketing automation.

Recipe 1: Dynamic Content

Most companies have a wealth of information about their B2B clients in their email database or CRM. Dynamic email content is a great way to put this knowledge to good use by delivering differentiated content which reflects the behaviour and history of your customers. It’s possible to do this kind of segmentation manually if you don’t mind labouring over a hot spreadsheet for a while, but most CRM and email systems can be integrated to do the hard work for you.

Start off with something simple - if promoting a whitepaper, you could vary your call to action depending on whether your contact is a Technical Director or a Finance Director, for example. An email with special offers could use the purchase history in your CRM to promote discounts on similar products - another great way to keep things relevant for your audience.

This kind of segmentation can lead to click rates being 62% higher, and that’s just by utilising information in your email database. If your email platform can integrate with a web analytics platform to include recent browsing history on your site, so much the better. It’s also easier to report on single dynamic campaigns rather than multiple-campaign segmentation. However you go about it, dynamic content is a great way to deliver content that your audience wants to see.

Recipe 2: Drip Campaigns

A series of timely emails to your audience can be extremely effective, especially for introducing new clients to your business. Some case studies have shown a 98% conversion rate for these type of 'drip’ campaigns; targeted communications sent out to your base at regular intervals to educate clients, welcome new customers and warm up new leads.

Drip campaigns can be especially relevant for businesses with long sales lead-times, helping to stay in regular contact with prospective clients while delivering targeted content.

Drip campaigns are easy to set up, but managing them effectively is key. For a start, see if your email platform supports triggered automatic sending - timing and a consistent experience for all your contacts will be key. It’s also important to measure engagement with your campaign and to know when a contact is engaged enough to approach directly. If Lead scoring is a feature you can use to measure and automate this is the perfect time to do so. Long campaigns will also benefit from a preference centre - an alternative to a simple unsubscribe, which offers multiple options to keep your audience involved, and allow further segmentation.

Recipe 3: Nurture Campaigns

Lead nurture is often visually depicted as a funnel, but it’s really more accurate to see it as a watering can - it allows your audience to branch out and choose their own journey through your pre-planned automated campaigns. In the same way dynamic content will change an email based static fields in your database or CSV upload, a nurture campaign will segment your audience based on their interaction with the your communications, automatically sending them in different directions based on their interests.

This level of automation can help to generate more leads at a far lower cost than using non-targeted static campaigns. A large part of this saving can be attributed to the time saved - a well-planned nurture campaign can span weeks or even months, and after setup can simply be left to run.

From a sales point of view, nurturing is a particularly good option for lukewarm leads - contacts who have engaged with your site or campaigns in a passing sense, but aren’t quite ready to be approached with a direct proposition.

To make your nurture campaigns successful, make sure your email designs have plenty of calls to action and links - more choice for your audience means better targeting for you. Connecting the dots between web analytics and email can also give you vital insight into user journeys which can be reflected in your campaigns.

Finding the time to save time

Prospects are now in charge of how you interact with them; social media and search is all about connecting with your audience when they’re looking for you, not the other way around. With enough time to spend analysing your web traffic and campaign results and segmenting your audience manually through Excel and CRM reporting, it’s possible to keep up with the demand, but with marketing automation on the rise, more and more marketers are looking at an integrated solutions. For those taking their first steps on the automation path, it’s like learning to cook; just take it one recipe at a time.

Thanks to Steve McConnel for sharing his advice and opinions in this post. Steve is a Marketing Specialist at Reed Business information, helping clients to plan and deliver automated campaigns, as well as blogging and copywriting. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.

from Blog – Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/lead-generation/marketing-automation/marketing-automation/

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Point of Sale: Retail & Travel Weekly

This week’s articles examine the importance of the full customer journey, common mistakes to avoid when using data to tell a story, the top hurdles that digital marketers face in articulating ROI, and more.

• Brands Recognize Realities of the Customer Journey [eMarketer]: Improving in-store experiences is a key strategic initiative for many surveyed retailers.
• Adventures In Data Storytelling: Three Key Traps To Avoid [Forbes]: Correctly telling a story with data requires combining data, a narrative, and visuals to support what is being articulated.
• The Top Hurdles to Proving Digital Marketing ROI [MarketingProfs]: Challenges include attributing social and content efforts to revenue and aligning key performance indicators (KPIs) with overall business goals.
• 8 Key Google Shopping Product Feed Optimizations [Checklist] [CPC Strategy]: Eight recommendations for boosting visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs) and increasing overall sales.
• Three Surprising New Places You’ll Pay In The Future [Forbes]: New technology is opening up opportunities for consumers to make purchases in new areas and in new ways.

The post Point of Sale: Retail & Travel Weekly appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/news-and-resources/point-sale-retail-travel-weekly-40/

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Supercharge Your E-commerce Revenues With These 3 UX Tactics

Live chat, video and product finders can help you massively boost your conversion rate

If you suddenly discovered you had superpowers, you’d use them, right? Of course you would! (and hopefully in a socially beneficial way). Well, I recently discovered a few user experience (UX) techniques that are proven to significantly lift E-commerce revenues, so I wanted to share these techniques so that you can starting use them yourself soon.

First I’ll describe the revenue ‘leverage factors’ each of these features provide. Then I’ll provide guidance on how to design and implement them for your eCommerce website.

The X factors, please

My recent analysis for a website that sells surveillance products found that the Revenue Per Visitor (RPV) - the top conversion metric for E-commerce websites - was amplified by the following factors:

• By 3.9X when visitors used chat
• By 1.7X when visitors viewed videos
• By 2.2X when visitors used a product finder

In other words, visitors who used online chat produced nearly 4 times as much revenue as visitors who didn’t use chat. These values are even more impressive when they’re expressed as percentage: the 3.9X for chat equates to a 290% increase in revenues for visitors who used this feature. This obviously adds up to big revenue gains when it’s multiplied by a large number of visitors per month.

My team arrived at these factors by:

• Installing the script for Evergage, a website personalization platform, on our client’s eCommerce website
• Tagging all key website interactions
• Creating segments of visitors (based on specific interactions)
• Running reports to see the before/after effect of the UX updates
• Taking the ratio of the RPV of visitors who used the feature to the RPV of visitors who were exposed to the feature, but didn’t use it

It’s a simple process - it just takes a few hours and a modest investment in a personalization tool. (I won’t get into the tool specifics or costs here - just know that the monthly tool cost pales in comparison to the insights and revenue lifts you get from creating custom visitor segments and viewing the available reports).

True, these ‘boost factors’ may vary across businesses. But considering that the above X factors are for discretionary products, not products that people need to buy every week or month, these factors are likely to be even higher for mass-market eCommerce sites.

Chat

It makes sense that chat would increase conversions because it’s a human interaction that requires little effort or motivation. Most people, especially those under 30, don’t want to actually talk to anyone while shopping; they’d much rather text, email or chat. So your website’s salespeople need to be where they are - online, knowledgeable, and eager to answer their questions.

If you don’t have chat on your site yet, you can get started by:

• Researching and choosing a suitable chat tool
• Training your chat (and phone) staff on customer service and sales best practices
• Hooking your chat tool up to your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, so your reps can do things like collect emails for follow-on marketing
• Deploying the chat experience on your website
• Improving both your chat tool and sales interactions over time

Since chat interactions provide the highest RPV boost, even if your chat experience isn’t awesome when first launched, you’re still likely to get a 1.5-2.0 X RPV boost. That’s nothing for you - or your CFO - to sneeze at.

Something else to keep in mind: You will also be gathering deep streams of prospect data from your chat logs. By mining these logs, either manually or with a text-mining tool, you’ll collect insights that will allow you to improve both your chat experience and other aspects of your conversion funnel.

Video

I learned the other day that the average session time on YouTube is 40 minutes per viewing session. No, not 40 seconds, or 4 minutes, but over half an hour. YouTube does this cleverly by auto-rolling playlists, showing related videos, personalizing the homepage, and other tactics. You end up saying, ‘Geez, where did the time go, I was just looking for how to jump-start my car. Now I’ve been watching Sean Spicer news conference videos for over an hour!’ We humans obviously love to watch videos and, with the high popularity of TV shows and movie streaming, I don’t expect this to change anytime soon.

So, how do you tap into this fascination, so that it lifts your conversions? First, you should script and produce some ‘explainer’ scripts for all of your site’s main usage scenarios and categories - content that explains key product features to consider, and the pros and cons of each. Don’t just blurt out features and specs; that will make your visitors’ eyes glaze over. Instead, assume that most of your visitors don’t know much about your company or your products, and don’t have the patience to be lectured. Assume that what they really want and need is guidance - ultimately reassurance - that they’re making a smart, well-informed choice.

After informing your visitors, you can then go into ‘demo mode’ - show videos of the product in use in real-life scenarios. These videos will make it real, and help your viewers visualize themselves using the product. If they’re using it in their minds, they’re well on their way to actually buying it. They just may need to get a quick question answered. Assuming that you’ve implemented chat (you will be, right?), those visitor interactions will ‘have your back’ in those situations.

Once your videos are done, post them to YouTube, social media, category pages, product pages. Get them out there so they can start driving engagement and getting your visitors to take that next conversion click.

Finders keepers

If you’re not familiar with product finders, here’s the best analogy: they are the UX equivalent of the real-life salesperson who greets you, asks you a few questions, then guides you to the best product for your situation. If this salesperson is good, she doesn’t just guide you to a single product, but to a complete solution. If she is bad - or doesn’t even connect with you - you just wander away and look elsewhere.

To find the questions - and answer choices - to put into your finder, ask a few experienced support reps the ‘qualifying questions’ they ask to guide prospects to the best product in the shortest amount of time. Then, after providing the right motivation for your call-to-action button (e.g. ‘Get your customized hidden camera! [subtext: ‘It only takes 30 seconds’), jump right into your questions. I’ve found that Lightbox layers are the best way to show the questions to desktop visitors. For mobile visitors, I’ve learned it’s best to show the questions directly on the page.

Keep in mind these guidelines are you create your questions:

• Don’t ask more than 5-6 questions (4 is preferable)
• Don’t offer more than 3 answer choices per question
• Include tips below the answers that clarify the implications each answer (if necessary)

And when you show your recommendations:

• Reiterate the answers the visitor provided
• Present a higher-price ‘premium’ option to the left of a ‘standard’ one (based on the anchoring principle, the standard one will seem like a good value)
• Provide a way for the visitor to save their recommendations (which gives you a reason to capture their email address)

Online, it’s less about building rapport, so you don’t need to include any introductory screens. Just dive directly from your finder call-to-action to the first question, and after the last question show your recommendations. Your visitors will appreciate your directness.

More visible, more boost

Now that you know how effective these power boosters are, you need to make them more visually prominent (within reason - please refrain from the flashing lights ‘Times Square’ syndrome). In addition to having ‘start chat’ button, push chat to visitors under certain conditions (for example, when they are stalled in the cart). Expose demo videos or finders on product pages. The more these features get seen and used, the higher the conversion rate - and RPV - boost you’ll get.

Remember to tag and track

When you deploy any of these tactics, be sure test their click-through rates and RPVs against your baseline experiences so that you can quantify the financial value of each update. Don’t put yourself in the position of spending time and emotional energy making updates, but having no way to quantify their financial impact. Begin with the end in mind - a compelling story to tell your CFO - and you’ll be sure to include all the tracking and reports you need.

Start using your superpowers now!

Put on your virtual cape and start working on adding chat, videos and product finders to your website, and see how quickly you can get them implemented. Don’t worry about making them perfect - just focus on getting something workable up and running as soon as possible. You can always perfect it later. Even if you ‘only’ get a 1.5X revenue lift initially, you’ll be getting a substantial ROI from your design and development investment. Your company’s CFO or owner will soon be singing your praises, and maybe even sharing some of those revenue gains.

Thanks to Mark for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Mark Hall is an eCommerce Expert, Conversion Rate Optimizer, Voice of Customer (VOC) Researcher and Concert Band Geek. Having consulted for over 20 years with a wide range of clients including AT&T, American Express, Edmunds, SpyTec and the California Lottery, he knows which marketing strategies and tactics will best boost companies’ conversion rates and revenues.

from Blog – Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/user-experience/supercharge-ecommerce-revenues-3-ux-tactics/

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TV Advertising in the Digital Age

The post TV Advertising in the Digital Age appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/digital-marketing/tv-advertising-digital-age/

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Fueling the Experience Business

Digital has disrupted the way consumers engage with brands, and people’s expectations are at an all-time high. Brands own each and every moment of interaction with their customers, and over time, only exceptional experiences lead to long-term relationships. Creating experiences that drive brand loyalty is very much the focus of Adobe Experience Cloud, which we announced at Adobe Summit last month.

Content Powers the Digital Experience.
As brands seek to consistently deliver the best possible experience in the moment it matters most, content is what fuels that experience. When done right, content can and will drive business impact, and it holds the key to driving brand loyalty that results in conversions.

Yet, companies are challenged to deliver engaging, highly personalized content that builds a positive, emotional connection during each customer interaction — regardless of the device or channel — and do so at a high velocity. According to International Data Corporation (IDC), 71 percent of marketers say they must create 10 times as many assets nowadays to support customer-facing channels — not to mention that the number of channels they are creating content for has exploded as well.

This is precisely how we’re helping customers with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) — part of the Adobe Marketing Cloud — which powers digital experience management and delivery as part of Adobe Experience Cloud.

Announcing the Next Generation of AEM to Fuel Fluid Experiences.
Today, we are announcing the general availability of AEM 6.3, which enables brands to deliver the most memorable, unique, and actionable experiences to customers. We know that consumers interact with brands nowadays in more ways than ever before — via not only mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, but also Pinterest, connected cars, and even ATMs. AEM 6.3 delivers content experiences beyond owned properties — to affiliated properties across web, mobile, and IoT — at the scale required for an Experience Business. With the help of data and actionable insights, customers can determine what content will create the most memorable experience for a particular individual at that moment in time.

This latest release helps realize the vision of “fluid experiences” — experiences fueled by content that flows and adapts to its context with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Following are the new features we are introducing that extend AEM’s capabilities even further than before:

1. Fluid Experiences
Fluid experiences enable brands to optimally deliver adaptable content beyond owned to affiliated channels and across different formats and touchpoints. To help achieve fluid experiences that are assembled instantly for the right format and context, we’ve introduced innovations that combine the omnichannel content management of AEM with the AI powers of Adobe Sensei. AEM has evolved beyond rich tools for websites, forms, and community engagement to become a solution that is also capable of flowing content into other third-party sites, screens, and IoT devices.

2. Real-Time Assets at Greater Scale
With assets becoming the cornerstone of digital marketing to help facilitate digital transformation, AEM now offers enterprise-level scalability and performance of digital asset management, and we’re enabling richer integration of both brand- and user-generated content (UGC). For example, brands can source and obtain permission for UGC within the AEM interface.

3. Faster Time-to-Value
With increased pressure to capture the attention of customers by creating, managing, and deliver personalized content more quickly, brands can now achieve business value more promptly with production-ready responsive components. We’re accelerating the ability to set up websites, digital-asset management, and forms with user-experience (UX) best practices and tools to connect to enterprise systems such as customer-relationship management (CRM). This release also provides broader options and support for increased flexibility and accelerated time to market in the Cloud.

Digital Drives More Business.
Digital transformation spans industries — whether it’s retail, financial services, healthcare, or manufacturing, businesses everywhere must make the digital leap. Let’s look at what digital transformation means for some of the world’s most innovative brands and how they are leveraging AEM to provide immersive, highly personalized experiences for their customers:

Philips
Philips — a global healthcare, consumer-lifestyle, and lighting company — serves a diverse base of customers worldwide. The company’s digital presence spans customers in 79 markets and 38 languages, and its one-million pages of website content receive over 1.4 billion views each year. Philips looked to Adobe to simplify and standardize new information for employees and enhance the quality and speed of delivery of on-brand content, which would, in turn, improve the customer experience. The company can now easily produce and deliver continuous, personalized experiences that are highly attuned to the context of each customer. AEM has automated the daily updates of over 30,000 digital assets, including product images and videos, and has transformed its one-million pages of online content into fluid, responsive webpages.

Wyndham Hotels and Resorts
In the travel and hospitality industry, Wyndham Hotels and Resorts set out to overhaul its technology platform to drive increased loyalty for its large portfolio of brands. Recognizing the growing importance of mobile as it relates to travel research and booking, Wyndham needed a digital asset-management infrastructure that could scale with speed and flexibility while meeting customers’ needs across all touchpoints in seconds — and sometimes less. To drive more bookings, the travel giant wanted to bring its brands to life with immersive, engaging digital experiences. With AEM as its repository for over 300,000 images and content for over 7,500 hotels, Wyndham can now create memorable moments across all customer touchpoints in the most unique and meaningful ways — ways that weren’t possible beforehand. The hotel giant transformed the way it engages with customers, both online and via mobile, resulting in increased conversions, more revenue for hotel owners, and improved customer loyalty.

Franke Group
Franke Group, a European-based manufacturer of residential and professional kitchen systems, was facing commoditization in a competitive market. The company leveraged virtual-reality technology within 3D webpages, forever changing how buyers purchase kitchens and driving business value and increased sales. Customers can now interact with and personalize Franke’s model kitchens and products in ways that could never be done on a showroom floor, helping each buyer create an environment that most closely resembles his or her current or future kitchen to aid in the purchase decision. With AEM, the company increased visitors’ time spent onsite by 40 percent, reduced its website churn rate by 15 percent, improved efficiency, and lowered costs.

It’s Time to Begin Your Digital Transformation.
Our customers are achieving tremendous business value through their digital transformations powered by Adobe Experience Manager. It’s an exciting time to be an Experience Business, and we’re supporting our customers on that journey — both today and as their journeys evolve alongside future technologies. The time is now for brands to invest in their digital foundations. Take the first step today by learning more about Adobe Experience Manager and how it helped Philips and Franke Group manage their digital transformations.

The post Fueling the Experience Business appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/digital-marketing/fueling-experience-business/

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Building Chatbots: Everything you need to know

Building Chatbots: Everything you need to know

Chatbots continue to receive a lot of hype in 2017, with companies including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and many others investing heavily in the technology. Smart Insights have covered how Pizza Express have built a chatbot. This brief guide explores some of key things to consider when building and launching your first chatbot.

Understand your audience

Before you start building anything it is essential to fully understand who will be using your chatbot, and what you already know about them. Facebook Insights and other analytical tools may provide some useful information.

Personas are frequently used when building websites to address specific audience groups, and may also be helpful when creating chatbots.

Set the right tone

The conversational nature of chatbots makes getting your tone of voice right critical. Tone of voice will vary according to the nature of your business. For example, a chatbot promoting the local music scene may be fairly relaxed and include the greeting:

However, a chatbot for an airline that allows you to check your flight details would be more professional in tone.

Creating a short tone of voice document may also be helpful, particularly if content is being updated by different members of a team.

Your tone of voice document will help define the personality and conversational style of your chatbot, and deliver a more coherent brand experience.

Define your goals

Just as you would when building a website or managing a social media channel you must have a clear understanding of what you want the chatbot to deliver. You may have multiple goals so it is always a good idea to list these and use as the basis for development. Some of these might include:

• Provide out of hours customer support.
• Offer quick answers to common queries.
• Act as a digital brand ambassador.
• Promote your business with special offers.

Plan your user journeys

As chatbot development includes branching navigation and conversational AI it is strongly recommended that you map out some typical paths through to content.

There are different methods of achieving this ranging from applications such as Visio, simple Word documents through to sketching on notepads and using sticky notes.

This approach will give you a strong framework for your chatbot, help avoid confusion and speed up development.

How much freedom?

It is vital to determine how much freedom you are going to offer your users. Many chatbots use an on-rails series of questions to limit the potential for errors or misunderstanding.

Whereas other chatbots provide space for open ended questions, and use AI and natural language processing to provide answers. This obviously carries slightly more risk, but may provide a more comfortable and immersive user experience.

A hybrid approach of offering set button responses with the option to ask additional follow-up questions is advisable. This helps you to provide clear routes through to common tasks, whilst giving your visitors some level of personal freedom.

Content is still king

Although the combination of AI, natural language processing and new technology makes it easy to get swept along, your chatbot will live and die by the quality and relevance of your content. As with web and social media content asking these five simple questions will help you to stay focused.

• Who. Who are your audience? What do you know about them?
• What. What do you want them to be able to do? What tasks can be accomplished with the chatbot?
• Where. Geographical location is important. As chatbots reach a global audience always consider any cultural and localisation issues.
• When. If your chatbot is providing out of hours customer service, can your audience still contact you by other means? Eg automated phone lines, online forms, etc.
• Why. Arguably the most important question. Why are you building a chatbot? Is it relevant for your audience? Will be it be used?

Human or machine?

Using a chatbot involves a level of intimacy that is usually associated with a human conversation, and so this needs to be carefully considered.

It is recommended you make it clear to your users from the outset that they are interacting with a machine, as this helps manage expectations, boosts transparency and avoids any sense of creepiness.

Chatbots can sometimes expect to receive some unexpected emotional responses, so it is advisable to have some content blocks ready for statements such as ‘I like you’.

The anonymity of chatbots can be particularly effective for applications such as counselling or self-help, as an individual may feel less inhibited having a conversation with a machine than a face-to-face discussion.

Leverage functionality

Chatbots can currently deliver multiple types of content including:

• Photo galleries
• Video content
• Recent blog posts and news updates
• Product catalogues
• Integration with web services via APIs
• Simple data capture for lead generation

Expect to see more functionality being added on a continual basis, as Facebook and other platforms follow patterns seen in China and South Korea where WeChat and Tencent are consolidating different tasks within a single interface, eg banking, e-commerce, wellness, etc.

Never misuse data

To help build trust with your audience it is acceptable to use data to address them by their first name.

However, it would be inappropriate and arguably invasive to display elements such as a profile photo of the user or their friends within the chatbot.

If you are using the chatbot to capture data, you must be clear about how this data is being used, and explicitly state if it is being shared with any third-parties. As an additional safeguard you may also consider providing a link to your privacy notice containing appropriate clauses.

An alternative to this would be to link out to an online form on your website.

Exercise caution

Although chatbots are fairly informal in nature you should always be careful not to provide advice and information that could result in legal challenges. Here are two examples:

• Financial services chatbot. It should be made very clear that any figures provided are illustrative and do not constitute a formal offer.
• Medical advice chatbot. Although the chatbot may be able to assess basic symptoms and give general support, there should always be a clear hand off point to a medical professional for a proper diagnosis.

Make the data work for you

Chatbots provide very detailed analytics and user data. This includes simple demographics, number of queries made, visitor flow and user retention. Careful study of this data and user behaviour will then help you identify gaps, and iterate accordingly.

Don’t be too ambitious

It is a sensible idea to start small and scale upwards. Be careful to avoid feature creep, and overcomplicate the chatbot. As the vast majority of your audience will be using it on mobile devices with limited screen space keep things as simple as possible. Less really is more.

Humour can help

Successful chatbots sometimes use subtle humour and a light tone to help establish a rapport with the audience, and reduce frustration when things don’t fully work as expected.

However, context is everything and whilst a light approach might work well for a fashion or lifestyle brand, a more sober tone would be appropriate for a financial, legal or medical advice chatbot.

It is worth considering though that some humour doesn’t always translate for a global audience, so use with care!

Fail gracefully (or at least charmingly)

As chatbots are still in their infancy there are bound to be some technical issues. You can mitigate some of this risk by providing helpful ‘error’ messages with clear routes to speak to a human representative.

Testing matters

This may seem obvious but bears repeating. AI can behave unpredictably and so it is vital to test your chatbot against as many scenarios as possible. Likewise having a testing plan using different devices and desktop machines is strongly advised.

Finding bugs and quirks is a normal stage of chatbot development, and will help you to deliver a better and more robust experience.

Stay updated

Regular content updates are essential and if anything even more critical than your website. If a visitor is seeking your contact details urgently, the last thing they would expect is for any information to be outdated or be taken to a dead link.

Promote your chatbot

Once everything is up and running promote your chatbot using your website and social media channels.

Facebook Messenger bots have a simple URL structure, eg https://m.me/techcrunch or Messenger codes that are similar to QR codes can be scanned using the Messenger App.

Finally, you can submit your chatbot to a directory such as botlist to raise awareness and improve your reach.

TThanks to Richard Ashby for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Richard is Founder of Dotkumo You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.

from Blog – Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/user-experience/building-chatbots-everything-need-know/

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How many digital specialists are needed in a marketing team?

Examples of the level of digital resourcing from Pharma marketing

The question of the types of specialist digital marketing roles businesses need in an organisation is an ongoing challenge. Although some have said that we’re now in a ’post-digital era of marketing’, the reality is, that although marketing generalists are needed to plan and manage campaigns and product launches and they need a certain level of digital competence, digital specialists will also be needed in large organisations. Although you can argue that some specialist digital marketing activities can and should be outsourced to agencies and consultants, you can equally argue that some digital marketing competencies are too important to be outsourced and a good level of knowledge and control based on customer and market knowledge is required in-house. Examples of digital competencies that many seek to keep in-house include the complexities of managing organic and paid search, engaging and serving through social media, automating email campaigns and running structured experiments to improve conversion and experience.

When we have researched this previously in our Managing Digital Marketing research, there has typically been around one-third of digital specialists in an organisation, although this naturally varies by size. I was interested to see this new ‘research’ from 'EyeforPharma’ in the Pharma industry.

They recently repeated the analysis for a third year and found that Bayer has joined J&J/Janssen at the top of the table, with 4.8 digital employees per thousand, an increase of 150% since 2015 when it went public with its digital transformation project. Click on the chart below for an enlarged version.

So it’s interesting, but I’d say it massively under-represents the importance of digital in an organisation. The method here of measuring 'digital intensity’, is to look at the number of employees who referred to ‘digital’ in their LinkedIn title. Well, it is some sort of benchmark and would indicate the relative number of digital marketing directors, managers and execs with that term in their job title. But what if the role is referred to as online marketing or e-business? Then there are more specialist roles mentioned above. Our research on digital skills identified 20 key digital marketing competencies most of which don’t have 'digital’ in their job title, rather, search, social, email, experience and so on.

Still, it’s interesting 'food-for-thought’ and emphasises the difference in digital maturity which you will see in any industry.

• Source: Eyeforpharma : How Digital is Pharma?
• Sample: LinkedIn evaluation 'Digital in job title’
• Recommended Smart Insights resources: Managing digital teams toolkit covering job descriptions and team structures

from Blog – Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy/many-digital-specialists-needed-marketing-team/

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LinkedIn launches new matched audiences feature and new ABM options [@SmartInsights Alert]

Are LinkedIn’s new features the most effective B2B ad product on the market?

This week has seen the launch of two powerful new B2B advertising products from LinkedIn. Both have the potential to help B2B advertisers get far more benefit from the business-focused social network.

LinkedIn Matched Audiences

Matching audiences to email addresses is one way to re-target people who you know are interested in your product (because they’ve given you their address). Facebook, Twitter and Google already have options to re-target audiences based on email address.

The idea is you upload the list of your customer’s email addresses, and then the ad network matches these addresses to the people on its database, so you can serve ads to those exact people. This is a great tactic for B2B because the long, complex selling process for big ticket purchases often involves signing up to research and white papers and then comparing several different providers. Advertising to these people is critical as it keeps your brand at the top of their mind.

These should be people that are the most cost effective to target because they already know your brand and have expressed a willingness to receive communications with you by giving you their email address. Sounds great in theory, but in practice, it tends not to be so effective for one simple reason. People sign up for B2B downloads or mailing lists with their work email address, not their personal email address. But the email address people have associated with their Facebook and Twitter accounts aren’t their work email addresses, they are their personal addresses, so they don’t match. The system then misses these people, which make up the vast majority of Facebook, Twitter and Google users. Usually, 85% of email addresses added to Facebook’s email matching ad product won’t be successfully matched to a Facebook account.

This is where LinkedIn has a huge edge. People do use their work email addresses with their LinkedIn accounts, so re-targeting these people on LinkedIn will be far more effective. Whilst you can expect to be matching 15% of your database on Facebook or Twitter, on LinkedIn the figure will be around the 75% mark.

It’s not just re-targeting that makes LinkedIn’s new matched audiences a useful tool. You can also use to it get better value from your LinkedIn ads. If you’re running demand generation ads on LinkedIn, you don’t want to be serving them to people that are already leads, as they are already in your system to contact. Any clicks from these people are just a waste of money. So if you upload the emails of your leads to LinkedIn and then exclude them from your demand generation campaigns, you can stop yourself from serving your content to these people.

Account Based Marketing (ABM) Ads

Along with Matched Audience, LinkedIn launched it’s new ABM feature for its ad product this week. You can now upload .CSVs of up to 300,000 companies to target. So if you sell a big enterprise solution, you can now easily target fortune 1000 companies so you’re not paying for ads to be seen by the owner of a florist who isn’t going to buy your all singing all dancing software in a month of Sundays. This feature opens up a range of new tactics which can make your LinkedIn far more effective. First of all, you can more effectively target the businesses that have been on your radar or the radar of your sales team. Get your staff to draw up lists of companies they know they’d want to win as clients and then add them to the accounts list to target.

You can also use the feature to exclude your competitors from all your LinkedIn ads, so your not wasting money getting impressions from competitors. This had the added benefit of preventing your competitors from knowing what you’re doing with LinkedIn ads, giving you a valuable edge. You can also save money by adding all your clients into an ABM audience and exclude them from all campaigns that don’t involve up-selling. This again lets you save money by not paying for impressions/clicks from those who you already work with.

from Blog – Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/linkedin-marketing/linkedin-launches-new-matched-audiences-feature-new-abm-optionssmartinsights-alert/

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The Marketing Statistics you need to compete in 2020

20 marketing stats for 2020

2020 now looms ahead of us, emerging from over the long-term planning horizon. For years marketers have envisaged 2020 as a distant realm where consumers are empowered, companies responsive and new technologies like virtual reality and the Internet of Things ubiquitous. Now it isn’t actually far off, less than three years. Marketers therefore need to stop imagining 2020 as some distant concept, and start planning for it as business reality.

To help you construct your plan, we’ve put together this list of 20 marketing stats showing what the state of the market will be in various areas, from search to social to VR, will be in 2020. These predictions can then help you decide where to allocate resources and spot possible opportunities for your business.

Plan - Think about how global megatrends will affect how your business will operate in 2020

• Total Global Marketing Spend set to reach 1.3 trillion by 2020 (Source: Statista)
• Total Global Digital Marketing spend is set to reach 306 billion by 2020. (Source: Statista)
• By 2020 Millenials will account for more than half of the US workforce for the first time.
• By 2020 there will be more than 75 billion devices connected to the internet (Source: TechCo)

Reach- Key trends in the evolution of SEO and how people search for information

• Total US spending on SEO set to reach 79 billion by 2020. (Source: Statista)
• Approximately 30% of searches will be done without a screen by 2020 (Source: Mediapos)
• There will be 21.4 million smart speakers (Such as Alexa, Google Home etc) in the US by 2020. (Source: Activate)
• By 2020 over 75% of mobile internet traffic will be mobile (Source: Cisco)

Act - How customer experience will change with the introduction of new technologies

• By 2020, there will be 2.5 billion Smartphone in use. That’s more than the total number of web users in 2010.
• 91% of employees believe their company will no longer be competitive by 2020 if the organisation stays in its current form. (Source: Infomentum)
• Revenue for virtual and augmented reality technology forecast to reach 15 billion by 2020. (Source: Digi-capital)
• There will be more than 2 billion connected home devices sold in 2020, and by 2020 over 90% of cars will be connected to the internet (Source: CMO.com)

Convert- What will the size of the market be and how you will you entice them to buy your product?

• By 2020 there will be over 3 billion email users. That’s 300 million more then in 2017. (Source: Radicati)
• International and domestic ecommerce sales will reach 69 billion British pounds in 2020. (Source: Statista)
• The market for machine learning applications is set to reach 13 billion dollars by 2020. (Source: Ironpaper)
• Cross-border B2C ecommerce to reach almost 1 trillion dollars in sales by 2020. (Source: UNCTAD)

Engage- How will interacting with customers change over the coming years?

• FinTech trends: Transactional value of robo-advisory services per user in the UK is expected to grow from approximately thirteen thousand U.S. dollars in 2015 to approximately twenty-seven thousand U.S. dollars in 2021. (Source: Statista)
• The market for artificial intelligence will grow rapidly, to be worth over 5 billion dollars 2020 (Source: Markets and Markets)
• There will be almost half a billion more users of social media networks by 2020 as there are today (Source: Statista)
• Spending on social media advertising will outstrip total spending on newspaper ads in 2020 (Source: CNBC)

For those interested in the success factors for planning an integrated marketing strategy for 2020, we’ve created a guide to help you do just that, and it’s free for all members.

Download Expert Member resource – Integrated Marketing 2020

You won’t be able to compete if you don’t have the right types or levels of investments in people, resources, media or tech to run different digital marketing techniques against intense competition. This guide from Dr. Dave Chaffey of Smart Insights will take you through the strategies you need to implement now in order to succeed in 2020.

Access the Integrated Marketing 2020

from Blog – Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/manage-digital-transformation/marketing-statistics-need-2020/

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Performance Without Compromise: Display Advertising With Adobe Advertising Cloud

“Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will.” ~ AT&T, 1994

AT&T could not possibly have known the revolution that would transpire as a result of these two simple sentences — widely regarded as the Internet’s first display ad — nor just how prophetic their inaugural copy would prove to be. Nearly 25 years later, the display-advertising market is estimated to exceed $40 billion, 78 percent of which is expected to be bought through software. Despite all the innovation in design and delivery, display ads remain a tried-and-true solution for driving consumers to take action at massive scale.

With a seemingly endless supply and myriad formats, marketers might be forgiven for thinking that display-advertising platforms are all the same. Adobe Advertising Cloud is the first independent, end-to-end platform to not only unify lower-funnel performance tactics (like search and display) with upper-funnel brand tactics (like video and TV), but also offer comprehensive reach and frequency management — at impressive scale — with complete transparency and media-quality protections.

Maximize Reach to Your Most Valuable Audiences.
According to the latest State of Advertising report by Adobe Digital Insights, 41 percent of marketers work with three or more media-buying platforms, 40 percent work with three or more media-planning platforms, and 44 percent work with three or more analytics platforms. All these platforms mean that marketers have a very tough time managing reach (i.e., total number of unique individuals exposed to an ad), frequency (i.e., total number of ads an individual views within a given timeframe), and de-duplicated conversions (to accurately measure performance) across their entire media buy, because it’s operationally complex to reconcile reporting from multiple sources. Adobe Advertising Cloud has aggregated the inventories of all major display-inventory providers in one location, giving marketers a single platform through which they can efficiently manage their display campaigns.

Marketers achieve strong performances by reaching high-value audiences at scale. These audiences may include prospects who have either abandoned the buying process or visited product pages or in-market shoppers who have otherwise demonstrated intent. To ensure marketers reach the right audiences, Adobe’s demand-side platform (DSP) is integrated with Adobe Analytics Cloud’s data-management and analytics platform (for audience-segment targeting) as well as 40+ industry-leading, third-party data providers.

This integration is particularly valuable for retargeting — an evergreen, or ‘always-on,’ tactic for many advertisers because these audience segments are the low-hanging fruit that consistently drive strong performances. These users have shown high interest in the advertiser’s brand and demonstrated intent through their actions on the site (abandoning shopping carts, visiting specific product pages, etc.). For most advertisers, however, these coveted high-performing audience segments can never be too big, nor could they have too many. Adobe Advertising Cloud has seen 90+ percent match rates for first-party audiences ported from the Adobe Analytics Cloud into the Advertising Cloud DSP, resulting in higher audience reach for an advertiser’s most valuable audiences.

Upgraded Algorithms and Lookalike Models Drive Performance and Awareness at Scale.
Of course, the best reach and frequency controls in the world won’t do any good without a lot of inventory from which to choose. Adobe Advertising Cloud has made big investments in scaling display — including a four-time increase in bidding scale (queries per second) and the addition of four new ad-exchange integrations just in the last few months — meaning more conversions, more leads, more sales, and more revenue.

With so much inventory, it can be tough to continue juggling all the moving parts. Fortunately, we have machines to do the heavy lifting. Adobe’s real-time performance algorithms consider various dimensions and data — such as audience, inventory quality, recency, pacing, and targeting — to determine the right bid amount to achieve the desired outcome. The algorithm not only optimizes to your primary goal (viewable impressions, conversions, or clicks) and performance metric (viewable cost per thousand impressions, cost per click, or cost per action), but also offers additional filters to target sites expected to achieve strong viewability and click-through rates.

But, algorithms do more than just find performance; they can also locate people who share similar traits with a given target segment, effectively extending your audience footprint. Powerful lookalike models based on your best-performing audiences are driven by unique Adobe algorithms and data. Simply select your high-value audience segment, build a model to identify similarities between these users and new users, and target the new lookalike segment to extend reach and drive conversions.

“We are now more efficient, effective and overall we have delivered 30 percent more revenue to the bottom line with Adobe.” ~ Megan Estrada, vice president of Media, MGM Resorts International, Adobe Advertising Summit 2017

Receive Complete Transparency and Visibility Into Digital Advertising Buys.
The recently launched Adobe Advertising Cloud unifies the deep investment in performance algorithms and optimization with a long-standing focus on brand safety and media quality. In today’s media environment, this focus on quality is more important than ever before. According to the Digital Advertising Report 2017 by Adobe Digital Insights, 58 percent of marketers report that their concerns about digital ad fraud have increased in comparison to 2016, and 50 percent of the media buyers surveyed identified “media quality” as the biggest challenge facing the industry.

Industry-leading fraud and brand-safety protections help drive better performances for advertisers. Adobe takes an aggressive approach to detecting fraudulent inventory, resulting in a 1.5 percent fraud rate versus an 11 percent industry average. Our Non-Human Traffic (NHT) Credit Program automatically refunds clients for impressions that WhiteOps — a leading third-party verification service — identifies as suspicious or fraudulent. Our media-quality suite is 100 percent transparent — we take a multifaceted approach to ensure advertisers have access to the best media placement.

In addition to our NHT Credit Program, Adobe Media Optimizer DSP — part of the Adobe Advertising Cloud — provides customers with proprietary brand-safety features, including automated tools to prevent ads from appearing alongside objectionable content and a manual site-screening process performed by a team of quality-assurance specialists.

The full set of preventive measures that Adobe provides for its customers includes:

• Site- and app-level screenings performed by a specialized team of experts who review quality and content, excluding any unsafe inventory (e.g., pirated content, malicious content, etc.);
• Contextual targeting that enables advertisers to target only those pages containing content that is relevant to their ads as well as exclude those containing certain topics;
• Pre-bid filtering to proactively detect objectionable content on pages and prevent ads from being delivered before the website or app loads — a crucial point because it proactively protects the brand’s image and prevents their ads from appearing alongside hateful and extremist material; and
• Third-party brand safety and fraud integrations (noted above).

The best part is that these features — as well as other brand-safety technology integrations — are available to Advertising Cloud Clients at no cost through the end of June 2017. The technology is available on Adobe Advertising Cloud’s DSP across desktop video and display inventory.

About Adobe Advertising Cloud
Adobe Advertising Cloud — which launched at Adobe Summit last month — is the industry’s first end-to-end platform for managing advertising across traditional TV and digital formats. The platform already manages roughly $3.5 billion in annualized ad spend on behalf of more than 1,000 global clients, including Allstate, Ford, Johnson & Johnson, Kraft, Liberty Mutual, L’Oréal, MGM, Nickelodeon, and Southwest Airlines.

Learn more about Adobe Advertising Cloud.

The post Performance Without Compromise: Display Advertising With Adobe Advertising Cloud appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/performance-without-compromise-display-advertising-adobe-advertising-cloud/

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The 7 rules of successful SMS Marketing campaigns

How to create and implement a successful SMS marketing campaign

There are countless reasons why your business should consider implementing SMS marketing as part of your overall communications strategy.

1. It’s budget-friendly - you can send messages from around 2p / 2 cents per message
2. It hits the mark - over 97% of text messages are read within the first four minutes
3. It gets your customers to act - 19% of people will click a link in a SMS campaign rather than just 4.2% for emails
4. It produces results - 30% of SMS campaigns receive average response rates of 30%, compared to 4% for emails

But there are rules to follow in order for each of your SMS campaigns to be successful. In this post I will inform you of the rules we encourage customers to adopt as often as possible when building your SMS marketing campaign. In addition, I’ll also showcase a ‘How To’, bringing these rules into a real life campaign example that you’ll be able to adopt in your own SMS practice.

Rule 1 - Communicate valuable offerings

Remember that your consumers seek valuable offers. Always make sure that the SMS you send out creates a hard to resist offer. Put yourself in the shoes of your customers or prospective customers and ask yourself, will this interest them? Will this encourage them to checkout, visit your store, call or email you?

No audience wants to receive a worthless, pointless offer from a brand that they love, and remember, you want your customers to love you.

Example:

Buy 2 jeans, get 1 shirt for FREE for all Gold text Club members this whole week at the Levi’s Frankwood Shopping Mall outlet. Show this text to redeem this deal. Customer service representatives are waiting for you at the store! Levi Strauss & Co.

Rule 2 - Start the text with your offer

Text message marketing is built to be concise and to the point. Your audience are busy people, and not getting to the point straight away will turn them off. Just cut right to the chase in order to reach everyone. Placing your offer at the beginning of the message grabs maximum attention.

Example:

Buy 2 jeans, get 1 shirt for FREE for all Gold text Club members this whole week at the Levi’s Frankwood Shopping Mall outlet. Show this text to redeem this deal. Customer service representatives are waiting for you at the store! Levi Strauss & Co.

Rule 3 - Keep it exclusive

In order to make the most out of your SMS campaign, make sure you that what your offers seems to be exclusive to the person reading and receiving it. Make your audience feel as though they are part of something special. If an offer is available to everyone, then redeeming that offer becomes less attractive and urgent. Making a sale via SMS is all about ensuring your feel special and valued.

Example:

Buy 2 jeans, get 1 shirt for FREE for all Gold text Club members this whole week at the Levi’s Frankwood Shopping Mall outlet. Show this text to redeem this deal. Customer service representatives are waiting for you at the store! Levi Strauss & Co.

Rule 4 - Create a sense of urgency

Your business can see rising footfall, website visits and revenue if you create a sense of urgency amongst your audience. Your audience will take time out of their day if you create enough of a reason for them to. An offer is a viable offer only if there is an expiry date associated with the offer and that this is clearly communicated in the offer itself.

Example:

Buy 2 jeans, get 1 shirt for FREE for all Gold text Club members this whole week at the Levi’s Frankwood Shopping Mall outlet. Show this text to redeem this deal. Customer service representatives are waiting for you at the store! Levi Strauss & Co.

Rule 5 - Location, location, location

Mentioning the location is the single most important element of your text message that your audience will need to know in order to redeem the offer. Do not miss out on stating the exact location of your store, even if it is an eCommerce store. Your audience would lose respect and willingness to engage with you as a brand if you grabbed their attention with an offer, without telling them where to go to get it.

Example:

Buy 2 jeans, get 1 shirt for FREE for all Gold text Club members this whole week at the Levi’s Frankwood Shopping Mall outlet. Show this text to redeem this deal. Customer service representatives are waiting for you at the store! Levi Strauss & Co.

Rule 6 - Include a call to action

A call to action is vital in order to lead the customer into your sales funnel. Keep your call to action clean and simple and easy to follow. Assume that your audience are lazy, but a clever call to action will spring them into action.

Example:

Buy 2 jeans, get 1 shirt for FREE for all Gold text Club members this whole week at the Levi’s Frankwood Shopping Mall outlet. Show this text to redeem this deal. Customer service representatives are waiting for you at the store! Levi Strauss & Co.

Rule 7 - State your brand name explicitly

There are different ways to ensure that your audience know where the text is coming from. The sender ID can be used for this purpose, but what your audience is reading when they receive the text is the text itself, so it’s worth signing off with who you are in the body of the text as well.

Example:

Buy 2 jeans, get 1 shirt for FREE for all Gold text Club members this whole week at the Levi’s Frankwood Shopping Mall outlet. Show this text to redeem this deal. Customer service representatives are waiting for you at the store! Levi Strauss & Co.

Thanks to Gareth Davies for sharing advice and opinions in this post. Gareth Davies is the Managing Director of Voodoo SMS, a Bulk SMS messaging platform. Their motive is to provide simple solutions for text message marketing, packed with the latest market-leading features yet suitable for any business of any size and any budget. You can connect with Gareth on LinkedIn.

from Blog – Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/mobile-marketing/sms-marketing/7-rules-sms-marketing/

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Competitors Leave Twitter in the Dust

Chart of the Day: As Twitter’s active users stagnate, WhatsApp becomes the front runner

Twitter was once a fast-growing social media site and the darling of marketers everywhere. But it has fallen on hard times of late, as growth as stalled.

This chart from Statista shows Twitter only managed to gain 31 million additional users actively utilizing the platform monthly over the past two years. Whereas Facebook has seen over 467 million join. This is impressive for  a platform once considered to have plateaued. But the biggest of threats is WhatsApp. The instant messenger platform presents a massive opportunity for marketers. Companies such as Just Eat and BBC are just a couple of the brands who are successfully using the platform to enable instant customer service and highly targeted marketing.

With this in mind, do marketers need to adjust how they spend their social marketing budget? And would investing in growing platforms such as Whatsapp see a greater return?

Get insight into how you could start improving your business’ social media, by downloading our practical social media marketing toolkit. Aiming to help you understand what your peers and competitors view as important and to help you see what social media strategy will work best for you.

• Source: Business Insider
• Recommended Resource: Social Media Marketing Toolkit 

from Blog – Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/competitors-leave-twitter-dust/

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Where Virtual Reality could take Digital Marketing — if it steps up its game

Virtual Reality is still in its infancy as a marketing technology, but it is about to mature

The demand for virtual reality experiences is growing — and not just among gamers and early adopters. Contrary to initial speculation, widespread use of VR isn’t dependent upon top-of-the-line head-mounted displays. Thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones, average consumers can now get in on the VR fun — and marketers should be paying attention.

VR will disrupt every sector, and brands that hope to reach Millennials, in particular, need to make use of this new platform. Young people prize experiences over material products, and virtual reality presents a way to fulfill that demand.

Where the Physical and Virtual Worlds Converge

By some estimates, sales of VR headsets could surpass half a billion in sales by 2025. As companies such as Google and Sony continue to promote their offerings, VR will increasingly penetrate the mainstream. And as awareness grows, digital marketers will find unique opportunities for differentiating their brands through this new technology.

Inexpensive headsets such as Google Cardboard play nicely with most smartphones, making it easy to provide a fun, novel, and inspiring brand experience through VR. Offering virtual tours of the farms where you source your coffee beans or an immersive experience of how your workers handcraft your products is far more compelling than banner ads and even videos.

Distinguishing your brand through VR provides a huge competitive advantage, particularly as the technology becomes more popular. Marketers who embrace this platform now have the room to test and innovate new tactics before VR explodes. When it does, their brands will be at the forefront of the field.

How VR Marketing Works

VR marketing enables companies to bridge the gap between experience and action. Look at Six Flags: The theme park titan offers consumers an option to virtually ride its tallest roller coaster, which inspires them to visit the nearest Six Flag park. The digital thrill isn’t quite the same as the actual experience, but it’s good enough to make them pursue the real thing.

But VR’s use isn’t limited to currently existing products. Let’s say you’re developing a new marquee offering and you want to drum up excitement before it’s launched. VR enables you to take customers along on the journey, inviting them to watch the story unfold from inception to final design. Not only will they be eager to get their hands on the finished product, but they can also provide valuable feedback throughout the production process.

Most importantly, VR changes the dynamic between brands and consumers. Rather than deploy ad blockers or click out of ads as quickly as possible, people will seek out VR brand experiences. Imagine how your engagement numbers would look if you had prospects coming to you instead of you having to go to them.

Here’s how to inspire that dynamic through VR:

1. Craft product experiences.

The best way to persuade someone that you have the best product is to let her try it out. But with people increasingly preferring online shopping to in-store experiences, getting them to your brick-and-mortar location can be a tough sell. VR can help.

Volvo began offering VR test drives for its XC90 SUV, allowing would-be customers to feel what it would be like to drive the luxury vehicle through scenic landscapes. That’s a far more compelling experience than hearing a salesperson drone on about the car’s list of benefits.

Once you’ve got customers through the door, VR experiences entice them back. In Sweden, McDonald’s Happy Meal boxes can be used as Google Cardboard headsets so kids can play a VR skiing game after they’re done eating. Such touches link brands with excitement, wonder, and personalization in the minds of consumers. Instead of generic experiences, people feel like they’ve had more vivid interactions with VR-savvy brands.

2. Educate your audience.

People crave connection to the companies from which they buy. Foster those bonds by showing them what happens under the hood. Use VR to showcase how your products are made, who is behind them, and the care and thought that goes into each aspect.

VR is also a great way to put people in the buying mindset. When someone is skittish about an offer because she doesn’t know whether she’ll enjoy or get use from it, VR can provide her with tangible information.

Marriott ran with this concept by developing “teleportation” booths that transport potential customers to exotic locations. Upon stepping inside the booth, users feel the sensation of warm, tropical breezes and the relaxation of being on a beach. How can they resist booking a vacation after that?

3. Integrate VR into retail.

Retailers have the opportunity to take customers beyond the showroom and into an entire virtual world built around their brands. Whether you’re selling clothes, cars, or eyeglasses, you can create an exciting, aspirational experience.

Merrell did just this in its Trailscape VR marketing campaign. Shoppers slipped on an Oculus VR headset and were able to explore a mountainous landscape right in the store. Now, when those consumers think of Merrell, they’re reminded of the amazing virtual adventure the brand provided them.

4. Facilitate relationships.

Take advantage of customers’ smartphones by offering new VR content on a regular basis. As long as your audience members have headsets, they should be able to log in to your app and explore new products and worlds all the time.

Ongoing VR experiences make people excited to interact with your company, which makes them more inclined to buy from you. Remember, the goal is to encourage them to reach out to you instead of you having to pursue them. When you have an enthusiastic and engaged audience, you unlock incredible potential for new ways to interact with consumers.

Virtual reality is here, and its presence will only grow during the next several years. Digital marketers should adapt to the technology now so they can differentiate themselves early and create truly innovative campaigns for their customers.

Thanks to Tony for sharing his advice and opinions in this post.
Tony Tie is a numbers-obsessed marketer, life hacker, and public speaker who has helped various Fortune 500 companies grow their online presence. Located in Toronto, he is currently the senior search marketer at Expedia Canada, the leading travel booking platform for flights, hotels, car rentals, cruises, and local activities. Connect with Tony on Twitter @tonytie.

from Blog – Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/managing-digital-marketing/managing-marketing-technology/virtual-reality-take-digital-marketing-steps-game/

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