It’s the holiday ad that caught fire for all the wrong reasons: A young, seemingly fit woman is gifted a Peloton stationary bike (presumably by her husband) and proceeds to vlog her fitness journey over the course of a year.
The ad, produced by creative agency Mekanism, went viral almost immediately, sparking criticism about Peloton’s unhealthy depictions of body image and marriage – not to mention the “Peloton Woman’s” concerning expressions (which some have quipped resembles a face of fear). Naturally, Twitter users couldn’t contain themselves, dragging the cringe-worthy campaign with labels like sexist, elitist, and entirely unrealistic.
Why is there so much value to asking questions in the headlines of your ads, websites, and other marketing materials? The answer is pretty powerful.
I pose that question because there are many businesspeople who have an aversion to using questions in their materials. When I present a headline that ends with a question mark, they instantly reject it. They may be like the boss I had who responded to questioning headlines by asking one of his own: “What if the reader says no?”
You’ve probably heard the old saws that the most powerful marketing is built around words like “free” or “money” or “sex.” The people who believe that also tend to think the role of a headline is to stop people in their tracks. While words like those and similar headlines on websites, ads, and other materials may indeed be capable of stopping people, they can’t do what really makes those materials effective: they can’t create engagement with the reader.
Very soon, the most comprehensive privacy law in the United States yet – the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) -- will be a reality, giving Californians more control over their personal information. Essentially the US version of the European Union’s General Data Protection Act (GDPR), the CCPA has some US companies looking beyond California and choosing to comply with CCPA guidelines for all their US customers.
Although consumers are likely to enjoy newfound choice and transparency into the personal data companies collect, the picture will become more complicated for businesses that depend on this data. The regulatory environment will be stricter, and the landscape in which their data infrastructure sits will grow more complex.
Self-driving cars … Siri personal assistant … chess master IBM Watson. These are just a few of the things that come to mind when we think about artificial intelligence (AI). AI is the buzzword that seems to be on everyone’s lips.
There’s virtually no business or industry, or consumer for that matter, that isn’t confronting the impact of AI today. To some, AI signals a utopian future, while others foresee a dystopian nightmare coming to control us all.
If ever two teams needed to be close enough to share DNA, it’s marketing and technology.
Gone are the days when the technology team looked at marketing as the team that does the hoo-ha—slick advertisements, flashy websites, and puts logos on t-shirts and water bottles—and marketing saw technology as the team in the basement that does laptops and stuff.
Today, you are either embracing or getting kicked by digital transformation. With much of the buying journey complete before a customer engages a live person from your company, your technology and your brand are indistinguishable to your customers. That is pushing CMOs and CTOs from backstage roles supporting sales and operations to starring roles in revenue growth. A 2016 study by Deloitte and the CMO Council found that 68% of CMOs say their boards and CEOs expect them to lead revenue growth. And according to CIO’s 2019 State of the CIO research, 62% of CIOs say creating new products or services that drive revenue is part of their job responsibilities.
Marketing is a dynamic field. Businesses are always trying to attract customers and get them to understand their value propositions. Consumers, on the other hand, have become increasingly savvy to marketing techniques, forcing companies to adapt how they interact with them.
Over the next few years, there is likely to be a lot of innovation, both in marketing approaches and in how companies conduct business. To help highlight some of these pending changes, 11 members of Forbes Communications Council, below, discuss some of the marketing trends they see developing in their industries.
Digital Transformation is one of the top concerns for executives in 2019, and yet companies dive into a Digital Transformation program without fully understanding what’s required – or even what it’s supposed to accomplish.
To their credit, many organizations attempt to put together a thorough business case before committing to anything. However, all it does is expose how much trouble the program will be in once it launches.
One of the greatest responsibilities of leadership is driving continual evolution of the organization toward a well-defined future state. Implied in this role is the need to lead change. Easily said, complex in practice.
Navigating change has been prevalent in management literature for decades. Notwithstanding the books, articles, consultants and experts, change efforts generally produce moderate success at best. Why? In the words of a long-time colleague, "Change would be easy if it didn’t involve people."
It’s called the ‘information age’ for a reason. Today, organisations have unprecedented volumes of data at their fingertips, providing incredible opportunities for marketers and businesses to better personalise their message to best service their customers. But to really take advantage of this data, businesses need data scientists who are not only skilled in data analytics, but who can convey information and lead and influence the actions of others.
I still have occasional nightmares where after I have given a presentation on how to improve customer experience by focusing on what matters most to customers, two marketers walk up to me. One looks me in the eye and says: “What about branding?” The other smirks and says: “What about personalization?”
Revenue operations is no doubt among the hottest trends in B2B marketing. Look at Twitter, for example, and you'll see the hashtag #revops popping up more and more frequently.
So why has revenue ops continued to gain popularity and traction by the day, and how can marketers reap its benefits?
First, what is revenue ops?
Before we dive into the impact that revenue ops is having on Marketing, let's back up and examine what it really means to have a revenue operations team in your company.
As consumers spend more time online to perform everyday tasks from banking to shopping to streaming entertainment, an increasing amount of this internet traffic is being routed through proxies. Online users wanting to surf the web anonymously often use proxies that can provide them with a means to mask their IP address from the rest of the world―and thus their locations and all the contextual information that can be gleaned in order to make marketing messages more targeted and personalized.
By connecting to the internet through proxies, a device’s IP address will not be shown accurately, but rather the IP of the proxy server. Recent data indicates approximately 26 percent of global online users access the internet using a VPN or proxy server.
For years, digital marketers have paid hand over fist in the digital gold rush for data. Instead of a tangible product, tech companies earn millions in revenue from the data they collect on previous, current and future digital consumers. But digital marketers seeking to gobble up as much data as they for their campaigns, while not stopping to consider the source of or methods used to collect it, are taking the wrong approach. The age-old mantra of “quality over quantity” has never been more relevant in online advertising, and marketers must quickly and fully embrace first-party data or risk their digital campaigns (and bottom lines) falling flat.
Marketing is all about strategy — or is it? To find out, the August 2019 CMO Survey asked U.S. marketing leaders: “How much time do you spend managing the present versus preparing for the future of marketing in your company?” Overall, 341 leaders responded by reporting they spend 68.5% of their time “managing the present” and only 31.5% of their time “preparing for the future.” This finding holds across company size, sector, and industry.
One thing that is usually uppermost in your mind as a marketer is how to ensure that you not only survive the competition but also become one of the market leaders.
And in order to become a market leader you are expected to work seriously on personalization but doing this at scale because you must focus on the global market, must require automation and that is where machine learning comes in.
You must create a digital presence that will help in better customer engagement, raise brand awareness, and reinforce business objectives. It’s expected that you must have been working on your web content and building out your CRM capabilities, you must also have it behind your mind that there is the absolute need to have various efforts underway to automate key marketing activities.
Only 38% of the 425 customer data executives “strongly agreed” when asked if they knew where all of their company’s customer data is stored. The survey of director-level or higher executives responsible for customer data management decisions was conducted by Forrester for Deloitte to evaluate how companies are managing their customer experience data. It found inadequate data management was a central theme, with just 5.6% of survey respondents scoring a “4” or higher on a 1 to 5 scale measuring data management maturity.
Google Analytics (GA) is one of the most popular traffic analytics tools for websites, but it can have serious drawbacks for anyone looking to measure content performance.
The problem is systemic: Analytics was built to track traffic for ecommerce and content sites, with the structure of its reports built around pageviews. It can provide some sophisticated data around those views – what kinds of audience members are behind them, how they might have arrived, what they did next, and other such questions – but today’s content marketers need the ability to measure and understand much more than that.
It’s no secret that brands are shifting their marketing dollars to digital channels such as email and social media. But are they effective at it?
Yes, depending on the channel, judging by Strategies, Tactics and Trends for 2020 digital marketing plans, a study by Ascend2.
30-second summary:
• By leveraging Robotic Process Automation (RPA), marketing teams are seizing the opportunity to enter the “Automation-First” era.
• Marketing operations: RPA allows for streamlined digital ad placement by up to 80%.
• Customer engagement: RPA integrates with chatbots to deliver a more compelling, actionable and intelligent conversation.
• The AI-powered customer experience: RPA turns rules-based decisions to experience-based; learning and improving continuously over time.
New research reveals 98% believe future improvements are held back by data silos, justifying the cost and in-house skills shortage.
Data-driven marketing is vital for today’s marketing teams. But a new report by global marketing communications agency Allison+Partners revealed that while marketers have made progress to becoming more data-driven, nearly all respondents cited numerous barriers preventing them from getting the most out of data.
hy It Matters
Failure rarely offers useful lessons. New research shows learning fast — through empowered teams, clear hypotheses, and adept questioning — leads to better innovation.
“Fail fast” is a popular mantra at companies exploring digital innovation as they try a variety of experiments to see what sticks. Yet failure rarely offers useful business lessons, according to Jeanne Ross and Nils Fonstad, research scientists at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research. In fact, the pair found that this type of thinking often leads to projects that create little if any actual value for the company.
“Leaders often assume that failures will lead to valuable learning. Our data doesn’t support that assumption,” Ross and Fonstad wrote in a recent research briefing. The reason? Most failures have multiple, interrelated causes. “As a result,” they write, “it is difficult to extract a reliable summary of lessons learned.”
Advances in data, technology, and analytics continue to bring new opportunities for improving sales and marketing effectiveness. Digital capabilities have evolved from descriptive (reporting what happened), to diagnostic (understanding why), to predictive (projecting what will happen if), to prescriptive (recommending what to do). But the road to realizing value continues to be bumpy.
Publications routinely highlight individual successes with systems such as CRM, reporting, and AI-enabled sales/marketing. Benefits touted include better leads and conversion rates, larger deal sizes, and increased sales productivity and growth. Yet surveys show widespread dissatisfaction with sales and marketing systems. For example, in a 2019 PCMag survey, the Net Promoter Score is negative for most major CRM providers.
It is estimated that the world now produces 7.5 septillion bytes of data every day. To put that in perspective, a septillion has 24 zeros. Just a little while back, in 2012, the estimated worldwide data production figure was 7.5 quintillion bytes per day. A quintillion has 18 zeros.
Not all of the data produced today is customer data. In fact, most of it has no corporate value, going instead into predicting weather and traffic patterns, compiling government statistics, producing economic forecasts, and more. But with the Internet of Things (IoT), social media, and other data producers, there is still a vastly growing pool of customer information that is only going to keep expanding.
Making a mark in the online marketplace is the dire need of all businesses out there. Regardless of its size, every business must jump upon the digital bandwagon to get more customers through the doors. The number of brick-and-mortar stores converting their status or beefing up their structures with virtual elements is quite surprising.
According to Statista, the number of digital buyers across the globe will reach 1.92 billion in 2019. This equals to a quarter of the world population. Furthermore, the forecast shows that this number will reach 2.14 billion by 2021. Indeed, the market has immense potential. All you need is to craft a digital approach that fulfills the purpose.
Many of us will be traveling by air this holiday season. Today's airlines are plagued by bad and really bad customer experiences that go viral on social media. And regardless of which satisfaction or airline quality survey you see, air travel is generally accepted to be a pretty miserable experience. But there’s always hope.
For that hope, I continually look to Continental Airlines for inspiration. Before being acquired by United Airlines in 2010, the airline relied on a winning combination of executive commitment, a dedicated and empowered team, a strong customer focus, and a solid foundation of trusted data to support its overall customer vision.
‘Personalisation’ has been snooping around the edges of the telecoms market for many years but has thus far has failed to break through in any meaningful way, at least the obvious ‘personalisation’ versions that ISPs, in particular, have tended to come up with.
Over the years I’ve had several personalisation use cases explained or demo’d and they usually involved some sort of low level extortion. This is invariably committed either on customers (“We know best what you want and how much you want to pay for it”) or on upstream or third party content providers who are often the ones who are expected to pony up for ‘access’ to the personalised customer.
Communigator has collaborated with Smart Insights to bring us their recent survey results in relation to Marketing Automation. For both B2B and B2C companies, Marketing Automation is a valuable tool. These survey results show how applications and attitudes have changed since a similar study from 2016.
1 in 8 businesses in 2019 is not using Marketing Automation, compared to 18% in 2016. Of those businesses who have opted for this incredible technology, only 5% are taking advantage of all the features available to them, this figure has remained consistent since 2016.
For any company that depends on data to drive its applications and business strategies — and let’s face that means most enterprises — Gartner’s recent research that shows nearly half of IT leaders planning further investment in analytics over the next year will be no surprise.
In the waning years of the last millennium, at my university, one of the cause célèbres of the progressive left was a concept known as “Manufacturing Consent,” the title of a book and film, by and starring Noam Chomsky. Its central thesis was that U.S. mass media “are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship.”
It’s fair to say that history has been pretty kind to this theory. Consider the support drummed up by mass media for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. To quote the public editor of The New York Times, “To anyone who read the paper between September 2002 and June 2003, the impression that Saddam Hussein possessed, or was acquiring, a frightening arsenal of W.M.D. seemed unmistakable. Except, of course, it appears to have been mistaken.” Consider the September 2002 dossier published by the U.K. government “to bolster support for war” which turned out to be full of spectacularly incorrect information, and the media’s failure to interrogate those claims.
The year is coming to an end, which means marketing budgets are going to be adjusted, digital marketing strategies will be adjusted, and Google's changes will be mulled over. We've experienced quite a change in digital marketing already, with a major focus on user journey.
Marketing agencies need to redefine what is SEO?
SEO is dynamic, and it's still evolving. Sure, there are some aspects that remain relatively the same, like keyword optimization and many on-page practices. However, Google now wants to be the start and end of the search journey.
Archetypes have long been used by marketers to help define a brand’s personality, which in turn allows for a powerful and cohesive digital marketing strategy to be rolled out. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the world of luxury marketing, where story archetypes help brands to define their image and tailor their marketing to a very specific group of individuals.
There are 12 archetypes, which were defined by famed Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung. These carefully constructed story archetypes each reflect enduring personas that feed into the human experience, helping a brand to discover its personality and brand voice by anchoring it to a clearly defined story archetype that is already embedded within humanity. This story archetype ultimately defines how and the way that brand communicates to its target audience, helping to make the brand instantly recognisable.
2019 was a strong year for video – with global viewership growing YoY by 7.2% across all digital video channels to 2.63B according to eMarketer. And with $37.5b pouring into digital video advertising (Zenith), it shows no signs of slowing.
However as the format continues to steam ahead, there will be a marked change in the way we consume it. Viewer growth, engagement and ad spend on digital video on desktop and mobile apps are all expected to plateau in the next few years, as emerging formats like OTT and CTV gain a larger foothold.
30-second summary:
• While media planning used to be an agency pillar, many are shifting away from that model with the realization that traditional media planning isn’t effectively optimizing ad spend.
• By allowing AI to test ads and find new audiences, marketing teams will have the opportunity and time to flex their creative muscles and develop unique campaigns that drive customer engagement.
• AI and automation is here to help marketers, not replace them. Effective application of the technology can help marketers refocus and flourish across their KPIs.
• Recent partnership between Albert Technologies and a big box American retailer, saw the retailer achieve a 20% increase in revenue at the most competitive time of the year (Black Friday).
• While still in its early days, AI is already delivering meaningful value for those who’ve embraced the tech. McKinsey reports, 78% of businesses claim to have received significant or moderate value, while only 1% say that they’ve seen none or negative value
Personalization gets more than its share of hype. But 80% of firms that have invested in it will drop the whole thing by 2025, according to a study by Gartner Inc.
The reasons are lack of ROI and/or the perils of customer data management.
In fact, 27% of marketers list data collection, integration and protection as the chief barriers to personalization.
Gartner also projects that one third of all brand public relations disasters will be caused by data ethics failures by 2023.
Companies continue to pump money into their digital transformation efforts – to the tune of $1.18 billion this year, according to IDC’s Worldwide Semiannual Digital Transformation Spending Guide. But given some of the lackluster or temporary results thus far (a McKinsey survey found that just 16 percent of organizations’ digital transformation had successfully improved performance long-term), it’s clear that some of those investments have failed to deliver.
Left unchecked, such misplaced investments will cost organizations in both dollars and cents and their competitive positions.
According to an August 2018 study by Salesforce, 71% of shoppers use a mobile device in-store – a figure up from 62% in 2017.
The reasons for this are said to be varied, ranging from reading product reviews to comparing prices.
Alongside this, of course, is the simple fact that smartphone usage in general is on the rise, irrespective of the retail context. This means that mobile provides a big opportunity for retail brands to meet shoppers on these devices, regardless of what they’re using them for.
With this in mind, here are a few examples of retailers embracing smartphone usage in-store, and integrating it into the physical shopping experience.
Since 2018, marketing technology (MarTech) has seen year-on-year growth of 22 percent with estimated market size of $121.5 billion globally. Combined, the North American and UK MarTech market are worth $65.9 billion. As marketers vie for the attention of an increasingly fickle consumer, they’ve turned to more sophisticated MarTech tools. Here’s what’s new and trending in the MarTech world in 2020. From optimizing customer experience to augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) apps and even machine learning for marketers, here’s how to most effectively leverage the technology for more successful campaigns and greater consumer engagement.
It’s no secret that digital technology and media have profoundly disrupted the retail industry. It’s estimated that more than 7,000 retail stores have already closed in 2019, including significant numbers from traditional powerhouse retail brands like Avenue, Gap, Kmart, Sears, Party City -- the list goes on. Even the big and mighty ones are not immune to the forces of disruption, led by Amazon.
So, there’s no small irony in noting the emergence of a new digital media platform that promises to once again transform the retail industry: the actual brick-and-mortar retail stores themselves. As retailers have begun to evolve from a showroom/warehouse paradigm to an experiential one, parallel developments in data-driven messaging and personalization have a new outlet that both enhances the experiential factor in-store and can extend and potentially compress the consumer funnel into the physical store all the way to the cash register -- and beyond.
If you took an audit of your marketing content today, what percentage would you categorize for lead generation versus post-purchase experience? I bet most of it would fall into the former category.
Many B2B organizations focus all of their content marketing efforts towards lead generation and fail to consider pre-sales or post-sales efforts. Your content strategy can — and should — include your sales tools like collateral, demos, pricing sheets, ROI assessments and more. Sales tools are how your sales reps deliver tailored content to interested prospects to drive them to buy. It can help bridge the gap between sales and marketing teams. Together, these departments can build a content engine that effectively engages the buyer throughout the entire purchase journey.
Over the next couple of years, programmatic ad growth shows no signs of slowing, while social networks continue to take an ever larger share of the programmatic pie.
That’s according to the latest forecast from eMarketer, which expects programmatic digital display advertising spend to grow from just over $57 billion, this year, to nearly $80 billion by 2021.
There’s a strong demand for advanced tech skills in the workforce, and that demand won’t be slowing down any time soon.
That’s according to Udemy’s 2020 Workplace Learning Trends Report, which indicates workers across some of the largest industries are heavily focused on learning data science and technology skills.
The online learning platform analyzed user data to determine what classes are the most popular among engineering, marketing, sales and financial teams that use its workplace learning service.
Even though global brand management is critical for company success, more than one-third (35 percent) of companies struggle with it, Gartner reports in its most recent brand survey.
According to the research firm, 58 percent of marketing leaders believe brand is a critical driver of buyer behavior for prospects, and 65 percent say it is a critical driver of buyer behavior for existing customers.
“Managing a global brand is a complex, multidimensional task,” says Chris Ross, Gartner vice president and analyst. “Even brands that may not see themselves as global are operating in a more tightly connected global ecosystem. As a result, the challenges of being a global brand extend to a large number of marketing leaders today.”
While personalized outreach to customers has become both more common and more successful, retailers are finding that they’re not learning as much as expected about who their customers are.
They’re working on ways to improve the experience so that customers don’t feel that they’re being tracked with ads so precise that they seem like an invasion of privacy.
“To achieve this level of engagement, marketers need the ability to predict — without coming across as intrusive — what their target audience will think, feel, say and do across a variety of scenarios,” Jeremy Hlavacek, head of revenue at IBM Watson Advertising, told eMarketer.
Marketing managers would ideally prefer to focus mainly on creating amazing campaigns rather than day to day management aspects. But in the real world, the situation is quite different. Marketing projects can take up different forms, from simple blog posts to global product releases, and marketing managers have to handle it all. They even need to gather sound knowledge of marketing software technologies tools to make their efforts pay-off.
In most enterprise organizations, UX designers and content managers are separate roles filled by different people. As a person who has worked in both capacities, I’m constantly reminded of the disconnect between the graphic design and development teams. Graphic artists can create an intricate design, but developers will need to create a content management template based on that design. The result is often a difficult process for both parties.
30-second summary:
• The new Gartner survey on martech finds that this year’s average assessment of martech stacks’ effectiveness is about the same as last year – but both assessments indicate effectiveness has a ways to go.
• The biggest impediments to effectiveness: training, tech integration and talent recruiting.
• IT and marketing departments are now often working well together – helping to make tech integration less of an issue for “best-of-breed” solutions.
The survey shows that 73% of US and 81% of UK consumers’ product purchases are inspired by visual inspiration
ViSenze, the artificial intelligence company powering visual commerce, today announced the findings from its study, ViSenze Visual Shopping Trends 2019 report, which analyzed how consumers are influenced to purchase products after they’ve been inspired both online and in person. In the company’s third annual report that studies consumer shopping preferences, ViSenze surveyed over 1,500 people in the US and the UK, finding that 54% of respondents in the US and 43% in the UK are most excited about visual search being part of their shopping journey.
This year’s results support earlier research done by ViSenze in 2018 (cited by eMarketer), which showed that close to 62% of Millennials in each market were comfortable using visual search. The results from this year’s report show a progression in visual search sentiment, which will likely continue to rise as consumers demand faster, seamless, and more engaging paths to purchase.
Each day, professionals of all seniority levels go online to ask their most urgent queries. We’ve aggregated this quarter’s most frequently asked digital marketing questions from across the internet and compiled the answers here for you.
Building a content marketing system for your business is the first step to a successful campaign. In order to ensure your content marketing reaches the right people and reels in leads, you need a thorough blueprint of your goals in place. That’s where your content marketing system comes in. We’ve put together this nifty guide to help you build one for yourself.
What is Content Marketing?
Before we jump into the system itself, let’s quickly go over what content marketing is in general. Content marketing should be seen as a strategic approach to marketing that focuses on creating and distributing high-quality, relevant content. The point of this content is to attract and retain customers in your target audience with the purpose of generating sales.
Today’s sales and marketing teams are operating in the age of the customer. To be successful, these teams must focus their strategies and actions on the buyers’ problems and opportunities. Marketers are tasked with generating high-quality leads for the sales team. While marketing looks to improve the lead conversion process, sales looks to accelerate the sales cycle. Despite these two teams sharing a common goal of winning business, responsibilities can blur together. Below are tips for connecting, accelerating and converting leads in the modern sales cycle.
The Spell and the Gypsy started as a brand sold in markets and was driven by personalised customer service and rich storytelling. So as the brand grew into a more omnichannel approach, it only made sense to continue these facets in a digital environment.
The Spell and The Gypsy (Spell), an Australian fashion brand, was founded at the Byron Markets in 2009 by two sisters, who still run the company today. The modern-bohemian fashion brand has seen steady growth and increasing interest in their product globally and across selling channels.
At Bombora’s second annual Intent Event in September, I began noticing a developing trend among several successful B2B sales and marketing teams. No fewer than six presentations shared a common way of gathering, organizing, and perhaps most importantly, valuing all their sources and types of data.
Are you down with PPC and unsure of where or how search engine optimization fits into the digital marketing mix? Better yet, do you need to add both pay-per-click and SEO to your overall marketing plan? Looking at the two, it’s understandable why it might seem confusing. In fact, with as many acronyms as there are floating around the digital marketing realm – PPC, SEO, SMM, SERP, Guest blogging and etc., it almost sounds like we’re proposing a bowl of alphabet soup – hot, steamy and full of broth. Yet, from a marketing perspective, those noodles are really two sides of the same plan.
Did you ever read the tale of The Emperor’s New Clothes? The protagonist of the story strutted around believing he was wearing the finest garments in all the world. The truth, as you’ll likely remember, was he was stark naked. The public front he believed he was presenting differed wildly from the public perception of his appearance.
Planning and preparing for Millennial and Generation Z consumers is no longer something that organizations can ignore. These demographics already have enormous influence and spending power, and this will only increase in the years to come. Companies that fail to gain their loyalty and trust risk becoming irrelevant quickly.
One of the most important ways to provide the experiences these consumers are looking for is through outstanding customer support, including providing a level of personalization that makes them feel known and appreciated. By deploying the right customer support technologies and processes, organizations can put themselves in a position to succeed with these valuable customers.
The CMO Council has released its new report and highlighted its key findings. The study revealed that irresponsible lead generation vendors have put brands at financial, legal and reputational risk. B2B marketers have also demanded that third-party providers bring more compliance to lead marketing science.
B2B marketers rushing to acquire mass leads at the cheapest price have led to a commodity market and the proliferation of disreputable lead generation vendors. In turn, this has created a toxic environment for brand reputation and trust.
According to a CMO Council report titled, Are Garbage Leads Trashing Your Brand?, marketers are now rethinking their lead generation strategies,
Cybersecurity company CHEQ conducted research with the University of Baltimore, which found that the epidemic of online fake news now costs the global economy $78 billion annually. The report, which analyzes the direct economic cost from fake news, also estimates fake news has contributed a loss in stock market value of about $39 billion a year.
The World Economic Forum's analysis released in 2018, ranks the spread of misinformation and fake news among the world’s top global risks.
Chicago: Cision (NYSE: CISN) and PRWeek today announced the release of their third annual 2019 Global Comms Report: The Path to Progress. The report surveyed more than 500 senior-level PR and marketing professionals in seven countries to uncover recent trends in communications. Among other findings, the 2019 Global Comms Report reveals that increased investments in data and shifts in social media strategy are helping comms teams clearly demonstrate their impact on a company's bottom line.
The Path to Progress presents comparative year-on-year data that spotlights key trends shaping the comms discipline – including the finding that earned media is on the rise. 34% of global respondents' overall media budget goes to earned media, up from 26% last year. Looking at U.S. respondents only, earned media's prevalence is even more apparent. Notably more budget goes to earned media (39%) than paid media (31%), which has seen its share growth plateau since 2018 and now sits near owned media, which has 30% of the spend in the U.S.
Three auction clearinghouses have come to dominate digital advertising: Prebid, Google open bidding (formerly known as exchange bidding) and Amazon Publisher Services’ Transparent Ad Marketplace (TAM).
With the rise of header bidding, publishers needed a way to have multiple exchanges bid against each other in real time. Prebid launched in 2015 as an independent and open source option, Google’s open bidding debuted in April 2016 and Amazon introduced TAM at the end of 2016. Three years in, each has become a leader. Many publishers use two or three of these auction clearinghouses.
But should buyers and publishers start to pare down who they work with?
Giving your customers some personalized attention via email can lead to an increase in sales.
No one wants to feel like just another customer. People love individual attention. They want to be seen as individuals who you know by name and truly appreciate. As Dale Carnegie puts it, "A person's name to that person is the sweetest and most important sound in any language."
Long story short, the days of one-size-fits-all-messaging are long gone. Modern consumers have come to demand and expect relevant and personalized content and experience, whether online or offline. Failing to personalize your emails isn't just a sign of incompetent marketing. It's just plain bad business.
It’s widely known that acquiring a new customer is significantly more expensive than retaining an existing one. This makes customer retention performance a critical metric in most board rooms. More recently, it’s made the management of customer experience a top priority. Keeping your current customers happy while adding new ones is the key to commercial excellence and bottom-line growth.
But the second law of thermodynamics tells us that unless acted upon by outside energy, a system will either have the same or more disorder as time passes. Entropy wins in the end! But in the very long meantime, how will you know if your customer starts to slide into “disorder”? Rather than asking your sales team to scramble and save an account that’s already closing the door on their relationship with you, there are early warning signs. Keying in on certain data points across the customer life cycle will give you some advance notice that the account could be at risk.
ll marketing should be informed by data. Planning a strategy without guidance from your data is like heading off on a cross-country road trip without a map (or GPS). Despite this, 87% of marketers say data is their company’s most under-utilized asset.
To drive better business results, leading marketers are leveraging data-driven marketing strategies.
New products are introduced in the market almost every day, but not much is heard of the majority after the initial buzz surrounding their launch. It’s too early to classify a product as “good” when no one is buying it yet. Marketing should be a part of the product prototyping and development stage and not an afterthought.
In today’s digital society, relying solely on traditional marketing tactics isn’t sufficient. Martech comes to the fore in hitting the right notes. It’s critical to examine how developers, designers, and marketers can come together to reduce the number of products that fail in the market.
We’re all unique individuals, and what may seem common sense to one person isn’t to another. During my undergrad years, I wondered why I saw so many books about how to conduct productive meetings. Just a couple of years later, I soon realized their purpose as I witnessed others fail and found myself floundering as well.
My recent training in change management reminded me of this fact. Change management aims to address the human factors involved in organizational changes because change is hard for people. During the training, a few of my colleagues commented that a lot in our pre-work for class sessions seemed pretty obvious. However, as the training proceeded, we realized that there was far more to fostering positive change than we had thought.
Facebook is bringing more machine learning-driven capabilities to its ads platform to improve personalization, the company announced this week.
Dynamic formats and ad creative for Dynamic Ads. Advertisers will now be able to automatically serve different ad formats to audiences based on the machine learning model’s prediction of a user’s format preference. Campaign managers can access this capability from the Facebook Dynamic Ad unit when creating ads for the catalog sales, traffic and conversions objectives in Ads Manager or the API.
You have heard or seen how artificial intelligence, machine learning, analytics, and other technologies have reshaped different industries – but keep that aside! Now blockchain is proving to be yet another disruptive technology that will change many industries and processes. Marketing is one area that is expected to get a boost from the use of blockchain development. We have witnessed blockchain being applied in finance and cryptocurrencies, and the same is about to happen in marketing. Blockchain allows transactions to occur between parties with no need for having third-party verification.
Again, other disruptive technologies like analytics and artificial intelligence have benefited enterprises more than the consumers, however, blockchain seems to be leveling the playground by allowing consumers to have power over data.
All you need to know about getting the most from your content.
You may have already heard this axiom before, but these days it is truer than ever. Content is king, especially when it comes to marketing a product, promoting a brand, or communicating about a company and its progress in the marketplace. Without content, there is no communication. Which is one reason Enterprise Content Management (or ECM) is so important.
The basic concept behind ECM is that content management really helps a company achieve its objectives. Since the goal is more effective communication, and due to the fact that content creation and storage is often so sporadic and haphazard at times, ECM helps maintain organization. It is an effort to capture, store, archive, secure, and produce content in a way that helps a company advance in the marketplace and improve internal efficiencies
The latest figures from Ovum’s global research into omnichannel customer engagement show businesses appear to be going backwards in meeting customer expectations, despite efforts to move forward.
Consider the data we’ve compiled over the last three years from approximately 5,000 enterprises. In 2017, only 7% believed they had cracked omnichannel customer engagement. In 2018, this rose to 10%. However, the latest figures from Ovum’s Global ICT Enterprise Insights study showed a drop, to 9%. Worse, the percentage with advanced deployments dropped by 5% from 24% in 2018 to 19% in 2019. Why the sudden fall, and is this critical transformation initiative really going backwards?
We associate marketing with witty advertisements, spectacular billboards, and quirky taglines. It’s no wonder marketing is believed to be art – all about creativity and expression. But then we remember the demographic analysis, market research, and trend forecasting that marketers do, and we start believing that marketing is a science. A number of articles and discussions have deliberated whether marketing is an art or a science. As marketing is a field that’s evolving rapidly, let's look at this old question in the context of marketing for 2020.
Look around you and consider some successful marketing strategies and campaigns. It probably strikes you that they are based on insights gleaned from hard numbers and data. Then creative imagination has been put to use to make an emotional connection with the audience. This is what makes marketing such a uniquely challenging and rewarding area of work – the elegant juxtaposition of analysis and creativity. This is why marketers really need to get both the art and the science right.
The notion that consumers might put commercial-size rolls of toilet paper on stands in their bathrooms, so they don’t have to change the roll as often, was odd enough that Procter & Gamble Co. might not have pursued it.
But last year, the Charmin development team forged ahead without a concept test and put the Freedom Roll online in Facebook and Instagram ads. Enough people bought the product that they expanded the test, then tweaked the name to Forever Roll, which worked better. As more sales and customer feedback come in, P&G plans to scale the launch further, possibly into stores.
Traditionally, advertisers collected data for a very specific reason—to create relevant messages and target those messages at the right moment to prospects and customers. It made sense. What brand wanted to send a promo code on a buyer who would never click “buy” to get those sneakers? Or waste an ad impression for a flight on a consumer who just booked her entire vacation?
Until recently, that’s how being a data-driven advertiser worked, and it was an improvement over more traditional advertising approaches—hitting a mass market with your message and hoping for the best (also known as “spray and pray”). Even so, this data-driven approach was limited.
Have you ever been to one of those restaurants with a deconstructed menu. Like, they’ll give you a deconstructed salad or deconstructed chicken parmesan. Your meal’s multitude of plates takes up 80% of the table and you force the rest of your party to fight for the rest. It’s supposed to be an elevated experience but in reality it’s just a plate of plain spaghetti, baked chicken, a bowl of tomato sauce, and a side of grated parmesan. If I wanted to put the ingredients together myself I would’ve stayed at home.
It’s the combination of the ingredients that I’m looking for! Don’t keep everything separate otherwise all I’m eating is a bowl of plain spaghetti.
Mobile apps were once heralded as the future of customer engagement. A must-have for any brand or business looking to acquire and retain an increasingly mobile-savvy customer base.
Fast forward ten years and mobile app use is in significant decline. Worse still, 71% of consumers would mute or delete an app if they started to receive too many irrelevant push notifications.
In contrast, smartphones use is booming, with the average American now spending 5.4 hours a day using their mobile phone. The problem for enterprises, is that most of that time is being spent using social media and messaging apps — not business apps.
Technology is changing the face of Marketing. In a complex, competitive and fragmented market, building long term loyalty is becoming more and more difficult for brands. At the heart of great customer engagement is a new Marketing mix of data, creativity, and technology. Technology is driving changes in consumer behavior and in order to adapt and thrive, marketers need access to the right data in order to know and understand their audience as individuals and to drive their creative decisions.
Most trends are destined for a quick death. None more so than snowclones, popular rhetorical clichés that are customizable for use across multiple settings. Examples include any variant of “X is the new Y”, “the mother of all X”, and possibly the most belabored trope of them all, “Millennials are killing X”. At its peak in 2017, it seemed nothing escaped the murderous clutches of avocado toast-eating 20- and 30-somethings.
How does a snowclone die? When it becomes so overused that it devolves into a punchline for how out of touch pundits are, or simply loses all meaning and novelty it once had.
Instagram has begun hiding ‘likes’ for select users worldwide, expanding a test that could determine whether or not they will be permanently hidden from public view. Instagram's CEO Adam Mosseri said the experiment will help improve the mental health of users, while some influencers and celebrities have argued that it may reduce engagement and make it harder to attract brands. But some marketers see this test as an opportunity to move away from such vanity metrics, particularly as audience measurement becomes more sophisticated.
Amid sluggish economic conditions and increasing competition, businesses are constantly on the hunt for better ways to attract and retain customers. One of the key ways of achieving this is through delivering them the best possible experience.
From its research into customer trends for the year ahead, Ecosystem looks at the five key customer experience (CX) trends that will drive business efforts in this area. Together, these trends will serve to shape the way businesses interact with their customers and make their offerings more compelling.
Every business needs a marketing strategy. But every good business leader knows that a strategy, without the proper systems to support it, is just pretty words on a page.
If you truly want your marketing efforts to work, you need to develop a system that supports your strategy.
The challenge is creating a marketing system that is scalable. In many cases, the things that got you where you are today won’t get you where you want to go.
So how do you develop a marketing system that meets your current needs, but can also grow with your business?
We all know that cookies are on their way out. The technology dates back to 1994 — the same year that PlayStation launched its first version of the console. Can you imagine if we were still playing games with graphics from the 90s? Brands have been basing their digital advertising strategy on an old and obsolete methodology — and it’s no wonder results are not up to snuff.
The top challenges for cookies are fairly well known. They track browsers not people (who may share laptops), Further, cookie duplication results in endless syncing that decreases precision as more vendors pile on. Cookies also have a limited lifespan — making it more difficult to take timely actions that have an ROI impact. Finally, they are limited on mobile as they don’t work in-app (which accounts for 80% of spent time on mobile phones). And let’s not forget the privacy concerns.
Recent research sheds light on what separates innovation leaders from laggards and the key shifts executives must make to move into the leader category.
We’re living in an age of digital disruption, and many executives are in a quandary. They understand that their businesses must embrace innovation to remain competitive, yet many find that their own technology-led transformation projects are failing to deliver the expected value. As a result, many companies face an innovation achievement gap, which marks the difference between the potential value of technology investments and the actual value realized by companies.
Successful Digital Transformation depends on various contributing factors which include creating the right cultural conditions within your organisation and having the most efficient technology in place. Sarfraz Ali, Senior Director of Market Development at Smartsheet, discusses the key to achieving Digital Transformation.
Starting with the business vision, you must secure stakeholder buy-in and then leverage investment in the right tools to ensure the smooth planning, communication, implementation and completion of mission-critical Digital Transformation projects.
Hyper-personalization is one of the latest marketing trends in the spotlight. A study by Epsilon found that 80 percent of consumers were more likely to do business with a company if it offered well targeted, meaningful, and personalized experiences. More consumers are demanding personalization and have even come to expect it.
Traditional personalization uses basic customer data, limiting itself to simple tactics like addressing customers with their first name in the subject line. Meanwhile, hyper-personalization goes a step further by using real-time data to deliver more relevant communications to consumers. This more advanced personalization uses data focused on consumer browsing, purchasing, and behavior.
The days of creating, managing and delivering digital experiences in a single channel are dying. This paves the way for a new era of web content management (Web CMS) technologies and strategies built on agile, open foundations that support digital experiences beyond the website.
If you could layer third-party intent data into every lead gen program you run, would you do it? In other words, would you only ever want marketing leads from prospects pre-determined to be actively researching your category, solution, use case, etc.? My argument: no, you wouldn’t.
I was part of a client conversation recently about the merits of different demand generation channels (paid social, content syndication, email, search, etc.) and this particular marketing exec was quick to reject the idea of anything that didn’t incorporate an element of intent data. In fact, he went as far as to classify anything else (a simple LinkedIn campaign, for example) as merely a “shotgun” approach.
Omnichannel marketing might sound complex and confusing if you’ve never heard of it. However, the concept is quite simple and can be an incredibly effective way to remodel your digital approach.
According to a study from Bright Pearl, 87% of top retailers believe that an omnichannel selling approach is extremely important for sales. So, what is omnichannel marketing, exactly? Technically, omnichannel marketing simply means you use every media channel possible to send out your message to your potential audience and existing consumers.
You can also incorporate traditional selling platforms. You ensure they will see what you have to offer often and repeatedly. Here's how to do it the right way.
• While over 80% of marketers have used AI in some way, only 15% are using it effectively. Personalization, powered by AI, is critical to B2B Marketing – it enables deeper engagement, stronger relationships, and better ROI. AI in a vacuum, however, is not effective – it must be aligned to a Business problem or Marketing challenge.
• There are two keys to activating AI. First, make data actionable – by creating hyper-personalized experiences across the entire customer journey of Marketing and Sales touchpoints. Second, define the dimensions – of customer data points and pieces of context – that really matter to your organization. Focus only on the ones that are meaningful to your business goals.
• We are still early in the AI journey, but marketers can and should take advantage of the opportunity to leverage AI for Personalization and ABM now.
Digital transformation isn't a dream — it’s in Estonia. Two decades ago the small Republic of Estonia in Northern Europe began its journey to become the most advanced digital society in the world, where 99% of government services are available online and 98% of Estonians have ID cards providing access to all of Estonia’s e-services — minus the red tape.
5G was designed to enable a more connected world. The next-gen mobile network takes connectivity to a whole other level that extends well beyond the mobile phone – and that includes the ways in which marketers connect with consumers.
5G works and connects differently than past mobile generations. Those differences are likely to drive several significant changes that can fundamentally alter marketing data and data-driven marketing.
To successfully adopt cutting-edge technologies, companies should first address the underlying cultural and organizational issues, say the authors of ‘The Technology Fallacy.’
The difference between a company that harnesses cutting-edge technologies to establish competitive advantage and one that commits “random acts of digital” isn’t the selection of the technology. Nor is it the implementation.
Businesses have been scrambling in the last few years to realign their organizations around the ongoing shifts in the customer realm. Spurred by a combination of mobile ubiquity, channel proliferation, ecommerce acceleration, access to unprecedented customer data and more, we've seen organizations large and small rethink their existing approaches and experiment with new methods of consumer interactions. But without an overarching strategy, one-off experiments will not build momentu
Everyone knows that sales and marketing are responsible for driving revenue. But despite this shared goal, these two departments are rarely aligned around much else. And that’s a shame too, shows a recent report from LeadMD. Because businesses with strong sales and marketing alignment are 67% more effective at closing deals, 58% more effective at retaining customers, and drive 208% more revenue as a result of their marketing efforts, according to data from LinkedIn.
Your sales team has access to a customer relationship management solution or platform as a service. Sounds obvious, right? Most enterprises are aware of the risk they run by allowing sales personnel access to such platforms, and it makes sense for these companies to put a few restrictions on these and other key users in place.
However, CRMs are not just used for sales personnel. For most organizations, these have become mission-critical platforms used across your organization. They also fall outside of many enterprises’ governance initiatives, which has pros for line-of-business success and cons for governance.
The key to your business's success is making sure you are able to keep your customers coming back again and again.
Businesses grow by acquiring new customers, but they thrive by keeping their existing ones happy. Businesses need to put in the effort to retain current customers. Doing so can be even more important than acquiring new ones.
There is compelling data that backs up the need for businesses to focus on their customer retention strategies.
• Acquiring new customers can cost five to 25 times as much as retaining one
• Repeat customers spend around 67% more than newer customers
It's clear that you should avoid getting complacent regarding the customers you have. By using retention strategies, you'll be able to better engage with customers and keep them happy.
Digital transformation is top of mind for organizations, with the goal of delivering better customer experiences. But the rules of relationships have changed for B2B businesses. By listening, personalizing and engaging with customers, B2B organizations can transform how they meet customer needs.
There’s a moment in the movie Casablanca when Humphrey Bogart’s character, Rick, turns to Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa and utters one of the most iconic lines in movie history – “Here’s looking at you kid.”
If only we could have that kind of impact with our relationship with customers. Instead, B2B buyers will tell you it feels a lot more like “Here’s emailing you, kid. Well, not you specifically, but someone probably kind of like you. Generally speaking.” Much less impactful.
While marketing organizations have made incredible strides in the personalization of experience, with dynamic delivery on their websites, highly focused content, and lots of highly engaging video, the experience is still very one-way, and can sometimes dissolve into generic product offerings and packages that may, or may not, meet customer needs and expectations. And those expectations are changing fast.
The purpose of tech is to advance the human experience, not the other way around, says Katrina Taylor, head of user experience and product design for fashion rental site Armoire.
When building a fashion site designed to recommend personalized styles for customers, Armoire knew it had to deliver a customized digital experience, but with a human touch. With the wide range of available machine learning and AI tech, brands can risk coming off as creepy by going too far with the details they use to build customer experiences. Armoire didn’t want to cross this line.
“We want machine learning to be more human, but then we’re freaked out when it is,” said Katrina Taylor, Armoire’s head of user experience and product design, during a presentation on machine learning and human empathy at DX Summit in Chicago this week.
A once high-flying startup has laid off 80% of its employees and its survival is in doubt following a botched rebrand involving a domain name change that reportedly caused it to lose 80% of its organic Google search traffic.
As detailed by BetaKit, six months ago, logo and brand identity platform Looka changed its name from LogoJoy as it embarked on an expansion beyond its AI-driven logo service. Dawson Whitfield, Looka’s co-founder and CEO, told BetaKit that his company anticipated a 20 to 30% drop in organic traffic as a result of the domain switch from logojoy.com to looka.com, with a three to six month recovery period.
Instead, Whitfield revealed that the company saw its organic traffic drop by a whopping 80%, a huge problem given that organic traffic had accounted for half of the company’s revenue.
The annual Gartner CMO Spend Survey isn’t just about marketing spending. While this survey digs into the budget and financial priorities of chief marketing officers (CMOs) across a range of industries and geographies, it does much more than that. The survey seeks to understand the capabilities that CMOs define as vital to the delivery of their strategies and how they define and measure success.
In the 2019-2020 CMO Spend Survey, CMOs were asked to rank the top three strategically important capabilities supporting the delivery of their strategy. The results in 2019 are perhaps not all that surprising – CMOs place marketing analytics in pole position, sharing first place with market research and competitive insights. Why is this not surprising? Gartner survey data and client interactions over some years have shown an increasing focus on customer-orientated strategies and data-driven marketing. In short, CMOs understand the value of data and analytics and insights, and this is evidenced in strategic commitment.
That’s according to a new report released by Borrell & Associates. In this latest report Borrell focuses on the amount of money that goes into the cost of producing and managing digital, before a dollar is even spent on advertising.
Businesses in the United States will spend $776 billion dollars in this category in 2019, according to the new report. The projection for 2020 is $808 billion.
Throughout the second half of the 2010s, “customer success” – both as a business concept and as a function – has steadily been growing in popularity.
Its origins can be traced back to some of the earliest software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies, and as the cloud computing revolution has steadily gained momentum, so too has customer success – to the extent that businesses of all kinds, not just SaaS companies, are jumping on the customer success bandwagon.
For anyone in advertising, fan obsession is the holy grail — when audiences not only seek out your work, but proudly share it as part of the pop-culture conversation.
Perhaps more than any other industry, entertainment campaigns achieve this level of brand love, with fans regularly tracking the release of advertising, passionately posting about, sharing, and deconstructing it online.
