Adobe Advertising Cloud Taps Spotify for Cross-Channel Audience Buying

Can you hear that? It’s the sound of an estimated 146 million global consumers streaming music this year. In today’s on-demand world, individuals consume what they want when they want it, and digital audio is no exception.

That’s why Adobe Advertising Cloud added digital audio as the latest format to our cross-channel demand-side platform (DSP). But one popular streaming music service offers a compelling full-funnel solution that goes well beyond just audio. To that end, Adobe Advertising Cloud is thrilled to announce that we have added Spotify as a premium inventory source for digital audio, display and video advertising formats. Over 50 advertisers – including Dr Pepper Snapple Group– have executed over 70 campaigns successfully through Adobe Advertising Cloud’s DSP in a closed beta program.

“Spotify is one of the premiere streaming music destinations for consumers of all ages and has done an incredible job translating that engagement into a compelling value proposition for marketers,” said Keith Eadie, vice president of revenue and partnerships, Adobe Advertising Cloud. “By taking a calculated approach to not only audio, but also display and video ad formats, Spotify has positioned themselves to be an instrumental partner for brands looking to reach and engage users across multiple channels.”

Spotify is available in 60 markets and reaches over 140 million highly-engaged music fans. In fact, cross-platform Spotify users spend an average of two hours per day on the streaming service. Spotify uses first-party login data to create a 100% authenticated audience across mobile, desktop and connected devices. Further, Spotify offers the ability to target by age and gender, specific genre or language, and even specific playlists in order to reach users who like to listen to music tailored to specific activities or moods.

“Digital audio is exploding, and Spotify provides a true cross-channel offering with not only streaming audio, but also video and display ad formats that engage consumers in a natural and intuitive way,” said Brit Sundberg, Programmatic Media and Data Strategy, Dr Pepper Snapple Group. “Their integration with Adobe Advertising Cloud gives us instant learnings across both desktop and mobile and allows us to deliver meaningful brand messaging at the perfect time to a highly relevant and engaged audience.”

Marketers can use Adobe Advertising Cloud’s DSP to purchase multiple ad formats across Spotify’s premium cross-channel properties, including :15- and :30-second mobile in-app audio with companion banner; static and rich-media display on desktop; and digital video on desktop and mobile app. Adobe Advertising Cloud supports Spotify inventory buys via DealID-supported private marketplace environments. Available reporting metrics include: impressions, quartile completion percentage, viewability (display and video only), geography, demographic and ad frequency.

Spotify is now available to Adobe Advertising Cloud clients in the U.S., Canada, Europe and Australia. Reach out to your Adobe account representative to learn more.

The post Adobe Advertising Cloud Taps Spotify for Cross-Channel Audience Buying appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/adobe-advertising-cloud-taps-spotify-cross-channel-audience-buying/

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Marketing automation tactics to boost sales

Chart of the Day: Looking to increase sales? Abandon Cart programs could be just what you need

The opportunities Marketing Automation provides your business is immense. I’ve always found that it is more difficult to decide which sequences to launch first as there are so many. I went back and counted the number of automation’s ideas, in our ‘for prioritization’ queue and found we had over 30, which is crazy.

If you just starting out on your journey to automate your marketing comms, you should build an Abandon Cart sequence.

MailChimp, the email marketing provider, studied the results of 150,000 of its own users and found that Abandon Cart Series provide the greatest increase in orders per recipient.

• Source: MailChimp - Identifying the Most Profitable Automation for E-Commerce Businesses
• Sample Size: Automation data—collected from 150,000 businesses that use MailChimp
• Recommended Resource: Essential Marketing Tools 2017

from Blog – Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/email-marketing/email-communications-strategy/marketing-automation-tactics-boost-sales/

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We’ve upgraded our interactive benchmarking tool that assesses the digital marketing capability of your business

Use our RACE framework to discover your ability to Plan, Reach, Act, Convert and Engage

Two years ago we launched our free interactive marketing benchmarking tool to help members rate their ‘digital readiness’ for digital marketing as a whole and for the key channels like Search, Social media and Email marketing.

Well, it’s proved popular since it helps members score where they are now and then gives recommendations of how to improve in the future - to take their skills or marketing results to the next level.

So in our recent UX members refresh - we have made it more prominent and put all the benchmarking tools in place.  We also renamed it to 'capability grader’.

Introducing our upgraded, free interactive tool!

I’m also writing this post to let members know about a simplification to the most popular digital strategy grader which you may want to try - it’s here (available if you’re signed in):

• http://www.smartinsights.com/capability-grader/

What’s changed?

To make it easier for our users, we have simplified the digital marketing strategy grader. You can now assess your digital marketing strategy and planning via the capability grader - using the 'Digital Marketing Strategy and Planning’ box on the left.

Previously, each grader was split into the different parts of the RACE planning framework, that’s Plan, Reach, Act, Convert and Engage.

Now, we have put these different stages into a single 'Digital marketing strategy and Planning’ grader. This will help members effectively manage their business’ strategy and ability to plan in one place.

Most people score about 2 on our grader, leaving lots of room for improvement, do you think you could score higher?

Once you have honestly scored your businesses’ ability to 'RACE’ you will be given a score and what this score means in the marketing world.

But we don’t just give you your score and that’s it. We will guide you through different areas that your business needs to develop to successfully optimize your business and take it the level of marketing leading capability.

What do I do after I complete the capability grader?

Our capability grader will suggest the best resources for your business to get started.

We have 170+ resources covering a wide range of marketing  activities- and 27 resources in the Digital Marketing Strategy and Planning toolkit including guides, models, templates (including spreadsheets), workbooks, e-learning courses and a SOSTAC planning guide. There is a range of resources and help at hand to get your business to the next level. The tool makes recommendations of the most relevant guides and templates for the stage you are at.

Our capability grader is free to use and available to all members. If you want to use our capability grader to assess your business’s strategy and planning process, you can sign up to be a FREE basic member. You will also get free access to our popular visual also enabling you to grade your digital marketing.

Download Free Member resource – Digital benchmarking templates

Score your business from Level 1 to Level 5 for the different ‘best practice’ marketing activities you are using for each of the core processes we have defined as each row. Once you know where you are currently at you can focus your efforts to improve. Use our guides to increase your skills and understanding in the key areas identified by the templates.

Access the Digital Marketing Benchmarking Templates

from Blog – Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy/weve-upgraded-interactive-benchmarking-tool-assesses-digital-marketing-capability-business/

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Google and Marketo: Marketings new BFF’s

Marketo forms a new alliance with Google Cloud

Marketo, a leading marketing automation provider, announced their new alliance with Google Cloud. Starting in 2018 both companies will join forces to migrate Marketo's platform from their own data centres to the Google Cloud Platform. The multi-year deal will enable Marketo to scale its infrastructure and create an integrated solution for marketers.

It’s no secret that Marketo has experienced performance and technical issues as they have grown in size. It is a common problem for growing companies that try to host everything themselves. Frustrating for their customers but not unusual for the industry. It is well reported that running lists can take an unusually long time and users are having to ‘game’ the system to allow for the time it takes for processing the data required for complex automation sequences

Download our FREE Resource – Essential Digital Marketing Tools 2017

A free download giving our recommendations on tools for audience insight and managing digital marketing.

Access the Essential Digital Marketing Tools 2017

So, upon moving to the Google Cloud Platform these issues are now Google’s problem. Which feels like a good call to me, if you’re going to put your faith in anyone Google seems like the safest hands in the business. But it does come with risks, ask anyone in your dev team if moving your whole site to a new server is easy and brace yourself for their reply. Because it has the potential to go wrong and mean that Marketo’s whole business goes offline for a large period of time, which could do a lot of harm. But with Google’s backing, I’d say it’s near guaranteed that everything will be fine as it’s in Google’s interest to make sure everything is A-OK.

What’s in it for Marketo?

• Speed - reducing run times from minute to seconds and seconds to virtually instant. For a best marketing team time matters.
• They no longer need to build, maintain or expand their own data centres reducing costs and many stress-levels
• Ability to scale their business without having to worry about performance issues
• Integrating the G-Suite into the platform leveraging Gmail, Sheets and Hangout chat to build a rounded product offering outside of just marketing automation.
• Product development supported by Google opens a massive opportunity with the potential to take advantage of Google BigQuery and machine learning
• Marketers who may have chosen a different marketing automation platform could now favour Marketo due to Google’s backing.

What’s in it for Google?

• Another large brand added to the Google Cloud following Evernote and Box, which could have easily used Amazon Web Services, IBM or Microsoft.
• Ability to place the G-Suite in front of over 6000 businesses globally
• A marketing platform to introduce Google BigQuery and machine learning

What does this mean for marketers?

Marketers will be able to take advantage of a marketing automation platform that is fast and will evolve with new features and integrations over the next few years. The prospect of a solid and fast platform that not only provides marketing automation but also a way to leverage AdWords with more targeting and personalization options makes a lot of sense for both parties.

Should Marketers consider Marketo more seriously?

Definitely, with Google’s vision and Marketo’s base of marketing customers, this alliance could change the platform from one of the best into a must have for marketers. Giving Marketo a Google-sized advantage over its competitors.

Final thought, is this the first step to Google purchasing Marketo? In 2016, Marketo was purchased for $1.79 billion which could be too high for even Google. Who knows, we’ll have to wait and see how this all pans out.

from Blog – Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/managing-digital-marketing/managing-marketing-technology/google-marketo-marketings-new-bffs/

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Survey: Sky-High Stakes for Digital Security in Healthcare

Imagine checking your credit report to find healthcare bills past due and in collection, yet you never ordered or received those services. You’ve been a victim of medical identity theft, most likely from a security breach.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t take much imagination to visualize this scenario. According to a recent survey by Accenture, one in four Americans has experienced a healthcare related breach, and half of those affected will find out on their own, without any notification from their healthcare providers. Healthcare information is among our most personal and private data, so a breach can have serious personal and financial consequences.

Content patients and revenue depend on trust and security.
The survey found the stakes are high for digital security in healthcare — one quarter of those affected switched healthcare providers because of the breach. According to Accenture, healthcare providers that don’t make cybersecurity a strategic priority will put $305 billion of cumulative lifetime patient revenue at risk in just the next five years. This is more than a threat of regulatory action or bad PR. It’s an existential threat to business. As Accenture says, “You are one breach away from losing a healthcare consumer for life.”

Recent high-profile breaches of hospitals and large health insurers have shown how vulnerable our personal data is. And securing data is not getting easier. Healthcare companies have to worry not only about thefts of financial information, but also the private data in our electronic medical records, on our health insurance IDs, and increasingly, from wearables and medical devices.

Consumers trust medical providers with their data.
Despite these high-profile cases, consumers actually trust their traditional health care providers much more than app or device technology companies. 88 percent trust their physicians or other healthcare providers to keep digital health data secure, and 82 percent trust their insurer.

Healthcare companies are taking steps to secure content and information.
Healthcare companies are taking further steps to improve their digital security and defend against attacks. This requires rethinking organizational structure and more fully implementing technology solutions. Most healthcare companies have separate teams and technology stacks running campaigns, analytics, data collection, and so on. Too often, siloed systems do not use the same security standards across teams and technologies, which makes security breaches more likely, and harder to detect. When team, technology, and data silos are broken down, data is centrally stored and secured instead of integrated across systems, and processes like workflows for approvals may be built into the tools. This makes security and regulatory compliance easier and more efficient.

It makes sense. If each internal team is building separate customer-facing interfaces, the added complexity makes it difficult to identify and manage vulnerabilities or security gaps. And if companies are spending precious IT resources on integrating different systems and maintaining those integrations, security can be overlooked. In moving towards a unified digital foundation, make sure you are partnering with a dedicated team of security professionals who will offer alerts and do forensic backups, so you can communicate effectively with your audiences about the security of their data.

Many healthcare companies are also relying on the cloud to improve security. Cloud providers like Microsoft Azure and AWS have HIPAA-compliant services with specific product integrations to address the healthcare industry’s need for information privacy and security. If the cloud provider is HIPAA-compliant, you can sign a business associate agreement with them to transmit and store protected health information and architect solutions that are HIPAA and HITECH compliant. A great benefit of cloud usage is that even small companies, hospitals, or medical groups can benefit from the cloud provider’s compliance obligations for database, application, and network security.

How you can improve security today:
● Elevate the role of security officer in your company. Be sure this person has the authority and staff to secure all aspects of your technology stack.
● Use cloud services for key data and application storage. A cloud provider can be more secure than homegrown IT security for most functions.
● Choose a cloud provider who complies with HIPAA and is committed to remaining compliant.
● Communicate thoughtfully and fully to consumers about any security issues. Accenture found some consumers actually gained trust in their healthcare vendor after a breach if the vendor took immediate action and communicated early and often.
● Begin implementing a cohesive digital foundation that contains unified technology along with the processes and internal structures to help deliver secure digital experiences.

A centralized, robust digital foundation can help healthcare companies mitigate risk and stay in compliance for securing patient data. The stakes are high in health care. The more security requirements become standard in the industry, the more secure your digital foundation must be. Let’s use the best technology and processes to create a more secure future for healthcare.

At Adobe, we take security seriously. Read more about our approach to making your data secure in this white paper, and about our HIPAA-compliant services here. To find out more about how we can help healthcare companies, please visit our healthcare industry page. You can also read our new article on data integration challenges in healthcare.

The post Survey: Sky-High Stakes for Digital Security in Healthcare appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/digital-marketing/survey-sky-high-stakes-digital-security-healthcare/

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Driving Better Customer Relationships

The internet has changed how consumers shop, including the way they shop for automobiles. Rather than visiting dealerships and looking at cars in person, consumers can browse and compare hundreds of models from different manufacturers in the comfort of their own home. While online browsing is much more convenient for customers, it reduces the opportunities automobile manufacturers have to meet with customers face-to-face and deliver relevant information that may sway consumers toward a particular vehicle.

Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. is a major global name in reliable automobiles. Traditionally, the company has focused on mass advertising campaigns over television, newspapers, and magazines to reach the largest possible audience. But with customer touch points changing, Nissan came up with a new strategy — use digital marketing to understand customers’ needs, and create tailored advertisements that will speak directly to the customer.

Nissan decided to build a new digital platform on Adobe Experience Cloud. With Adobe Analytics, part of Adobe Analytics Cloud, Nissan can analyze the behavior patterns of customers online in real time, and build customer profiles. By feeding these customer profiles into Adobe Target and Adobe Campaign, both parts of Adobe Marketing Cloud, Nissan can create custom digital experiences and marketing messages.

One of the best examples of custom marketing is Nissan’s one-to-one email marketing strategy. Rather than sending the same marketing email to a large group of people, Nissan creates custom emails using interchangeable content. Nissan marketers develop a handful of content blocks around color variations, fuel economy, and specifications. Then, Adobe Campaign arranges the most relevant content for each customer into the marketing email. As a result, Nissan can send dozens of email variations with just a few pieces of content. As a result of these personalized, on-to-one emails, open rates increased 1.3 times, and click-through rates grew 2.6 times.
“If we can understand each customer’s needs, we can provide infinite options,” explains Mr. Moyuru Kudo, head of Japan digital customer experience at Nissan Motor Co., Ltd.

To learn more about how Nissan builds long-term, trusted relationships with customers via Adobe Experience Cloud, read their story.

The post Driving Better Customer Relationships appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/customer-experience/driving-better-customer-relationships/

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Digital Brand Compliance

How to meet today’s marketing compliance challenges with an online BrandHub

Marketing departments are bursting at the seams with opportunity. Upstream they are in overdrive producing content for niche targets, using multiple agency partners and designers. Downstream, content needs to be seamlessly distributed across a range of social, web, print and broadcast media.

The challenges today are not only getting great work out the door, on time and on budget, but ensuring the work is compliant from a brand and legal perspective as well. As such, having a system in place that can cater for the full lifecycle of content from creation and collaboration, to creative approvals and the centralization of final artwork, is no longer a ‘nice to have’ but rather a must-have to streamline marketing operations. Especially, when working with tight marketing deadlines and multiple stakeholders.

According to Tessa Court, the CEO of IntelligenceBank DAM, “most companies are undergoing a wave of digital transformation projects whose aim is to create operational efficiencies to reduce cost and risk. For marketing, this means getting brand consistency and quality right across all media to protect brand reputation. Ironically, organizations spend millions to develop and create their brand, but without a brand portal in place, it is essentially impossible to manage in a methodical way.”

What is it? DAM

Digital Asset Management (DAM) is software that provides companies with a centralized online hub to store, manage, find track and share digital assets. A DAM is used to house and order all files including presentations, Microsoft Office documents, agency contracts, design files, images, video and audio. Industry leading DAMs integrate with other systems, such as content management systems and graphic design software, to ensure your DAM is not an island – but the driving force behind your marketing and communications technology. With a constantly increasing number of digital files being created and used in a multi-channel environment, without a DAM, it’s easy to feel perpetually disorganized and lose control of files and brand assets. Trying to keep track of asset licensing, staying on top file versions and managing stakeholder access to assets without a robust system in place is both difficult and costly. Haphazard asset management can lead to a slew of problems which prevent your marketing team from providing inspiring, on-brand marketing.

The Brand Compliance Challenge

Try to think about brand compliance and consistency challenges by likening all marketing communications to an iceberg. Brand experience, is more than just the tip of the iceberg (i.e. a company’s most visible communications such as major broadcast campaigns), with the majority of communications activities below the water line. While it’s quite straightforward to ensure high profile creative is on brand and signed off by legal, the key to achieving marketing consistency is ensuring all communications are on-brand and compliant from the campaign planning phase.

For example, a mortgage broker may have a beautifully produced TV campaign promoting their top-rated customer service, however, having overly-complicated legal jargon in formal notices coupled with images that are off brand in a direct mail campaign will negatively impact the company.

Further to the example above, if a freelance creative or a new design agency produces work that makes a false claim or uses an image or video without paying usage rights, the off-brand advertising can attract both adverse social media attention and hefty fines – which are equally bad.

Without using a robust system such as a BrandHub to manage content creation, compliance and distribution, including talent usage rights, legal and creative approvals – it’s only a matter of time before a creative disaster occurs.

How a BrandHub Can Help Marketing Departments

Modern marketing departments use online BrandHubs to distribute and produce creative while mitigating marketing compliance risks. While a BrandHub features many of the traditional tools users find in DAM software, some key elements of a BrandHub include the following:

• A Creative Repository - to centralize creative assets, with review dates, mark-ups, usage reporting and comments.
• Custom Brand Guidelines Pages – to bring your brand to life and showcase online how to use brand elements such as logos, color, fonts and other factors.
• Talent Usage Rights Management – to link assets to talent release forms, and automatically archive creative that has expired.
• Creative Approvals – before your work is published, create customized workflow processes to ensure brand, legal and other compliance processes are completed and documented.
• Web to Print – enable your franchisees or partners to customize their creative online, and download localized versions of marketing collateral.
• API Connectors – to seamlessly distribute assets to social media, web content management and other systems.

To learn how companies like Medibank, Hertz and NAB use IntelligenceBank’s BrandHub for Brand Compliance, download the IntelligenceBank DAM – Brand Compliance Whitepaper.

from Blog – Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/online-brand-strategy/brand-development/digital-brand-compliance/

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Adobe Target for the WIN: AI-driven “One-Click” Personalization Shines at the DMA Innovation Awards

We’ve always been proud of Adobe Target — not only in terms of what we’ve achieved technology-wise, but just as important, the value that it has brought to our customers over the years. But, today, we’re thrilled to announce that Adobe Target won the Data & Marketing Association’s (DMA) Innovation Award for personalization. The DMA Innovation Awards “showcase the disruptors that are creating innovative developments in the use of data and applying data in groundbreaking ways.” The personalization category specifically recognizes solutions that are raising the bar in helping marketers “as they tackle the latest technologies and tactics that are paving the road to true one-to-one marketing.”

Its consideration set focused on Adobe Target as an “exciting advance on previous technology.” Indeed, for the last decade, Adobe Target has been considered a leader in website personalization and optimization and has been used by top global businesses in virtually every industry. But ours has always been an iterative approach. It wasn’t good enough to have a great product. We wanted to ensure Target was growing, scaling and evolving with our customers to give them the most innovative and effective tools to scale their personalization efforts.

The most recent — and, now, award-winning — example is a new capability in Adobe Target called Auto-Target. This innovation leverages sophisticated machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to automate personalized experiences with a single click. Auto-Target is already changing the way marketers deliver more relevant and revenue-generating experiences, and from where I sit, truly represents the future of personalization.

What Separates Adobe Target from the Pack
Most personalization platforms offer basic rules-based targeting and collaborative filtering approaches, combined often with traditional and basic A/B testing features. It’s all very manual and not particularly experience-driven. Does it work? Sure — to a point. But because traditional personalization lacks the automation marketers need to define an effective strategy — or to scale the delivery of personalized experiences — it almost always falls short.

But Adobe Target has raised the bar. Target provides a full spectrum of optimization and personalization capabilities ranging from automated testing to machine learning-driven personalization across all channels. With the addition of Auto-Target, marketers can kick their personalization up more than a few notches — personalizing customer experiences at the one-to-one level with one easy click.
Auto-Target leverages powerful machine learning powered by Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s AI and machine learning framework, to introduce as many experience variations as marketers choose in order to personalize customer experiences across their digital properties – including websites, apps and IoT interfaces. Then, with one click of a button, Auto-Target automatically evaluates all behavioral and contextual variables to determine the best experience for each consumer. Those experiences are continuously optimized over time as the consumer takes additional actions.

By learning what resonates and what doesn’t with specific consumers, Auto-Target improves experience performance over time, delivering the most relevant experiences possible. Not only is this a huge win for consumers and for brands, but it mitigates the risks that comes with allocating critical traffic to tests. With the backup policy feature in Auto-Target, marketers can always be assured that no variation will perform worse than their best control. The result is that the best experiences will only get better.

What Adobe Target Means for Today’s Marketers
Adobe Target’s DMA Innovation Award win confirms what we’ve suspected all along: consumers demand a high level of personalization and brands are challenged by the scale it takes to deliver these compelling, spot-on relevant customer experiences. With Adobe Target — and, now Auto-Target — marketers can leverage powerful machine learning, automatically introducing countless experience variations with a single click.

Leading brands are leveraging Adobe Target to achieve success with their personalization efforts. Enterprise storage provider NetApp saw a 170 percent increase in click-throughs and a 13 percent lift in engagement using Adobe Target to optimize content for its website redesign. Using Adobe Target, Marriott saw a considerable improvement in gross bookings driven by Rewards members, plus a 50 percent-plus increase in enrollments. Progrexion, an online credit services provider, experienced a 14 percent boost in conversions by leveraging customer insights in Target.

With advancements like Auto-Target in Adobe Target, Adobe is changing the way personalization happens, while helping brands rethink and re-architect their personalization approach so they, too, can deliver the best customer experiences. We’re thrilled to be recognized by the DMA for these efforts and bar-raising achievements. And the best part? This is just the beginning.

The post Adobe Target for the WIN: AI-driven “One-Click” Personalization Shines at the DMA Innovation Awards appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/personalization/adobe-target-win-ai-driven-one-click-personalization-shines-dma-innovation-awards/

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Live streaming is on the rise

Chart of the day: 28% of internet users have watched a live stream on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram

According to a recent report, 28% of internet users who have watched a live stream on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, up from 20% in 2016. This increase will be due to the number of businesses introducing live stream into their marketing strategy. Social platforms now have live streaming tools such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, making it easier for anyone to go live.

What does this mean for marketers? As time spent online on social media increases, more users will be engaging with live video content. Brands need to use this opportunity to reach a larger audience and engage their current customers. It also gives viewers the opportunity to communicate with other users and discuss your products or services. It’s not only good for feedback but can help put a human face on a brand.

• Source: Global Web Index 
• Sample Size: 226,189 Internet users aged 16-64 outside of China
• Recommended Resources: Social media marketing strategy guide

 

from Blog – Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/social-media-strategy/live-streaming-rise/

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10 reasons you need a digital marketing strategy in 2017

Using a digital plan to support digital transformation

Where do you start if you want to develop a digital marketing strategy? Well, I don’t think it needs to be a huge report, a strategy can best be summarised in two or three sides of A4 in a table linking digital marketing strategies to SMART objectives. Yet despite this, it seems that many organisations still don’t have a plan.

Do you have a digital marketing strategy?

2017 Update: Since 2012 we have run an informal poll to see how widely used digital marketing strategies are. The results have shown some big improvements over the years. A few years ago we found around two-thirds to three-quarters did not have a digital marketing plan. Now that number has shrunk to 49% in latest survey, although that is still quite high, and means almost half are still doing digital with no strategy in place.

When we did the research for our free Managing Digital Marketing report we were interested to see how this percentage looked for a defined sample.

Download free Basic member report – Managing Digital Marketing

Survey and recommendations based on how over 600 businesses exploit digital marketing today.

Access the Free Managing Digital Marketing 2017 Research Report

This is what we found in our survey about the level of digital marketing adoption:

So, our latest research suggests an improved approach to planning in this sample of marketers, with fewer than half without a digital strategy. Congratulations if you’re one of these companies!

A recommended approach for developing a digital strategy

Whether you have a strategy or not, at the heart of the Smart Insights ’Opportunity, Strategy, Action’ approach to improving digital marketing, is benchmarking to compare where you are now to assess the potential against where you need to be in the future.

To help you get started we have created a free digital marketing benchmarks download with a series of benchmarks covering overall digital strategy and the key tactics like Search, Social Media, Email marketing and site/experience design.

Download free resource – Digital Marketing Benchmark templates

Quickly score your approach to digital marketing with these 7 visual templates.

Access the Digital Marketing Benchmarking Templates

Click on the image below to see a larger version of one of our benchmarking templates, which you can download for free to help you create your digital marketing plan.

But what if you’re one of the companies that don’t have a digital strategy yet? Well, I think the two simple alternatives for creating a plan may suggest a way forward:

• Start with a separate digital marketing plan defining transformation needed and making the case for investment and changes to your digital marketing
• Then, following approval, create an integrated digital plan which is part of the overall marketing plan - digital is fully aligned and becomes part of business as usual.

So, what are the takeaways to act on here? It seems to me that:

• Using digital marketing without a strategic approach is still commonplace. I’m sure many of the companies in this category are using digital media effectively and they could certainly be getting great results from their search, email or social media marketing. But I’m equally sure that many are missing opportunities for better targeting or optimisation or are suffering from the other challenges I’ve listed below. Perhaps the problems below are greatest for larger organisations who most urgently need governance. There’s arguably less need for a strategy in a smaller company.
• Many, a majority of companies in this research do take a strategic approach to digital.  From talking to companies, I find the creation of digital plans often occurs in two stages. First, a separate digital marketing plan is created. This is useful to get agreement and buy-in by showing the opportunities and problems and map out a path through setting goals and specific strategies for digital including how you integrated digital marketing into other business activities.Second, digital becomes integrated into marketing strategy, it’s a core activity, “business-as-usual”, but doesn’t warrant separate planning, except for the tactics.

If you don’t have a strategy, or maybe you want to review which business issues are important to include within a strategic review, we’ve set out the 10 most common problems, that in our experience arise if you don’t have a strategy.

10 reasons why you may need a digital channel strategy?

1. You’re directionless

I find that companies without a digital strategy (and many that do) don’t have clear strategic goals for what they want to achieve online in terms of gaining new customers or building deeper relationships with existing ones. And if you don’t have goals you likely don’t put enough resources to reach the goals and you don’t evaluate through analytics whether you’re achieving those goals.

2.  You won’t know your online market share

Customer demand for online services may be underestimated if you haven"t researched this.  Perhaps, more importantly, you won’t understand your online marketplace: the dynamics will be different to traditional channels with different types of customer profile and behaviour, competitors, propositions and options for marketing communications. See online marketplace methodology post.

3. Existing and start-up competitors will gain market share

If you’re not devoting enough resources to digital marketing or you’re using an ad-hoc approach with no clearly defined strategies, then your competitors will eat your digital lunch!

4. You don’t have a powerful online value proposition

A clearly defined online customer value proposition will help you differentiate your online service encouraging existing and new customers to engage initially and stay loyal.

5. You don’t know your online customers well enough

It’s often said that digital is the “most measurable medium ever”. But Google Analytics and similar will only tell you volumes of visits, not the sentiment of visitors, what they think. You need to use other forms of website user feedback tools to identify your weak points and then address them.

6. You’re not integrated (“disintegrated")

It’s all too common for digital marketing activities to be completed in silos whether that’s a specialist digital marketer, sitting in IT or a separate digital agency. It’s easier that way to package digital marketing into a convenient chunk. But of course, it’s less effective. Everyone agrees that digital media work best when integrated with traditional media and response channels.

7. Digital doesn’t have enough people/budget given its importance

Insufficient resource will be devoted to both planning and executing e-marketing and there is likely to be a lack of specific specialist e-marketing skills which will make it difficult to respond to competitive threats effectively.

8. You’re wasting money and time through duplication

Even if you do have sufficient resource it may be wasted. This is particularly the case in larger companies where you see different parts of the marketing organization purchasing different tools or using different agencies for performing similar online marketing tasks.

9. You’re not agile enough to catch up or stay ahead

If you look at the top online brands like Amazon, Dell, Google, Tesco, Zappos, they’re all dynamic  - trialling new approaches to gain or keep their online audiences.

10 You’re not optimizing

Every company with a website will have analytics, but many senior managers don’t ensure that their teams make or have the time to review and act on them. Once a strategy enables you to get the basics right, then you can progress to continuous improvement of the key aspects like search marketing, site user experience, email and social media marketing. So that’s our top 10 problems that can be avoided with a well thought through strategy. What have you found can go right or wrong?

from Blog – Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy/digital-strategy-development/10-reasons-for-digital-marketing-strategy/

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How Fluid Experiences Can Redefine Financial Services

Financial institutions are becoming increasingly aware of the need to implement solutions that facilitate personalized interactions at scale. This capacity requires the ability to connect content with data and analytics to deliver personalized customer experiences.

The National Australia Bank is optimizing online engagement by taking the first steps toward creating what experts call a “fluid experience.” Delivering fluid experiences requires technology that adapts to the context of each user’s interaction, across all platforms and devices. That means delivering a consistent experience as customers move between different touch points, such as branch offices, apps, PCs, and smartphones.

Customers at NAB are more engaged online than ever before. By integrating and leveraging customer data to improve online content delivery and targeting, the bank is better able to connect customers with its products and services. Now, instead of getting bogged down with website updates and digital asset management, NAB’s content management team has more time to focus on website optimization and cross-selling opportunities.

It’s all about personalization and integration.

For NAB, the ability to use technology for personalization is a perfect fit, and it’s paying off. The company has boosted customer engagement by integrating online and offline data in order to create a single view of each customer. In addition to improving content velocity — the time to market for delivering new information —  the bank has implemented responsive design to ensure a consistent customer experience on any platform or device. This reflects a core tenet of the fluid experience philosophy — Consumers are using multiple channels to do their banking, and financial services companies need to facilitate that process.

Implementing fluid experience technology for financial services is an evolutionary process that requires connecting legacy systems to sophisticated artificial intelligence and machine learning technology. This enables financial institutions to customize content for the context and environment in which the customer is accessing it. Just as liquid conforms to the shape of any container, web content needs to adapt to the needs of every individual user.

The power of fluid experiences.

Mobile responsiveness is particularly important for meeting customer demand for ease of access to financial services. Financial institutions have to make it easy for customers to find and use key products and services via mobile devices, facilitating everything from bill payments and deposits to loan applications and balance transfers.

For example, when NAB added a single-click application form to its mobile application, submissions increased by 430 percent in the first week of implementation. “It could have taken weeks, previously, to recode, test, and release the changes needed to either build, or even turn off, a new application,” says Todd Copeland, digital general manager, at NAB. “Now, we have the tools we need to adjust applications quickly to meet changing business requirements.”

“The power of fluidity includes web and mobile experiences, and can even extend to well-structured touchpoints, such as ATMs and social media sites,” says Loni Stark, senior director of strategy and product marketing at Adobe. “It also has the power to transform how customers engage with mobile apps and IoT experiences.”

The retail banking sector, in particular, has been forced to implement more robust mobile offerings in the face of competition from online banks such as Moven, Atom and WeBank, which have tapped into the desire of many consumers to manage their finances on smartphones and tablets.

Companies in the financial services sector have the advantage of being able to implement well-integrated digital asset management systems that have proven successful in other industries. Sony Interactive Entertainment Japan Asia (SIE), for instance, has used the same tools deployed by NAB to improve website productivity and optimization.

SIE’s content management team can now implement website production changes that used to take days, in seconds. “Using an integrated web management platform, we can rapidly move through optimization cycles, and improve the quality and efficiency of web content,” says Takehiro Akiba, director of web management at SIE, who is responsible for Sony’s blockbuster PlayStation product. “As digital channels become an essential point of contact for customers, it becomes more important that we establish such a fast and flexible internal workflow.”

Likewise, for NAB, improved analytics and targeting capabilities are yielding impressive results. For instance, when the bank tested page designs to optimize customer experiences, one test showed a 45 percent increase in conversion rates.

Evolution Means Change.

The emergence of agile financial service alternatives to traditional banking is putting pressure on banks to invest in new technology in order to remain competitive. When it comes to money management, customers expect a brand experience that reflects a knowledge of who they are, and what they need and want from a financial institution. The challenge for marketers in the financial services sector is to deliver the digital experiences their customers crave, while maintaining trust, security, and personal connections.

“At NAB, we realized that the future for our digital strategy needed to be built on completely integrated customer experiences,” says Todd. “As we reviewed our digital strategy, we realized that our existing content management platform limited our ability to quickly deliver the more compelling digital experiences that customers expect today.”

A New Era for Financial Services.

Money management solutions such as Mint and PayPal helped start the digital revolution in financial services, but now financial institutions are being challenged to facilitate better integrated money management options for their customers.

For the financial services sector, the time has come to move beyond an ecosystem of legacy systems to a new, integrated framework that leverages open source programs, APIs, and other tools to better understand, manage, and customize content. This requires not only state-of-the-art technology, but also a new way of thinking and communicating across an organization, from marketing and sales to customer service and support.

A recent survey, “State of Digital Transformation in Financial Services,” found that improving customer experiences was the number one priority cited by more than 300 respondents. Moreover, the survey underscored a recognition by financial services marketers that customer experience is increasingly important in terms of differentiating one banking or money management solution from another.

The survey also found that while competition from start-ups is a concern, financial services executives are particularly worried about the potential for a much bigger player to enter into their market space, such as Google Capital or Apple Pay. This worry is a powerful motivator for investing in tools that will both enhance services for existing customers, and improve online conversion rates.

To gain a better understanding of where the market leaders are heading, think about this —  a third of those surveyed said they were considering the kind of strategies that NAB has implemented — omnichannel solutions that leverage machine learning and data management solutions to improve their ability to target customers and prospects with highly personalized messaging.

Getting results.

All of this comes back, full circle, to the idea of fluidity. Creating fluid experiences in the financial sector requires a data management platform that integrates marketing attribution, marketing automation, and multichannel analytics that provide a way to determine which solutions result in the best ROI.

For financial services customers, a fluid experience should include applications and digital forms that are easy to use on any device. It also features omnichannel portals that make it easier for users to find what they need. Customers in today’s financial ecosystem expect a consistent, cohesive experience. From interactions at their local bank branch to mobile apps and the web, financial institutions need to deliver fully integrated experiences that provide measurable results.

Fluid experiences are all about delivering personalized customer experiences that scale across channels in real time. “Fluidity means using technology to glean deep insights into your customers, and your market, so that you can better manage and target your content,” says Loni. “With a 360-degree view of every customer, a financial institution can predict what its customers want, when they want it, and how they want to consume it.”

Learn more about how fluid experiences are re-defining the financial services and insurance sector.

Find out more about integrated technologies designed to support your experience business.

The post How Fluid Experiences Can Redefine Financial Services appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

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4 tips for implementing a customer-focused brand relationship

How to engage your audience with a customer-focused relationship

It seems to be a trend in the world of digital marketing: Brands are leaning heavily on their product instead of their customers. Coca-Cola recently rebranded its Coke Zero product to Coca-Cola Zero Sugar, abandoning advertisements about the experiences of people drinking its beverages in favor of a product-oriented focus on ingredients and taste.

Coca-Cola believes this product-centered approach will drive sales and create a loyal culture of followers, but this mindset runs counter to human behavior. An overemphasis on the bells and whistles of a product might work in some industries, but people are far more likely — to the tune of a jaw-dropping 269 percent, according to one study — to do business with companies that take their needs into account.

Think about the last time you tried to buy a car. I suspect the salesperson spent hours talking about the features, gadgets, and design aspects of the car. And you probably did not care that the car could zoom from zero to 60 in 2.2 seconds or that the controls for the radio were right next to your hand. You were likely more interested in whether the vehicle met the needs of your family.

Had the salesperson instead asked how you plan to use the vehicle and what you dislike about your current car, it might have been a more pleasant experience. Customers are more interested in learning what a product does for them and less interested in hearing how this car compares to competitors.

The same theory applies to digital marketing. By considering the interests, wants, and needs of customers, brands can emphasize how a given product might solve specific challenges. Marketers must get their customers talking to understand their unique pain points. This insight is tremendously useful when cementing a marketing strategy, and it sets you up to sell by design instead of by chance.

So how do you get started? Here are four tips for implementing a customer-focused process:

1. Stop underestimating data.

Nearly 90 percent of marketers consider data their most underutilized asset. If you can measure it, you can manage it, but you cannot manage things that you fail to measure. Collect as much data as possible, and spend time analyzing it for trends that you can use to generate leads and drive sales. If possible, make these data-centric exchanges conversational and interactive when engaging with customers. Ask your customers what they need.

Your research will help you relate to your customers and shape what I call your W.I.N. list: what’s important now. This list of life goals should include everything that is important right now to make your next significant personal and professional moves. The end goal is definitely critical, but incremental steps along the way are equally as important. Considering the amount of white noise in the marketing world, it is necessary to differentiate your company in some way. The best way to achieve separation for your brand is to truly understand your customers — and data can play a big role to help you achieve your goals.

2. Be flexible, not breakable.

Even the best-laid plans of marketers can go awry. You might hit a roadblock, but that does not mean you should abandon your entire strategy. Instead of pulling the plug, take the time to consider why it failed. Tweak your strategy, believe in your system, and start again.

Consider Amazon, which is arguably the most innovative company of our time. Despite several high-profile failures, Amazon continues to reinvent the wheel. Remember the ill-fated Fire Phone? It certainly resulted in a bit of egg on Amazon’s face, but that did not stop the company from going back to the drawing board to try again. The company learned from those mistakes and eventually incorporated some elements into its new Echo Show.

Most successful endeavors involve some amount of failure. You might fall down seven times, but you need to stand up eight times. Learn from your mistakes and come back with something bigger and better. A marketing strategy that incorporates the same openness and determination is bound to succeed.

3. Get your story straight.

Does your website tell a story? Does it match your social media posts? Does your social content sync with the stories coming from your sales reps? Each platform of your brand influences every other foundation of your business to create a continuum of communication.

Consider Anthropologie, a clothing retailer that truly excels at content marketing. Anthropologie understands the wants and needs of its customers, and its content speaks to those needs by delivering a consistent story across its store, blog, website, and social accounts. It offers contests, photos, and lifestyle tips across these platforms, ensuring customers remain engaged and loyal to the brand — with 2.3 million Instagram followers, its customer loyalty seems secure.

When you tell your story, be as honest as possible. Be authentic. Even though we might be afraid to call our babies — or our businesses, in this case — ugly, it is OK to let customers see the truth behind the curtain. People want something that feels real instead of canned and scripted. Deliver a consistent, authentic story, and consumers will be hooked. This sort of brand alignment helps build trust in your company and enables your team to use storytelling in the sales process.

4. Sleep with one eye open.

A Gartner survey revealed that the number of companies that planned to invest in big data dropped by 6 percent in 2016. If that trend were to continue, industry insights and trends might not be as prolific in the years to come.

I encourage clients to spend 90 percent of their time driving business with a marketing plan. I adhere to the adage of planning your work and working your plan. But what about the remaining 10 percent of your time?

In addition to monitoring what your competitors are doing, dedicate a small team at your company to research and development. Give them a budget, and let them pursue ideas nobody else has tackled. Whether something sounds unimportant or insane, give them space to experiment. You will stay on the cutting edge while nurturing an innovative company culture.

Not buts about it, you must go outside your comfort zone to identify your customers and determine how to appeal to their unique needs. Instead of trying to sell people on the myriad features of your product, talk about what your product does for potential customers. A client-focused process helps you discover the needs and wants of your clients while allowing you to connect with them on a personal level.

Think of it this way: When we talk about our lives, we talk about designing the life we want instead of simply living it. It is easy to say, “I want to make a million dollars and live in a white house with a picket fence,” but those words are hollow without actions to back them up. We can turn our dreams into reality by designing a plan rooted in our wants and needs. By taking a similar tact, digital marketers can cut through the clutter and serve the needs of their clients.

Thanks to Michael Ray Newman for sharing his advice and opinion in this post. Michael is the CEO of Zig Ziglar Internation. ZZI transforms businesses, changes lives, and trains people to be leaders through the time-tested principles of Zig Ziglar. Michael has committed his life to helping others and inspiring employees with high energy and higher expectations You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.

from Blog – Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy/digital-strategy-development/customer-focused-brand-relationship/

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Integrating TV advertizing into your digital marketing strategy

3 ways to integrate TV advertizing into your digital strategy

Amazon has led the seismic shift from brick-and-mortar stores to e-commerce. Customers now expect free shipping and overnight delivery with Amazon Prime, and the level of shopping convenience has never been higher.

 

For years, Amazon had competitors. But no one can compete with the e-commerce juggernaut anymore. About 34 percent of online sales in the U.S. come through Amazon, and by 2021, that number is expected to grow to 50 percent.

 

Despite this shift from physical stores to the online realm, there are no signs that digital will dominate other forms of media in the advertising world, which is why you need to integrate TV ads into your strategy. Television remains a marketer’s best bet for hitting a mainstream audience despite the assertions that TV is dead.

 

TV Is Still Alive and Well

 

Some modern marketers focus solely on the digital channels, but online marketing efforts usually come to an early plateau. Targeted ads on websites and online media only reach a specific set of customers, and the product or service only ends up in front of the people who are looking specifically for that product or its competitor.

 

In contrast, television reaches a much bigger audience to broaden your reach. In CBS’s study of 315 brands, when looking at both TV and digital campaigns, the average target reach was 67 percent. But once you break it down by campaign, just 5 percent saw only digital ads, 9 percent saw a mix of digital and TV, and a whopping 53 percent saw television ads only.

 

Some marketers disparage TV advertising as a shotgun approach with zero ability to target, but with more advanced data and TV attribution models, that’s no longer true. With video on demand (VOD), over-the-top (OTT) programming, and addressable options, television has the ability to reach the masses or drill down and market one to one.

 

“You can’t reach all the people all the time with digital alone,” chief retail strategist at Shoptalk, Sucharita Mulpuru, says. “In a crowded marketplace of sellers, sometimes traditional approaches are critical to growing word of mouth and awareness.”

 

Combine and Conquer

 

The best marketing campaigns use a combination of marketing vehicles. Digital is fantastic at casting to a narrow audience. It can identify a yoga-loving mom who likes to eat organic foods; then, it can give her very specific ads. But customers don’t only buy things within the box that the metrics put them in. That’s why online marketing campaigns have trouble creating critical mass and expanding their message and audience.

 

Especially for e-commerce brands, launching a digital campaign is a good way to learn your core customer and grow through the early stages. The information gathered through online tracking is incredibly useful when combined with television.

 

Here are three tips for e-commerce professionals who want to use TV marketing to drive business to their online platforms:

 

1. Be Consistent

 

Consistency is key when combining TV and digital campaigns. When a viewer sees a TV spot and Googles the brand name, the website that comes up should have the same look, feel, and messaging as what they just saw in the commercial. TV is a huge driver to the web, so do not treat those new customers differently.

 

Offers and products should be just as consistent. Whether the customer comes from a link, Google search, or phone call, the TV customer should be treated the same as the online customer.

 

2. Be Direct

 

Don’t be shy about telling customers what to do. In a TV ad for an online brand, viewers should know where to log on, why they should want to, and what they are going to get when they do.

 

The ad can (and should) still be creative and memorable, but it needs to have a purpose. Viewers shouldn’t have to guess at what the brand is selling, and it is possible to create an ad that is “too cool.” A creative, eye-catching ad is useless if it leaves viewers confused.

 

3. Look at the Big Picture

 

Television ads add credibility, and they allow you to introduce and explain your message to a broad audience. In turn, TV ads will help drive social and digital campaigns as well.

 

Once customers find your brand through a TV ad, they’re going to go to your social networks and digital spaces. Again, the website needs to be consistent with credibility built up through the TV ad. A confusing or difficult-to-navigate website will lose the impulse buyer.

 

The viewer is acting on an urge, so be careful not to slow down the momentum. The potential buyer can leave as fast as he came and end up not searching for the item or service. At the end of the day, well-executed TV and digital campaigns should reinforce each other.

 

Some marketers scoff at TV advertising, thinking it’s too “traditional” to be able to succeed in an increasingly digital world. But TV isn’t “traditional” media — it’s established media and is here to stay. Online marketing has its benefits, but it works best as part of a combined approach. After all, if your only ads are shown just outside your store, you’re never going to find any new customers.

Thanks to Stacy Durand for sharing his advice and opinion in this post. Stacy has been the CEO of Media Design group since its inception, and her passion for the job is fueled by her pure love of the media business. Her career has always been about facilitating business growth exponentially and maximizing the potential of any campaign that runs through her company. You can follow her on Twitter

from Blog – Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-platforms/video-marketing/tv-advertsizing-is-still-alive/

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