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Google Analytics: A Job Search Game-Changer

Ever felt like finding the right data analytics job is like searching for a needle in a haystack? The solution might be closer than you think, lies in the power of Google Analytics. Harnessing this tool could be your secret weapon in securing a role that perfectly fits the data analyst job description you're after.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the demand for data analysts is expected to grow by a remarkable 16% from 2020 to 2028. This surge underscores the rising importance of professionals capable of making sense of raw data, transforming it into meaningful insights for business performance.

The path to landing that first data analyst job is often tricky, with many needing help comprehending the breadth of data analyst responsibilities and the intricacies of data analysis tools. Enter Google Analytics, a game-changer that's set to overhaul your job search strategy.

Let’s explore in this blog how Google Analytics can catapult your job search, understand the essence of the data analyst role, and demonstrate how proficiency in this powerful tool can set you apart in the highly competitive field of data analytics.

The Importance of Data in Job Search

Data has become a cornerstone of many aspects of life, and the job search process is no exception. The power of data analysis extends beyond traditional business analytics; it's also crucial in crafting an effective job hunt strategy.

In an era where detailed and structured online jobs offer flexibility and convenience, understanding the job market dynamics through the lens of data is paramount. It provides insights into emerging trends, popular roles, and sought-after skills in the realm of data analysts, market research analysts, and more.

Data-Driven Decision-Making: Your Key to Success

Data-driven decision-making is the secret weapon of many successful data analysts. The ability to collect, analyze data, and draw meaningful insights from various data sets can help identify patterns in job postings, understand a typical data analyst job description, and gauge the current demand for particular analytical skills or programming languages.

Leveraging Data in Your Job Search

Whether you're an experienced data analyst or seeking your first job, incorporating data analysis into your job search can be transformational. It's not just about understanding the data analyst role but also about grasping market trends and employer expectations.

Data can reveal the most in-demand skills or the technical expertise that employers seek, providing a more accurate picture of the data analytics job market. It can also help pinpoint the specific responsibilities and data systems commonly associated with data analyst jobs.

How Google Analytics Can Transform Job Search

Google Analytics is a potent tool not just for interpreting data but also for redefining your job search. This tool can provide an insider's view of market trends, highlight the most sought-after data analyst responsibilities, and guide you to roles that match your skill set perfectly.

Uncovering the specifics of a data analyst job description to predicting industry demands, Google Analytics has the potential to make your job hunt a breeze. Let's unpack how Google Analytics can revolutionize your search for the ideal data analyst role.

Tracking Website Traffic and User Engagement

Google Analytics power extends beyond your typical data analyst job description. Its ability to track website traffic and user engagement can be a game-changer in refining your job search strategy.

Understanding web traffic trends can reveal which companies are garnering attention, a hint towards those with growing data analyst job opportunities. This knowledge provides a targeted approach for job seekers in data analytics, guiding them toward promising organizations and industries.

User Engagement: Your Pulse on the Market

Gauging user engagement offers insights into what elements of a data analyst's job description draw the most interest. This information can help you better understand the specific data analyst responsibilities currently in high demand in the job market.

This in-depth guide is a fantastic resource for a detailed overview of strategies for setting up and measuring your digital campaigns using Google Analytics. It provides a comprehensive understanding of Google Analytics, which is equally applicable and advantageous in your job search journey.

Leveraging Google Analytics to monitor web traffic and user engagement can offer a wealth of data-driven insights to inform your job search. With this tool, you'll be better positioned to land a data analyst role that aligns perfectly with your career goals.

Analyzing Job Posting Effectiveness

Google Analytics can also be used to analyze the effectiveness of job postings, a crucial aspect overlooked in many data analyst job descriptions. This application of Google Analytics goes beyond business analytics, offering unique insights into the job market.

Monitoring job postings can quickly reveal which roles are being filled, indicating high demand for specific data analyst skills. Roles that remain open longer might require a more specialized skill set or hint at a less competitive area within data science.

Informing Your Application Strategy

This analysis can inform your application strategy, guiding you towards roles where your skills are in high demand and competition may be less fierce. It highlights areas where you could benefit from further professional development, such as learning new data analysis tools or mastering additional programming languages.

Google Analytics is not just about interpreting data; it’s also about transforming raw data into meaningful insights that can guide your decisions. A successful data analyst can harness this information to identify patterns, optimize statistical efficiency, and ultimately find their ideal job in the ever-evolving data analytics landscape.

Understanding Applicant Behavior

A standout feature of Google Analytics, often untapped by even experienced data analysts, is its capacity to understand applicant behavior. This could provide a strategic edge to those seeking data analyst roles.

Applicant behavior refers to the actions of job seekers—which jobs they click on, how long they spend reading various data analyst job descriptions, and the specific data analyst responsibilities they focus on. By examining these behaviors, you can gain insights into the competitiveness of different roles. Furthermore, applicant tracking platforms for hiring managers play a vital role in collecting and analyzing this data, providing valuable metrics and analytics that aid in optimizing the hiring process and attracting top-tier candidates.

Shaping Your Job Search Strategy

An understanding of applicant behavior can shape your job search strategy. For instance, roles that attract a high number of clicks may be more competitive, suggesting your application needs to stand out with unique data analyst skills or a master's degree in data science.

Roles with lower engagement may present less competition and a more incredible opportunity for you to shine. They could also point to niche areas within data analysis that require specialized skills and offer potential for professional development.

Understanding applicant behavior through Google Analytics allows you to analyze and interpret data, refining your job search strategy and bringing you closer to landing your ideal data analyst role.

Identifying Skill Gaps and Training Opportunities

Google Analytics can help identify skill gaps in your repertoire—those key competencies employers seek in data analysts but might need to be added to your current profile.

By comparing the data analyst skills most employers request with your abilities, you can discern where you might need additional training or professional development. It may be in mastering specific data analysis tools, learning new programming languages, or getting a handle on emerging statistical techniques.

Unearthing Training Opportunities

But it’s not just about spotting gaps. Google Analytics can also help you uncover opportunities for further learning. For example, observing trends in data analyst job descriptions might reveal a growing demand for knowledge of specific data models or an increasing emphasis on data visualization tools.

You can proactively seek relevant training or certification programs by keeping your finger on the pulse of industry trends—especially as a data analyst role working in a niche field such as the healthcare industry, commercial security system industry, computer security industry, or other specific careers as a data analyst. A commitment to continual learning enhances your skill set and makes you a more attractive candidate for your dream data analyst role. A successful data analyst is constantly evolving, and Google Analytics can be your guide on this journey.

Google Analytics Certification and Its Value in the Job Market

Acquiring a Google Analytics Certification is more than just an added line in your data analyst job description; it's a significant feather in your cap that speaks to your proficiency in data analysis and business analytics.

Google Analytics Certification showcases your ability to collect relevant data, analyze it for patterns, and create visualizations that convey meaningful insights. It solidifies your standing as a highly skilled data analyst, enhancing your marketability and increasing your chances of landing that coveted data analyst role.

A certified data analyst is competent, confident, and ready to handle complex business problems and interpret data for business performance optimization.

Demonstrating Data Analytics Skills

Possessing data analytics skills is one thing, but demonstrating them effectively is what sets a good data analyst apart.

Google Analytics provides:

An excellent platform for showcasing your abilities.
Highlighting your prowess in data collection.
Data analysis.
Translating complex data sets into easily digestible insights.

For instance, developing a portfolio that displays your skill at transforming raw data into visually engaging and meaningful reports can significantly enhance your job application. Your adeptness in utilizing data visualization tools to craft clear and impactful data narratives is a valuable asset that can set you apart from the competition.

Applying Theory to Real-World Scenarios

Beyond mastering statistical techniques, a successful data analyst can seamlessly translate theoretical knowledge into practical application. By providing examples of how you've leveraged data analysis to identify patterns, generate insights, and influence business decisions, you affirm your position as a competent practitioner in data analytics.

Demonstrating is more potent than telling. Google Analytics equips you with the means to present concrete examples of your work, effectively exhibiting your analytical skills and technical expertise and strengthening your candidacy for the desired data analyst role.

Enhancing Resume and LinkedIn Profile

Sprucing Up Your Resume

Given its ubiquitous use in data analysis and business analytics, Google Analytics becomes a valuable asset on your resume. Any data analyst job description you come across will likely mention proficiency in Google Analytics as a requirement if not a preference.

When including your Google Analytics certification in your resume, highlight the tasks you've mastered. You've shown how to efficiently transform raw data into compelling narratives or use data visualization tools to translate complex data sets into visually appealing insights.

These key highlights emphasize your technical expertise and practical data analysis understanding.

Maximizing Your LinkedIn Profile's Impact

LinkedIn serves as the digital face of your professional persona. In this vast sea of data analysts and data scientists, your Google Analytics certification can be the lighthouse that guides prospective employers to your shore.

But don't just stop at mentioning your certification. Exhibit your achievements that demonstrate your skills. Include a project where you successfully applied statistical techniques to analyze and interpret data meaningfully or a situation where you used data models to solve complex business problems.

By sharing real-world applications of your skills, you substantiate your understanding of the data analyst's job description and responsibilities. Possessing a Google Analytics certification and adeptly showcasing it in your resume and LinkedIn profile make you an appealing candidate in the competitive field of data analysis.

Gaining Competitive Advantage in Job Applications

The job market has become increasingly competitive, with data analyst positions growing in demand. Google Analytics certification can provide you with a decisive edge, setting you apart as a knowledgeable professional with the skills to interpret data effectively and contribute significantly to business performance.

Proof of Proficiency

Beyond mere words, this certification is tangible proof of your proficiency in data analysis. Your understanding of data models, experience with data analysis tools, and ability to analyze data are all validated by this coveted certification. It's not just another line in your data analyst job description; it's a testament to your technical expertise and analytical skills.

Enhancing Your Marketability

This certification enhances your marketability. Employers value candidates who demonstrate a commitment to continuous learning. By securing this certification, you exhibit a drive for professional development, increasing your appeal in the eyes of recruiters.

The Power of Networking

Becoming Google Analytics certified opens doors to a community of other certified professionals, offering networking opportunities that can be invaluable in your job search. Engaging with this community can lead to new opportunities, industry insights, and job offers.

Conclusion

Exploration of Google Analytics has shown its application goes beyond business performance tracking and extends to a powerful tool for job seekers in the data analytics field.

The strategic use of data can dramatically transform your job search, allowing for a more targeted, data-driven approach. Utilizing Google Analytics provides valuable insights into job postings' effectiveness and applicant behavior, facilitating data-driven improvements to enhance your search results.

Google Analytics presents a platform to showcase your data analyst skills, proving your ability to extract meaningful insights from data and utilize data visualization tools effectively. Coupled with a Google Analytics certification, this bolsters your resume and LinkedIn profile and gives you a significant competitive advantage in your job applications.

The value of Google Analytics extends to identifying skill gaps and training opportunities, thereby driving professional development. By utilizing its extensive resources, you can continuously improve your data analytics skills and maintain a competitive advantage in a dynamic industry.

Embracing Google Analytics is a game-changer in the job search journey. Seeking your first data analyst job or looking to advance your career, this tool can empower you to navigate the job market with greater precision and success.

How to Create a Social Media Budget for Your Business

In today’s digital landscape, social media plays a pivotal role in business growth. Yet, with the myriad of platforms and strategies available, determining where to invest your resources can be overwhelming. That’s where an effective social media budget steps in. More than just a financial roadmap, it’s a strategic tool that can boost your business by guiding your social media efforts towards your goals.

This article aims to simplify the process of creating a social media budget, walking you through the basics of budgeting, goal-setting, audience identification, platform selection, and budget allocation. So, whether you’re an established business owner or a startup founder, let’s delve into the journey of crafting a social media budget that works for you.

Understanding the Basics of Social Media Budgeting

Before we delve into how to create a social media budget, it’s crucial to understand what exactly a social media budget is. In simple terms, a social media budget is the portion of your marketing budget that you allocate towards social media related activities. These activities could include everything from creating and curating content, to social media advertising, to investing in tools that streamline your social media management, and of course, labor costs for those managing your social media presence.

The components of a social media budget can be broken down into four main categories:

Tools: This could include anything from social media management tools like Hootsuite or Buffer, to graphic design tools like Canva, or analytics tools that help you track your social media performance.
Advertising: Social media platforms often operate on a pay-to-play model, meaning you need to invest in ads to reach a wider audience. This could involve boosting posts, promoting your page, or creating targeted ad campaigns.
Content Creation: This includes costs associated with creating content for your social media platforms - everything from photography and video production, to graphic design and copywriting.
Labor: This encompasses the cost of hiring and training employees or contractors to manage your social media presence, create content, or run ad campaigns. It could also include the cost of outsourcing these tasks to an agency.

A comprehensive and well-structured social media budget ensures you’re not overspending in one area at the expense of another, and allows you to measure the return on investment (ROI) for your social media efforts, helping you make data-driven decisions for your business.

Identifying your Social Media Goals

Having clear goals is crucial because they dictate how your budget should be allocated, as different goals require different resources. Let’s examine some common social media goals:

Increasing Brand Awareness: If your goal is to expand your brand’s reach and visibility, you might need to allocate a larger portion of your budget to social media advertising. This could involve promoting your page or boosting your posts to reach a wider audience.
Generating Leads: If your aim is to use social media as a lead generation tool, investing in tools that help capture leads, like landing page builders or customer relationship management (CRM) systems, could be important. Additionally, you may need to put money into creating high-quality content that entices potential customers to share their information.
Driving Sales: If you want to use social media to drive sales, then you might want to budget for features like social commerce (selling directly through social media platforms), or paid advertising targeting customers who are ready to make a purchase.
Improving Customer Engagement: If your focus is on building a community or improving customer relationships, your budget should prioritize creating engaging content and possibly investing in social listening tools to monitor and respond to customer interactions.

These are just a few examples; the key takeaway is that your social media budget should align with your goals. By defining what you want to achieve, you can allocate your resources more effectively, ensuring that every dollar spent is contributing to your overarching business objectives.

Knowing Your Audience

Understanding your audience is a vital aspect of any marketing strategy, and social media is no exception. Knowing who your audience is will not only inform the type of content you create but also where you invest your social media budget.

You need to identify who your target audience is. What are their demographics? What are their interests? What challenges do they face that your product or service can solve? These questions will help you build a clear picture of who you’re trying to reach.

Also, you need to understand where your audience spends their time online. Different social media platforms appeal to different demographics. By understanding where your audience is, you can prioritize your budget for the platforms that are most likely to reach your target market.

Lankitha Wimalarathna, Founder and CEO of Hiveage, mentions: “You should understand how your audience interacts with social media. Do they respond well to videos, or do they prefer text-based posts? Do they engage with interactive content like polls or quizzes? This insight will help you allocate your budget towards the type of content that will engage your audience most effectively. Understanding your audience in these ways will ensure that your social media budget is being spent in the areas that are most likely to yield results.”

Determining Your Social Media Channels

Selecting the right social media channels for your business is critical and directly linked to your understanding of your target audience. Different platforms cater to different demographics and offer varied ways of content presentation and audience engagement.

Popular platforms include Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, Pinterest, and YouTube. Each platform has unique strengths. For instance, Instagram and TikTok are ideal for visually compelling content and younger demographics, while LinkedIn is perfect for B2B marketing and professional networking.

You don’t need to be on every platform; instead, focus on those that best align with your audience and business goals. Remember, it’s more effective to have a strong, targeted presence on a few key platforms than a weak, scattered presence across many.

Allocating Your Social Media Budget

Now that you’ve laid the groundwork by identifying your goals, audience, and platforms, it’s time to delve into the specifics of how to allocate your social media budget.

Start with a Total Figure: Identify what total amount you have available for social media. This might be a percentage of your overall marketing budget, or a figure determined by your business’s financial circumstances.
Break Down by Platform: Based on where your audience is, allocate a percentage of your budget to each platform. It’s wise to start with one or two primary platforms and allocate about 60-70% of your budget there, using the remaining for secondary platforms.
Allocate Funds to Key Areas: On each platform, consider what your major costs will be. This could be content creation, ads, or labor. Typically, businesses spend about 45-55% of their social media budget on content creation and promotion, 25-35% on tools and software, and 20-30% on labor and outsourcing.
Keep a Contingency Amount: Reserve about 10% of your budget for unforeseen opportunities, like a trending hashtag in your industry, or unexpected costs.
Consider Seasonality and Key Business Periods: If you have times in the year when your audience is more engaged or more likely to buy, allocate more budget in these periods.
Review and Adjust Regularly: A budget is a dynamic tool, not a static document. Monitor your performance and adjust your budget allocations as needed. If one platform is outperforming another, or one type of content is yielding more results, redirect funds as necessary.

Remember, creating a social media budget isn’t a one-size-fits-all process. It requires regular refinement and adjustment, but with time and experience, it can become one of your most effective tools for social media success.

Conclusion

Creating a social media budget for your business is a strategic exercise that encompasses defining your goals, understanding your audience, selecting the right platforms, and then allocating your budget wisely across various elements.

While the process may seem complex, remember that it’s a dynamic and flexible tool. Regular monitoring and adjustments based on performance and changing trends are integral to ensure that every dollar spent contributes to achieving your business objectives.

With the right approach, your social media budget can become a powerful ally in amplifying your brand, engaging your audience, and driving your business growth. Start planning today and open the doors to a world of social media opportunities.

Meg Madden: Connecting People and Transforming Marketing Strategies

In the digital marketing world, successful leaders possess a unique combination of strategic thinking, technical expertise, and a talent for connecting people. One such individual is Meg Madden, the Vice President of Products at Marin Software. With her vast experience and remarkable achievements, Madden has established herself as a trailblazer in the industry. In this article, we delve into Madden's professional journey, her accomplishments, and the values she holds dear.

A Journey of Growth:

Meg Madden's professional journey can be traced back to June, 2012 when she joined Marin Software, a leading provider of digital marketing solutions. Her tenure began as an Online Marketing Manager, where she excelled in activating social strategies for notable companies such as General Motors and PayPal. While working in the Austin office, Madden was instrumental in fostering team growth and spearheading global strategies for paid strategies, including collaborations with AT&T.

As a Pod Leader for the Austin team, Madden showcased her leadership skills by managing independent network agencies and overseeing account directors and customer managers. She also played a crucial role in breaking down silos within teams, facilitating cross-channel and cross-regional collaboration. Her efforts resulted in forming the Global Customer Engagement Team, further strengthening Marin Software's customer-centric approach.

Professional and Educational Background:

Before joining Marin Software, Meg Madden pursued an MBA at Yukon, where she honed her skills in business management. Prior to that, she served as a Social Media Manager for Quickluck, showcasing her expertise in leveraging social media platforms to drive brand engagement. Madden's educational journey began at Yale, where she earned a BA in American Studies, providing her with a solid foundation in understanding consumer behavior and cultural dynamics.

Beyond the Office:

Meg Madden's story is not just defined by her professional accomplishments. Growing up on the border of Texas and Mexico in Harlingen, TX, she was exposed to a multicultural upbringing. This experience instilled in her a deep appreciation for diversity and a strong sense of community. Madden's formative years were marked by active involvement in various activities, from playing softball and participating in color guard to volunteering at the Women's Crisis Center.

Even today, Madden continues to impact others' lives through her volunteer work positively. She regularly guest lectures at Stanford Business School, sharing her industry insights and experiences with aspiring business professionals. Additionally, she remains active in her church group, contributing to the children's ministry and participating in activities at the cowboy church located on the rodeo grounds.

Meg Madden's personal life revolves around her family. She is a proud mother to three children, aged 8, 6, and 3, comprising two boys and a girl. Her husband has taken on the role of a stay-at-home dad, allowing Madden to focus on her professional endeavors while balancing her responsibilities at home. Madden believes that being a mother is the most challenging yet rewarding role she plays, finding solace in her rural lifestyle on a farm, complete with chickens and ducks.

Values and Inspirations:

When it comes to personal values, Madden emphasizes the importance of continuous learning. She believes that staying curious and open to new ideas is key to personal and professional growth. Additionally, she has always learned to assume positive intent, realizing that it took her some time to truly understand the impact of this mindset.

Madden's unwavering commitment to her team's growth is one of her proudest achievements. She takes immense satisfaction in witnessing the professional progress of individuals who have worked under her guidance. Many of these talented individuals have either moved on to new opportunities outside of Marin or have climbed the ladder within the organization itself.

Conclusion:

Meg Madden's journey from an Online Marketing Manager to Vice President of Products at Marin Software is a testament to her exceptional skills, dedication, and ability to connect people. Throughout her career, she has prioritized breaking down silos, fostering collaboration, and building customer-centric solutions.

Best Marketing Conferences to Attend in 2023-2024

It’s safe to say a lot has changed in the digital marketing space over the last year. We entered an AI renaissance, gained not one but two new social media platforms (hello Lemon8 and Threads), and while personalization is trending, third-party cookies are on their way out. For good.

Keeping up with the latest trends and best practices with so many drastic changes on the table can be tough, which is why we love marketing conferences. They condense wisdom, experience, and research from industry experts into keynote presentations and breakout sessions that help marketers regroup and re-evaluate their strategies according to top-tier insights.

Without further ado, here are the best marketing conferences to attend in 2023 and 2024:

DigiMarCon

Date: Multiple

Location: Multiple

Ideal for: Digital marketers, marketing managers, SEO specialists, and professionals interested in overall digital marketing strategies and trends.

DigiMarCon is a comprehensive digital marketing conference series that takes place in 40 cities across 18 countries (and one international cruise), making it arguably the largest digital marketing conference in the world.

Attendees can expect to learn about social media marketing, SEO, content marketing, data analytics, and customer experience via the event’s expert insights, best practices, real-world case studies, interactive workshops, panel discussions, and networking sessions.

MozCon

Date: August 7 & 8, 2023

Location: Seattle Convention Center Summit in Seattle, Washington (two livestream pass options available)

Ideal for: SEO specialists and digital marketers

MozCon is a hub for SEO enthusiasts. The conference features presentations from leading SEO experts. Attendees can expect the latest on search engine optimization and ranking strategies, complete with guidance on how to make data-driven marketing decisions and future-proof your business. This year’s conference is all about the future of search, with a special focus on ChatGPT, E-E-A-T, and TikTok.

Digital Summit

Date: August 16-17, 2023

Location: Minneapolis, Minnesota

Ideal for: All digital marketers

Digital Summit is a series of conferences held throughout the United States. The conferences cover digital marketing, content marketing, and social media topics. Dates and locations vary per conference. View the full schedule for 2023 here.

Digital Summit is also holding an online conference titled “Deep Dive into Social 2023” on September 7, 2023. The one-day virtual conference is jam-packed with a masterclass, breakout sessions, and how-tos with actionable resources.

2023 AMA Summer Academic Conference

Date: August 4-6, 2023

Location: San Francisco, CA

Ideal for: Digital marketers, business leaders, and content creators

The 2023 AMA Summer Academic Conference features research that highlights the role of marketing in the broader business ecosystem.

AMA is also holding virtual content marketing conferences on August 23-24 and October 18-19 of this year. Register for free to access this two-day conference packed with all the tools and strategies you need to build a compelling content strategy in 2023.

Inbound

Date: September 5-8, 2023

Location: Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, Boston, MA

Ideal for: Marketers, sales professionals, and business leaders

Inbound 2023 by HubSpot offers three curated agendas to help attendees maximize their experience– one for marketing, one for sales and business development, and one for growth acquisition marketing. The conference features inspiring keynote speakers, educational breakout sessions, networking opportunities, and hands-on workshops.

Digital Marketing World Forum Global

Date: September 14-15, 2023

Location: Miami, FL

Ideal for: Digital marketers, marketing managers, content creators, and professionals interested in the latest digital marketing trends and best practices.

The Digital Marketing World Forum Global is an international event series that explores the future of digital marketing technologies through keynote presentations and interactive sessions. The conference features the following content tracks:

Content and digital brand strategy
Data and insights
Digital experience and e-commerce strategy
Influencer marketing world
Social media and community marketing

AdExchanger's Programmatic I/O

Date: September 26-27, 2023

Location: Hilton Midtown, New York, NY

Ideal for: Programmatic, data-driven professionals from brands, marketing agencies, publishers, and technology companies.

AdExchanger's Programmatic I/O is a conference centered around advertising and ad tech. Attendees can look forward to educational discussions on programmatic buying, data-driven marketing, and the future of advertising technology.

MarTech (Marketing Technology Conference)

Date: September 26-27, 2023

Location: Online

Ideal for: Digital marketers and business leaders interested in MarTech.

If you’re interested in learning more about the intersection of marketing and technology, the MarTech conference will be right up your alley. Attendees will explore the latest tools, technologies, and techniques in marketing strategy, including advertising automation. It’s also completely free to register.

Content Marketing World

Date: September 26-28, 2023

Location: Washington, D.C.

Ideal for: Content marketers, writers, editors, and marketing managers

Content Marketing World is the place to go for all things content. Event attendees will learn the newest best practices for content marketing strategy, creation, distribution, and measurement.

LavaCon Content Strategy Conference

Date: October 14-17, 2023

Location: Manchester Grand Hyatt, San Diego, CA

Ideal for: Content strategists, content marketers, technical writers, and content creators

LavaCon covers all things content. Attendees can expect in-depth sessions on content planning, storytelling, content SEO, and best practices for delivering valuable content to target audiences. The conference also explores emerging content marketing trends like interactive content, visual storytelling, and AI.

Advertising Week New York

Date: October 16-19 2023

Location: New York, NY

Ideal for: Advertising professionals, brand marketers, media buyers, and marketing executives

Advertising Week New York hosts a hefty lineup of 12,000+ industry peers, 600+ speakers, 400+ sessions, and 20+ content tracks. The event unites the brightest minds in marketing, advertising, media, and tech. Attendees will learn from industry leaders, uncover new trends, and network with peers from all over the world. Virtual sessions are available online for 30 days post-event.

Social Media Strategies Summit

Date: October 25-27, 2023

Location: Online

Ideal for: Social media managers, content creators, digital marketers, and business owners interested in optimizing their social media presence and campaigns.

The Social Media Strategies Summit is a virtual conference designed to help senior-level social media marketers audit and revitalize their social media strategies to promote brand awareness and customer loyalty. Pre-summit workshops take place on October 25, 2023, and the General Summit will happen in the days that follow.

Attendees can expect keynote presentations, panel discussions, case studies, and interactive workshops on subjects like content creation, influencer marketing, community building, and social media advertising.

SMX (Search Marketing Expo)

Date: November 14-15, 2023

Location: Online

Ideal for: Search marketing professionals, SEO specialists, PPC managers, and digital marketers.

SMX is a conference on all things search engine marketing, both SEO and PPC. Attendees can expect in-depth sessions on search engine marketing with valuable insights into top advertising platforms.

Traffic & Conversion Summit

Date: January 9 - 11, 2024

Location: Caesars Forum, Las Vegas, NV

Ideal for: Digital marketers, growth hackers, and e-commerce pros

Known for its emphasis on digital advertising and conversion optimization, the Traffic and Conversion Summit teaches digital marketing strategies specifically designed to drive traffic and convert.

Expect sessions covering new traffic channels, customer-centric marketing, new conversion breakthroughs, and ultra-current breakout sessions.

Social Media Marketing World

Date: February 18-20, 2024

Location: San Diego, CA

Ideal for: social media marketers, content creators, community managers, and business owners

Social Media Marketing World features top-notch social media marketing strategies, expert-led sessions, case studies, and networking with fellow social media professionals. Attendees can expect to learn the latest on creating successful social media advertising campaigns.

LeadsCon

Date: April 8 – 10, 2024

Location: Paris Hotel & Casino, Las Vegas, NV

Ideal for: Lead generation specialists, digital marketers, sales professionals, and business development managers interested in improving their lead acquisition strategies

LeadsCon is a conference for marketers interested in improving their lead generation and customer acquisition strategies. The event bundles the latest trends, tools, and techniques for converting leads into expert-led sessions, case studies, and interactive workshops.

Los Angeles eCommerce Summit

Date: May 16, 2024

Location: JW Marriott LA LIVE, Los Angeles, CA

Ideal for: e-commerce marketers, online retailers, and digital marketing professionals in the e-commerce industry

The Los Angeles eCommerce Summit is a local gathering of LA’s top ecom experts and decision-makers. It focuses on e-commerce strategies, digital advertising, user experience, and customer retention for online retailers. Attendees can expect to hear industry experts share insights into website optimization, digital advertising campaign implementation, and data analytics.

Gartner Marketing Symposium/Xpo

Date: June 3-5, 2024

Location: Denver, CO

Ideal for: Marketing leaders, CMOs, marketing strategists, and professionals responsible for marketing technology decisions and customer experience optimization

The Gartner Marketing Symposium/Xpo features new research and actionable insights on topics like AI, marketing strategy, multichannel marketing, and brand strategy. Attendees can expect keynotes from Gartner analysts, expert-led sessions, workshops, and networking opportunities.

Gartner Data & Analytics Summit

Date: March 11-13, 2024

Location: Orlando, FL

Ideal for: Data analysts, marketing analysts, data-driven marketers, and marketing strategists

The Gartner Data and Analytics Summit is a conference tailored to challenges faced by data and analytics professionals. It covers topics like data management, predictive analytics, customer segmentation, and data visualization. Attendees will learn from Gartner analysts, industry leaders, and case studies. The most recent summit prioritized the following topics:

Delivering digital business success
Attracting the right talent and skills
Dispel the myths of AI
Understanding data ecosystems
Optimizing intelligent decisions with competitive differentiators

Wrapping up

The marketing conferences above are great opportunities for learning and networking, but they aren’t the only way to learn about new advertising technologies. MarinOne’s experts can help you supercharge your paid search, social, and e-commerce advertising efforts. Book a personalized demo to get started.

Maximizing Revenue Potential with Mobile Advertising and App Advertising

Many of the tasks that used to be done on a desktop have become just as easy on a phone. Shopping, as an example, is accessible the second a consumer thinks of something they want or need to buy. They can look it up on their smartphone, check out without even needing to grab a physical credit card, and have the peace of mind that the item will be delivered to them within just a few days.

Over the past several years, we have seen more and more consumers make purchases right from their phones, and e-comm businesses are responding with company apps, an influx in SMS marketing, and various promotional initiatives associated with a mobile-first consumer experience. Because of this, mobile advertising and app advertising are a must in many industries if you want to maximize revenue potential.

Tips for Creating a Great Mobile Experience

Creating a mobile ad will be different than creating a desktop ad. Here's what you need to know to start an impactful and effective mobile ad strategy:

Design Your UX to be Touch Screen Friendly

Mobile users have different patterns and utilize other features than desktop users. Touch screens are a big part of this user experience as a touch screen inherently creates a different way of navigating your site, such as zooming in or swiping side to side.

Some ways to do this effectively include:

Placing primary content and actions in the center of the screen, using the edges for secondary activities and tabs, and incorporating tertiary functions behind menus.
Consider how the user interacts with their device and what is on the screen as a part of that device, such as the grip of their hands, what fingers they use to complete various tasks, and the context of your website, app, or advertisement within the greater UI. An Apple user may have different needs than an Android user. The size of a tablet could change how prominent your design features need to be.
When in doubt, remember that recent studies have shown users predominantly touch the center of the screen and use their devices in various ways, challenging the assumption of the "Thumb Zone" designers once had. All these nuances will change how the user interacts with your brand and will have a powerful subliminal effect on how that individual perceives your brand.

Make Creative and Visually Engaging Mobile Ads

Mobile advertisements have a lot of potential to showcase your company creatively. There is a lot of opportunity to show off products and services. Here are a few ways you can ensure the design of your ads is as impactful to potential customers as possible:

Size matters: Any images will need to be sized correctly, and they will need to be of high quality to draw your audience’s attention.
Keep it short and sweet: Attention spans can be short, so you must catch the consumer's attention within seconds. Knowledge of your ideal customer persona is crucial. Know what your customer will like about the product and immediately showcase that feature. Or, if it is a video ad, add a hook at the beginning of your message to draw immediate attention.
Stay on top of trends: You can even use current trends and use that to come off as organic entertainment. Just ensure the message clearly and accurately represents what your company is all about while employing a catchy trend.
Use every design or content tool you have at your disposal: There is a huge opportunity in both mobile and in-app advertising to push the envelope in creativity. The best marketers are doing this by leveraging augmented reality (AR) to create immersive experiences, using creative GIF animations to boost engagement, incorporating location data for personalized targeting, and employing personalized messaging for effective communication.

Diversify Your Advertising Placements to More than one Platform

To effectively advertise on mobile, it's crucial to understand the different types of mobile ads, such as app ads, social media ads, mobile banner ads, in-app display ads, interstitial ads, SMS ads, native ads, video ads, and audio ads.

Mobile ads on platforms like Spotify, TikTok, Facebook Stories, and Instagram Stories have proven effective in reaching and engaging audiences. Implementing interactive mobile ads and utilizing formats like Facebook Collections ads can also boost user engagement. Next, we'll dive more into mobile and app advertising specifics on each social media platform.

Paid Social for Mobile

Social media has become a popular pastime for adults, with growing numbers of daily users. This presents a valuable advertising opportunity, allowing you to reach large audiences, increase visibility, and engage with users through your social media presence. Look at some of the complexities that go into each social media platform's available advertising placements.

Instagram story ad

This is a great example of creating an ad that goes along with the patterns of smartphone users. If a user clicks through stories and your ad comes up, they will most likely pay attention to it since they anticipate something new with each click. Some ways to make a great story ad include: maximizing fullscreen usage, highlighting your call-to-action, incorporating text overlays, using audio enhancements, making your ads interactive, consistently branding your ads, and incorporating motion.

Snapchat ad and filter

Snapchat ads are a great way to introduce your organization to a new audience. Snapchat may have different users than other platforms, which is beneficial for retargeting. You can also have your own filter showcasing your brand or product. Many users look through filters to find new or creative ones, and if they choose to use them, they create more reach when they share their image paired with the filter on their personal profile.

Recently Snapchat has introduced a set of instructions for devising potent Snap Ad campaigns to assist businesses in connecting with its 375 million daily users, primarily composed of Gen Z and millennials. Essential advertising principles the company highlighted involve prominently displaying products, adopting a sound-on design, and employing goal-oriented bidding. In reaction to Apple's iOS 14 update, Snapchat suggests widening targeting scopes, underlining the importance of suitable content for the most valuable leads.

YouTube ad

YouTube has a large audience reach, and people use YouTube for many different reasons. Video ads can help you connect with your audience as you show more about your brand. There are also options for retargeting.

The best strategies to creating an effective Youtube ad are: surprising the viewer with unexpected content; improving on competitors' ad concepts; continuously testing and adjusting content; using storytelling to draw in viewers; incorporating user-generated content; emphasizing the benefits of the product or service being advertised; and optimizing content for different viewing devices.

Facebook story ad

Like any other story ad, you can increase reach significantly with Facebook story ads. This type of story ad will take up most of the smartphone screen, just like Instagram. By creating an immersive experience, the goal is that your content will captivate the audience's attention.

Creating story content is quite straightforward, involving choosing the type of content, customizing it, adding custom links and buttons, and sharing it. Businesses can further optimize their use of Facebook Stories by creating exciting, time-sensitive content, making it interactive and actionable, sharing third-party content, and regularly tracking performance to polish their strategy.

Website display ad

For this ad type, you will want a high-quality, interesting image to draw in your audience. You can create custom audiences by using pixels and tags to target the same people across different platforms.

Keep the design simple and instantly readable, use buttons wisely, and ensure a clearly defined frame for your ad. Animations can improve performance, but they should not distract from your message. While your ad should complement the website it is on, it still needs to be distinctive. Consistency with your brand is crucial, as is instilling a sense of urgency. Images, if used, should be directly related to your product, and the colors chosen should evoke the right emotions in your audience. Keep the file sizes small for faster loading and use appropriate formats such as JPG, PNG, GIF, or HTML5.

Twitter ad

You can grow a larger audience on Twitter by promoting your tweets. This should boost your followers, and then these users will continue to see your organization's tweets over time.

To effectively use Twitter Ads, it's essential to follow five critical steps. First, research your competitors to understand which strategies have been successful for them, and take note of the types of offers that generate the most engagement. Second, gather social proof by initially advertising to less expensive audiences to increase engagement before targeting your primary audience. Third, use A/B testing or split testing to determine which elements of your ad perform best, testing one variable at a time. Fourth, avoid including hashtags or mentions in your promoted tweets to ensure your call to action remains the only clickable element. Lastly, create a specific target segment for mobile users, as they comprise about 80% of Twitter's monthly active users. Remember, the goal is to create ads that attract attention and encourage user interaction.

App Advertising Placements

Apple Search Ads

Apple Search Ads (ASA), first introduced in 2016, have recently expanded significantly. The new ASA inventory includes two additional placements: the Today tab and the bottom of individual app product pages. The Today tab is the landing page for users upon opening the App Store, and the new ad placement allows developers to promote their apps alongside daily editorial content. The guidelines for these ads are comprehensive, including a limitation on promotional messaging to 50 characters or three lines of text. Also, the ads must use app screenshots as their main feature. These new placements are expected to increase exposure due to their visibility and broad reach.

The second new ad placement is located directly within the product pages of individual apps, appearing under the “You Might Also Like” section. This provides developers the opportunity to place ads on the pages of other apps. Unlike the Today tab ads, these do not require a custom product page for ad creatives; they are created using the assets already uploaded on the App Store product page. However, due to their location at the bottom of the page and considering that many users download apps directly from search results without visiting product pages, the impact of these ads might be less than those on the Today tab.

Google's Universal App Campaigns

Universal App Campaigns (UAC) is an automated ad type offered by Google Ads, providing an efficient way to advertise mobile apps across Google's extensive ad networks, including search, display, YouTube, and the Google Play Store. UACs utilize machine learning to showcase the most relevant and high-performing ads to users, driving conversions and app installs. The ad campaigns are generated using supplied text lines, images, videos, or HTML5 assets, and over time, the best-performing combinations are identified and displayed to users. UAC ads can run across different Google properties such as Google Search, Google Play, YouTube, and the Google Display Network, as well as on both iOS and Android devices.

Creating a UAC requires manual inputs, including a daily budget, a target cost-per-install (CPI) or cost-per-action (CPA), target location and languages, and up to four text lines. Further, optional media assets can be added to aid in the creation of the ad. When setting up a UAC, selecting the right campaign objective is crucial: "Install Volume" for attracting new users and "In-App Actions" for users likely to complete actions within the app. Google suggests different budget strategies depending on the chosen goal. Finally, setting up UAC involves selecting a device type, adding text ideas, setting location and language targets, defining the campaign goal, budget, and bid amount, and establishing a campaign run date.

Test ads across multiple platforms and determine what works best for your marketing strategy. Advertising across multiple platforms can help increase brand awareness. As mobile devices have become more needed for day-to-day routines, it has created a great opportunity for phone ads. Mobile advertising and app advertising strategies have made it easier for marketers to make ads more personalized for consumers. It can give consumers insight on the brand and what they have to uniquely offer.

To optimize your mobile and app advertising strategy, start working with a MarinOne expert today.

The Evolution of Native Advertising

Modern consumers are becoming increasingly adept at tuning out aggressive, disruptive advertising. This has led digital marketers to seek new and creative ways to engage their target audience. Amongst the most promising of these emerging strategies is native advertising—a format that seamlessly blends into the user's natural viewing experience.

But native advertising isn't some shiny, brand-spanking-new strategy cooked up in a digital marketing laboratory. In fact, it has a long and colorful history – one that spans decades and crosses a range of different platforms, mediums, and industries.

From the days when people relied on black-and-white newspapers for their daily fix of information, to the golden age of radio when catchy jingles ruled the airwaves, all the way up to the digital dominion we now inhabit, native advertising has always been around, transforming and adapting with each passing epoch.

In this blog, we'll first take a journey through time to explore the rich history of native advertising and how it has continuously adapted to the demands of each era. Following that, we'll examine the current state of native advertising and discuss a few of the techniques that publishers and brands are using in a bid to make their native ads as successful and effective as possible.

So, without further ado, let's start at the very beginning of the native advertising story.

A Brief History of Native Advertising

As the wheels of time turned and advertising evolved, native ads took on various forms, captivating audiences across different mediums. Let's take a journey through the evolutionary tapestry of native ads:

Advent of Advertorials

The roots of native ads can be traced all the way back to the early 1900s when advertorials – ads that masquerade as editorial content – first began appearing in print magazines. Advertorials were a clever concoction of marketing and journalism, allowing advertisers to promote their products or services in the guise of an informative article.

Cadillac's 1915 advertorial in The Saturday Evening Post was a shining example of this format. Created by Theodore F. MacManus, the ad was an impassioned ode to the spirit of progress and advancement, with nary a mention of Cadillac or even the automotive industry. The only giveaway that it was an advertisement was the subtle logo placed in the corner. But despite its lack of overt branding, the ad was deemed radical for its time – and even today, advertising professionals consistently hail it as one of the best ads ever created.

Radio Revolution

In the roaring 1920s and 1930s, a time when radio and TV ruled the infotainment sphere, native advertising began to take a more audible shape. Businesses would regularly fund radio programs to propagate their marketing message.

A momentous event in this advertising revolution was the debut of the renowned "Eveready Hour" in 1923. This groundbreaking radio program, sponsored by the National Carbon Company, swept the airwaves via the illustrious WEAF radio station in New York. Beyond captivating the audience with its selection of entertainment, the program also weaved in advertisements for the company's prized Eveready Batteries into its segments.

Television Takes the Stage

As television emerged as the dominant medium in the mid-20th century, native advertising followed suit, adapting to the visual storytelling potential of the small screen. Early adopters of this brave new world of television advertising included multinational consumer goods company, Procter & Gamble.

P&G's pioneering strategy involved underwriting a slew of drama series, such as 'The Guiding Light,' in exchange for subtle product placements of their soaps and detergents, hence coining the term "soap operas." Families gathered around their televisions, eagerly following the trials and tribulations of their favorite characters, in the process, absorbing the sponsored messages seamlessly woven into the storylines.

Infomercial Madness

The 80s were a pivotal moment in the history of native advertising. This was when the iconic infomercial– an advertisement structured as a program – first made its debut. Late-night television became a breeding ground for enthusiastic hosts and pitchmen hawking everything from kitchen gadgets to exercise equipment in an entertaining, educational format.

Leading the charge was Soloflex, the first-ever company to air an infomercial. The ad revolved around a common scenario – how to get in shape without joining an expensive gym. The infomercial was a tremendous success, thus giving birth to a wave of "as seen on TV" products.

Native Advertising in the Digital Age

When native advertising stepped into the digital age, it took on a whole new level of sophistication and relevancy. Although the basic premise of native advertising remained the same, digital media opened up a multitude of possibilities for brands to enlist in their quest to reach potential customers. Some of the biggest developments in native advertising's digital evolution include:

Paid Search

The rise of search engines in the early 2000s ushered in a new era of native advertising, as brands capitalized on Google's sponsored ad slots to promote their products and services. This gave birth to the concept of contextual targeting, allowing advertisers to reach out to users based on their interests and search queries.

Branded Content And Sponsored Articles

The proliferation of digital publishing in the 2010s led to the emergence of sponsored content, as brands began partnering with publishers to produce articles and videos in sync with the native content of their favorite websites. Digital media powerhouses such as BuzzFeed and Mashable, for instance, have made sponsored content an integral part of their business models.

One of BuzzFeed's most iconic examples is their "11 Reasons Why The Year 2000 Was The Best" article, which was sponsored by Tic Tac and featured a vote for the company's next flavor at the end. This article perfectly encapsulates how Buzzfeed and its brand partners have managed to meld sponsored content with their regular posts, creating an immersive native advertising experience for the reader.

Traditional publications like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have also recognized the potential of sponsored content, catering to advertisers by crafting specially-branded articles and videos for their readers. This move further solidifies native advertising's position as a mainstream advertising medium, as even the most venerated news sources join in on the fun.

Programmatic Native Advertising

Sharpening the targeting abilities of native ads even further is programmatic advertising, which uses algorithms to automate the process of buying and selling ads. This has allowed marketers to personalize native ads based on the user's browsing pattern, resulting in higher engagement and better ROI. Programmatic native ads have also enabled brands to target a much wider audience, making their content more effective and relevant at scale.

Video Ads

Video is the next big frontier in native advertising. Viewership of digital video content has grown exponentially over the past few years, and wise brands are already capitalizing on this trend through native video ads.

In fact, a survey by eMarketer revealed that in 2022, native video advertising accounted for a whopping 56% of all digital video ad spending in the United States. Furthermore, projections indicate that native display spending will experience a robust 12% year-over-year growth in 2023.

The power of native video ads lies in their ability to captivate viewers with compelling content while keeping them engaged with their interactive nature. Just take a look at Taco Bell's "Belluminati" campaign—an ingenious example of a native video ad that used humor and a conspiracy-theory narrative to promote its new $1 menu items.

Techniques for Native Advertising Success

A study conducted by Kantar and Taboola reveals that the inclusion of native advertising in the marketing mix led to a 25% increase in brand awareness. But as digital native advertising matures, getting your ads seen and acted upon is becoming harder and harder. Here are some of the key tactics that you can use to make sure your native ad campaigns hit the mark:

Research, Research, Research

A fleshed-out understanding of your target audience is the first step in executing a successful native ad campaign. Knowing who your target audience is and what they like allows you to craft an advertisement that resonates with the viewers, increasing the chances of them taking action.

Once you've identified your audience, you can start getting familiar with the platforms that will host your ad. Each platform comes with its own nuances and restrictions, so it pays to do your research beforehand.

Be Authentic

Your ad should be engaging, approachable, and interesting – but above all, it should be authentic and relevant. If your ad looks too much like a blatant sales pitch than an exciting read, it will turn the viewers off.

People want to be informed and entertained – not sold to. So, focus on creating an ad that's helpful and educational. Frame your message in a way that adds value to the viewer's experience, and ensure that the ad fits in seamlessly with the content of its hosting platform.

Measure Your Success

It's not enough to simply create an ad and put it out there. Just like how your employees need regular performance evaluations to know if they're doing well, your native ad campaigns also demand frequent audits to ascertain their success.

Continually analyze metrics such as engagement, CTR (Click Through Rate), CPC (Cost Per Click), and CPA (Cost Per Acquisition). These metrics will indicate how well your ads are performing and how effective they are at driving conversions. Then, refine and optimize your campaigns based on the insights gathered from these evaluations.

Leverage Digital Tools

The digital advertising toolkit is brimming with powerful resources that can give your native ad campaigns a much-needed boost. Some note-worthy tools include:

Workflow Automation. These tools empower you to automate repetitive tasks, optimize collaboration between team members, and ensure seamless project management. All you have to do is find an automation system that integrates with your current tech stack. Additionally, prioritize tools with a low learning curve or, even better, ones that offer a low-code or no-code config, making them accessible to users with varying technical backgrounds.
File Management Systems. File managers play a crucial role in preventing the organizational chaos that can arise when dealing with creative assets and collaboration documents, especially when working with large teams. Proper file management systems allow you to share documents in real-time and ensure everyone is working off the same page. Most filing tools also provide granular permissions control, making it easy to protect sensitive information.
Ad Management Software. With a full-suite ad management tool like MarinOne, you can optimize the delivery and performance of your ads in real time. Comprehensive solutions like ours reduce the need for manual interventions while providing end-to-end visibility into your ad campaigns. Advertising automation tools allow you manage budgets, bids, and placements and help you pull reports to analyze the performance of your ads, all in one place.

Future of Native Advertising

Native advertising in the digital age is only going to get more sophisticated. As machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) continue to evolve, marketers will be able to leverage these technologies to create more contextual and intelligent native ad experiences. It’s also likely that native will continue to expand beyond the current platforms, with more interactive and personalized formats appearing over the next few years.

No matter what the future holds for native advertising, one thing is certain: the adaptability and scalability of native ads will keep them at the forefront of digital marketing for years to come. So, if you haven't hopped on the native ad bandwagon yet, now is the perfect time to do so. Embrace native ads and make them an integral component of your overall marketing strategy.

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Yoshiro Kichiro is a guest contributor to the Marin Software blog.

Step-by-Step Tutorial: How To Find Keywords In Google Analytics for Your Website

Are you struggling to find the right keywords to optimize your website's content? Do you want to improve your search engine ranking by discovering the most relevant and effective keywords?

With the help of Google Analytics, you can gain valuable insights into the keywords that are already driving traffic to your website. By analyzing this data, you can optimize your content and target new keywords to attract even more visitors.

In this post, we'll guide you through the process of finding keywords in Google Analytics. Our step-by-step instructions will help you identify the most effective keywords to boost your website's SEO strategy.

So, if you want to improve your website's search engine ranking, keep reading to learn how to find keywords in Google Analytics and optimize your content for success.

How to Find Keywords in Google Analytics: Step-by-Step Tutorial

In Google Analytics, you cannot directly find specific keyword information within the platform itself. Due to privacy reasons, Google Analytics does not provide keyword data. However, you can gain valuable insights about the keywords driving traffic to your website by utilizing integration with Google Search Console.

How to Connect Google Search Console with Google Analytics

To connect Google Search Console with Google Analytics, follow these detailed instructions:

1. Access Google Analytics: Open your web browser and go to the Google Analytics website (https://analytics.google.com). Sign in with your Google account credentials.

2. Navigate to Admin Settings: In the bottom-left corner of the page, click on the "Admin" option. This will take you to Admin Settings.

3. In the "Property" column, click on "Search Console Links" at the bottom of the list. Then click on the "Link" button to link Google Search Console to GA4.

4. Click on the "Choose Accounts" button. You will see a list of websites that you have verified in the Google Search Console

Select your property in Google Analytics

5. Select the data stream that is used to collect data for the website and click "Submit". Click "Next" to proceed.

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Confirm your website in Google Analytics

6. Select the data stream that is used to collect data for the website. If you have multiple data streams, ensure that you choose the one associated with the same website you are linking from Google Search Console. Hover over the stream and click "Select." Click "Next" to continue.

7. Review the details to ensure that you have selected the correct property from Search Console and the corresponding data stream. Then click "Submit" to finalize the linking process.

Note that it may take up to 48 hours before you start seeing data from Google Search Console in your Google Analytics reports.

Close the linking dialogue and navigate to the "Reports" section in Google Analytics. Select "Acquisition" and then "Acquisition Overview" from the menu. Scroll down to the bottom of the report, and you will notice two new cards added: "Google Organic Search Traffic" and "Google Organic Search Queries." These cards provide insights into your website's performance in organic search results on Google.

You can click on the links within each card to access dedicated reports for landing pages, organic impressions, search queries, and click-through data.

How to Customize the Reporting Menu in Google Analytics and Find Your Keywords

Additionally, you can customize the reporting menu by accessing the "Library" section in Google Analytics. There, you can locate the new "Search Console" collection and publish it to make the Search Console reports readily accessible from the main reporting menu.

Here’s how to customize the reporting menu in Google Analytics and publish the new "Search Console" collection:

In the "Library" section, you will find a new collection named "Search Console" that is not published yet. Click on “Edit collection” to edit it.

Edit Google Search Console collection in Google Analytics's library

Inside the "Search Console" collection, click the "Save" button to save the changes you made.

Now, navigate back to the main reporting menu by clicking on the "Reports" link in the left-hand menu. In the reporting menu, click on the three vertical dots (more options) located at the top right corner of the page.

From the dropdown menu, select "Publish" to make the Search Console reports accessible in your GA4 property.

Publish your Google Search Console collection

If you encounter any issues during the publishing process, wait for a few minutes and then refresh the page. This step can resolve any potential problems. Once the reports are published, you will see the Search Console reports available in the main reporting menu of your GA4 property. Now you can easily access your website's top-performing keywords right in Google Analytics.

Exploring Other Options: Alternative Tools for Keyword Research

While Google Analytics is a popular choice for tracking website metrics, there are several smooth alternatives available specifically designed for finding keywords and gaining valuable insights. These alternatives offer unique features and functionalities to help optimize your content and improve your organic search performance. Consider the following alternatives:

Google Site Kit

One option is to use Google Site Kit. This is a free plugin for WordPress that allows you to connect your website to various Google services, including Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google Ads. Once you have installed the plugin and connected it to your Google account, you can view your site's keyword data directly within your WordPress dashboard.

This includes information such as the keywords driving traffic to your site, the page ranking for those keywords, and how your site is performing in search results. Google Site Kit also provides insights into other areas of your site's performance, such as page speed and mobile usability.

See your keywords with the help of Google Site Kit

Google Search Console

This is a free tool provided by Google that allows you to monitor your site's performance in search results. Once you have verified ownership of your site, you can view data such as the keywords that are driving traffic to your site, the pages that are ranking for those keywords, and how your site is performing in search results.

You can also use Google Search Console to submit sitemaps, monitor crawl errors, and view other data related to your site's performance in search results.

Third-party Keyword Research Software

There are many third-party tools available that allow you to research keywords and analyze your site's performance. Some popular options include Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Moz. These tools allow you to research keywords that are relevant to your site and your target audience, and provide insights into how your site is performing in search results.

They also offer features such as competitor analysis, backlink analysis, and site auditing, which can help you improve your site's performance and visibility in search results.

Here is an example of how you can use SEMrush to view your site’s ranking keywords:

1. Log in to your SEMrush account. Click on the "Domain Overview". Enter your domain name in the search bar and click "Search".

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2. Scroll down to the "Organic Search Traffic " section and click on the number that indicates the number of keywords you’re ranking.

3. In the "Organic Search Traffic" report, you will see a list of all the keywords that your website is ranking for in search results. You can then sort the list by different metrics such as search volume, position, and traffic percentage by clicking on the relevant column header. You can also filter the list by various parameters such as keyword difficulty, search volume, and position by using the filters at the top of the page.

How to Use Keyword Data to Improve Your Website

Google Analytics provides valuable keyword data that can help you improve your website's performance. By analyzing this data, you can optimize your existing content, create new content, and improve website navigation and user experience.

Optimize existing content

By using keyword data, you can easily identify which pages on your website are performing well and which ones need improvement. Once you've determined which pages require optimization, you can take several steps to improve their performance.

One way to optimize your pages is by adding relevant keywords to your content. Tools such as Page Optimizer Pro can help you identify which keywords to use and how to use them effectively. You can also improve the page's structure and update the existing content to make it more engaging and up-to-date, which can help attract more traffic to your website and improve your website's overall performance.

Optimizing your existing content not only improves its relevance to your target audience but also increases its visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). This means that your website will rank higher in search engine results, making it more likely that people will find your website and engage with your content.

Tip: If you want to see faster results after updating content, consider republishing the article and submitting it to Search Console. By doing this, you can signal to search engines that your content has been updated and is worth revisiting.

Create new content

Keyword data can also help you identify high-performing keywords and create content around those topics to complete the topic cluster.

For instance, suppose you run an online store that sells fitness equipment, and you notice that the keyword "best home gym equipment" is driving a lot of traffic to your website. In that case, you can create more blog posts or landing pages that target that keyword. You could create a blog post that provides a detailed review of the best home gym equipment available on the market, or you could create a landing page that showcases your store's selection of home gym equipment.

By creating more content around high-performing keywords, you can attract more traffic to your website and increase engagement with your audience. This can also help you establish your website as an authority in your industry, which can help generate more leads and revenue.

Improve website navigation and user experience

Keyword data can also help you improve the navigation and user experience of your website. By analyzing the keywords that people are using to find your website, you can identify areas where your website may be confusing or difficult to navigate.

For example, if you notice that people are using certain keywords to find a specific page on your website, but they're not finding it easily, you can improve the page's navigation to make it more user-friendly. This can help reduce bounce rates and improve the overall user experience of your website.

Conclusion

Knowing how to find keywords in Google Analytics is crucial for understanding your website's traffic and enhancing your SEO performance. By using the methods outlined in this article, you can gain valuable insights into which keywords are driving traffic to your website, and which ones you may need to focus on optimizing.

Keep in mind that keyword rankings can fluctuate over time, so it's important to regularly monitor and analyze your website's keyword performance. By doing so, you can make informed decisions about your SEO strategy and make adjustments as needed.

And don't forget to use a variety of tools and resources to supplement your keyword research. Google Site Kit and other third-party keyword research tools can provide additional insights into your website's keyword performance and help you identify new opportunities for optimization.

Overall, by taking a comprehensive approach to keyword research and analysis, you can improve your digital marketing strategy and drive more traffic to your site.

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Millie Pham is a guest contributor to Marin Software.

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Use Email Automation to Streamline Customer Journey Mapping

Email automation is the way to go in 2023. But don’t just take our word for it. Take Hubspot’s. They say that 71% of B2B marketers use it to grow their business. And they are not alone. Statistica says that by 2025, there will be 4.6 billion people using email. That means a lot of opportunities for you to connect with your audience. You can also use automation to deliver your messages at the right time, increase conversions, analyze their behavior, and optimize the customer journey across different channels and touchpoints.

In this blog, we will show you how email automation can help you align your email campaigns with your customer journey-mapping strategies and how that can lead to more trust, loyalty and action from your customers.

What is Email Automation?

Email automation is like having a magic wand that lets you send emails to your customers without lifting a finger. It uses smart rules that tell your emails when, how, and to whom to go to based on what your customers do or don’t do. Plus, you can save time, make your customers happy, earn more money and customize your messaging for each point of the nurturing funnel.

Email Automation Campaigns You Ought to be Running

When it comes to email automation techniques, there are different types of campaigns or automation series that are simple to execute and very effective for virtually any industry, such as:

Welcome Email Campaign: A series of emails introducing new subscribers to your brand.

Standard Promotional Campaign: A single or multiple emails that offer discounts, deals, or incentives to your subscribers.

Seasonal Campaign: A series of emails that aligns with a specific season, holiday, or event.

Triggered Email Series: A series of emails sent based on specific actions or events your subscribers take.

Post-Purchase Drip: A series of emails that follows up with your customers after they purchase.

Connect-Via-Social Campaign: A series of emails encouraging subscribers to follow you on social media platforms.

Newsletter: A regular email that provides valuable content, updates, or news to your subscribers.

Cart Abandonment Followup: A series of emails reminding subscribers of the items they left in their shopping cart.

Re-Engagement Campaign: A series of emails that tries to reactivate inactive or unresponsive subscribers.

High Level Phases of Email Customer Journey Mapping

Before we dive into how email automation works in customer journey mapping, let’s understand what customer journey mapping means. It may sound fancy, but it’s just a way of showing how customers interact with your business. We can break this down into three steps: How they discover you, buy from you, and get your support.

To connect your email automation campaign to customer journey mapping, you need to focus on the following phases of user engagement:

Onboarding

Onboarding is the first step of an email automation campaign. You can “Greet and Welcome” your new customers, show them what you offer, and help them get started. For instance, if they signed up for a free trial, email them tips and resources.

Nurturing

Create a nurture campaign that increases trust between you and your customers and converts them from potential customers to customers. For instance, if they download a brochure, email them exclusive content and a special offer related directly to that brochures' content.

Retention

Retention is the last phase of your email automation funnel. Customer retention relies on customer satisfaction and engagement. A retention email, or series of emails, is sent to existing customers to maintain their loyalty. These emails vary in form but share the goal of enhancing education about your brand and deepening customer loyalty. Moreover, they aim to minimize effort for the customer over time and provide exceptional service with easy calls to action.

Know the Difference Between Customer Personalization and Marketer Segmentation

Though the terms are often used interchangeably, personalization and segmentation are different concepts. While segmentation is all about marketers, personalization is about the customer.

Segmentation refers to dividing your customers into smaller groups, while personalization means tailoring your messages to each customer’s needs, preferences, and behavior. Here’s how it can help you transform your email automation strategy to address both your needs as the marketer and the users' needs as the customer:

Email automation tools can be used for personalizing triggered email sequences, cart abandonment emails, and re-engagement email series to grab your customer’s attention.
Personalization helps you create a better customer experience and loyalty by expressing to your customers that you know, value, and care about their needs.
With properly personalized and segmented emails, you can reduce your costs and increase your return on investment by sending your customers fewer but more effective emails.
When emails are relevant, users engage. A majority of marketers agree that subscriber segmentation (78%), message personalization (72%), and email automation campaigns (71%) are the most effective strategies for email marketing campaigns, based on a recent Hubspot survey.

Some ways you can personalize and segment your email automation campaigns are:

Dynamic content

Dynamic content is a game-changer for email marketing, adding a special touch and increasing conversion rates. With dynamic content, you can personalize your newsletters, delivering exclusive information tailored to specific subscribers. This customization improves click-through rates as people engage with content relevant to their interests. Additionally, by utilizing subscribers' shopping behaviors, targeted cross-sales campaigns can be created, boosting sales. Not only does dynamic content save time by consolidating multiple marketing messages into a single email, but it also enables the sending of ultra-personalized emails that drive conversions. Change the email content based on the customer’s data, such as name, gender, interests, etc.

Merge tags

Merge tags are placeholders that represent contact data in your CSV file. These customizable variables, such as First Name, Last Name, and Company, allow you to personalize the emails you send in your campaigns. By utilizing merge tags, you can increase customer engagement and improve email open rates. These tags are automatically created from the column headers in your CSV file, ensuring that each contact in your campaign receives a personalized email.

Behavioral data

Create your email based on the recipient’s actions or inactions, such as clicking a link, visiting a page or opening an email, etc. Once you've collected and organized behavioral data, you can create segments of subscribers based on their behavior. Segment options include purchase behavior (frequency, recency, value, product category), website behavior (pages visited, time spent, bounce rate, conversions), and email behavior (opens, clicks, replies, unsubscribes). Utilizing this data, you can send targeted offers like loyalty programs to frequent buyers, re-engagement campaigns to inactive customers, content offers to engaged blog visitors, or win-back emails to unsubscribed subscribers. These segments provide valuable insights for improving email campaigns and informing stakeholders.

Buying history

Order history provides valuable insights for boosting sales and making informed decisions. By analyzing data and trends, you can accurately manage inventory, ensuring stocked shelves and avoiding missed sales opportunities. Understanding what sells well allows you to plan promotions and feature popular products both in-store and online, while discontinuing less popular items. Additionally, order history enables targeted marketing campaigns by allowing you to send relevant messages and offers to specific customer groups based on their past purchases. Segment and personalize your email based on the recipient’s previous purchases, such as product category, price range, frequency, and more.

Location

Location-based email marketing utilizes customer location data to send targeted and personalized emails. While mobile marketing focuses on real-time location using GPS, email marketing relies on broader location information such as zip codes. Location-based email marketing takes advantage of static data points like city, state, country, and zip code to create region-specific content, zip code-centric emails, and city-based emails. These emails can provide personalized experiences based on the customer's location and can be combined with location-based mobile marketing for a seamless customer journey. By leveraging available location data creatively, marketers can deliver highly relevant and engaging location-based email marketing messages that enhance the customer experience.

Why Timing and Triggers are Essential for Successful Email Automation Campaigns

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“#1 — TIMING. Timing is everything when it comes to email marketing. If you send too many promotional emails or run too many sales…..You’ll burn out your list.” ~ Vlad| Direct Response on Twitter.

Timing and trigger-based automated emails are sent to your customers at the right time and based on the right action or event. According to SmartInsights, general trends indicate that Tuesdays and Thursdays are the most popular days for trigger emails, and one should send them at 10 AM and 2 PM for the best results.

To measure the effectiveness of your email automation triggers, and the timing thereof, several metrics can be used. Take a look at the total number of emails sent, open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribing rate, site traffic, and conversion.

Common mistakes marketers make when executing email automation triggers include buying third-party email lists, not syncing the right triggers, sending too many emails, and not analyzing performance metrics continually over time.

If you want to do it the right way, and we assume you do, utilize opt-in forms to collect interested users' emails, add value to messages, provide clear call-to-action buttons, keep messages personalized and humanized, and check triggered email performance against set metrics that align with company objectives.

How to Measure and Optimize Performance for Email

The phrase "Data is King" holds true, emphasizing the importance of measurement and optimization for your email campaigns. To ensure success, it's essential to analyze email performance effectively. Here are some compelling reasons why measurement and optimization matter and how you can approach them with excellence.

You can track how your clients interact with your emails. Use Google Analytics to measure email traffic, bounce rate, and conversions.
It is easy to find out the loopholes in your customer journey. For instance, surveys, feedback tools, or heat maps can help you find pain points and opportunities to keep contacts moving through the sales funnel.
The use of interactive email marketing tools can help you assess how campaigns affect consumer behavior, loyalty, and satisfaction.
You can use data analysis to experiment with different email elements over time, such as design, content, and personalization. For instance, use multivariate testing to find the best design version of an email.

The right blend of all these steps can help you enhance the customer experience and boost your email revenue. Many email automation providers, like MailModo, have templates available for email design, automation funnels, and common audience segments to help you get started. Customize these elements for your company in a few clicks and you'll have boosted conversions and retention in no time at all.

How to Craft the Ideal Email

Email automation campaigns are some of the best ways to deliver personalized and timely messages to your customers based on their actions and preferences. Here's how you can create great email funnels that nurture and convert:

Pay Attention to the Structure

Crafting a perfect email requires attention to various elements. Starting with the "from" name, it's crucial to choose a familiar and recognizable name for better open rates. Creating an engaging subject line that focuses on the benefits and has around 28-39 characters can significantly improve open and click-through rates. Utilizing a cohesive preheader that complements the subject line adds value and provides a snippet of the email's content. Clearly explaining the purpose of the email establishes trust and helps readers decide whether to continue reading. Keeping the email short, concise, and visually appealing is important to capture and maintain readers' attention.

Visualize and personalize your audience

Design and write your email with a picture of your target audience in mind. Use catchy subject lines, compelling copy, strong Calls-to-Action(CTA), and attractive images. DemandSage claims that emails with personalized subject lines increase open rates by 35%. Personalized subject lines show that you care about your audience and their interests, and they can help you stand out from the crowd.

Test your email campaigns regularly

A/B testing is a crucial practice in email marketing to improve campaign performance. It involves sending two different variants (A and B) to your email list and analyzing which one performs better. A/B testing allows you to make evidence-based decisions. Common elements to test include subject lines, preview text, sender name, email timing, call-to-action text, landing pages, email length, design, subscriber greetings, and new ideas. By consistently testing your campaigns, you can maximize engagement and drive better results. With user-friendly email apps available, conducting A/B tests is convenient and highly recommended.

Key takeaways

Despite being the oldest digital marketing channel with a long history, email marketing is going strong and continues to deliver great performance for marketing teams across the globe. With the right email marketing strategy, companies are improving their customer journey mapping and getting the best ROI on all their omnichannel efforts. To sum it up, here’s a reminder of how you can leverage email automation to improve your customer journey mapping:

Segment your customer based on their behavior and interests.
Create personalized and interactive email campaigns for each audience segment you have.
Measure and optimize your email performance.
Use customer feedback, heatmapping, and unsubscribe rates to know if you're on the right track.
Execute proper implementation of different types of campaigns to build rapport, satisfaction, loyalty, and business amongst your customer base.

Email automation can be complex and challenging, with multiple campaigns needed to nurture contacts throughout the customer journey. Simplify this process with the right combination of AI assistance, best practices as outlined in this guide, and content that captures your target audience. This combination has the potential to grow your business exponentially.

The right email strategy is an important part of any company's omnichannel marketing efforts, but we know you have much more than just email to worry about. Work with MarinOne today to streamline your advertising and make sure all your marketing channels are working together effectively.

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Aquibur Rahman is a guest contributor to Marin Software.

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Content Marketing

Employee Advocacy on LinkedIn: Empowering Your Team to Amplify Your Brand

Undoubtedly, social media has become an integral part of our lives. With that in mind, businesses are constantly seeking ways to leverage social media as an innovative way to amplify their brand and connect with their target audience.

One powerful and often overlooked tool in this realm is employee advocacy on LinkedIn. This platform combines the power of professional networking with the authenticity and reach of personal connections.

Did you know that companies with active employee advocacy programs experience a 30% increase in employee engagement and a 39% increase in brand awareness? This statistic highlights the tremendous potential within your team when it comes to amplifying your brand's message in the digital landscape.

In this article, we will explore the ins and outs of employee advocacy on LinkedIn, uncovering its benefits, the strategies for effective implementation, and how it can transform your brand's digital presence.

Benefits of Employee Advocacy on LinkedIn

When you empower your team to become brand advocates, you unlock many benefits that can amplify your brand and propel it to new heights. Let's dive into the exciting world of employee advocacy and explore the remarkable advantages it offers.

Expanded Brand Reach

Imagine your brand's message reaching your immediate audience and their extended networks. That's the magic of employee advocacy on LinkedIn. When your employees share content, insights, and experiences related to your brand, they tap into their connections, exposing your brand to a broader and more diverse audience.

Each like, comment, and share has the potential to cascade through networks, increasing your brand's visibility and exponentially expanding your reach.

Authenticity and Credibility

In an era where consumers crave authenticity, employee advocacy on LinkedIn has become a powerful tool for humanizing your brand. Employees sharing personal experiences, expertise, and success stories lend credibility and authenticity to your brand's messaging. Their personal touch builds trust and fosters meaningful connections with the audience.

Jim Pendergast, Senior Vice President at altLINE Sobanco, adds, "It's no secret that people trust recommendations and insights from their peers more than traditional advertising. This makes employee advocacy an invaluable asset in cultivating trust and loyalty."

Thought Leadership and Industry Influence

LinkedIn is a breeding ground for thought leaders and industry influencers. By encouraging your employees to share their knowledge, insights, and opinions, you position your brand as a leader in your field.

Morgan Taylor, Co-Founder of Jolly SEO, explains further, "When employees contribute to industry discussions, publish thought-provoking articles, or engage in meaningful conversations, they establish themselves as experts and ambassadors of your brand. This elevates your brand's reputation, attracts top talent, and opens doors for collaboration and partnership opportunities."

Enhanced Employee Engagement

Employee advocacy on LinkedIn is not just about boosting your brand; it also profoundly impacts your team. When employees actively participate in promoting your brand, they feel a more profound sense of belonging and pride in their work.

Their engagement levels rise as they become more invested in the organization's success. Employees receive recognition and validation through sharing their achievements and contributions, fostering a thriving work culture and a positive feedback loop that fuels motivation and productivity.

Recruitment Magnet

Jerry Han, CMO at PrizeRebel, says, "Your employees are your brand's best recruiters. When they share their positive experiences, highlight company culture, and showcase the impact of their work, they become potent magnets for top talent."

Potential candidates get a genuine glimpse into your organization's values, work environment, and growth opportunities, making your brand an attractive choice for aspiring professionals. A strong employer brand cultivated through employee advocacy sets you apart in a competitive talent market and helps you attract and retain the best and brightest.

Implementing an Employee Advocacy Program on LinkedIn

Now that we've established the incredible power of employee advocacy on LinkedIn, the next step is knowing how to implement it.

Cultivate a Culture of Advocacy

Implementing an employee advocacy program begins with cultivating a culture where employees feel inspired, motivated, and empowered to champion your brand. Start by aligning your organization and employees' values, creating a strong sense of purpose and connection.

Encourage open communication, provide training and resources, and recognize and reward employee contributions. When employees genuinely believe in and feel proud of their organization, they become natural advocates who willingly share your brand's message.

Define Clear Objectives

Defining clear objectives for your employee advocacy program is crucial to drive success. Consider what you aim to achieve, whether it's increased brand visibility, enhanced thought leadership, or improved employee engagement.

Anthony Martin, Founder and CEO of Choice Mutual, adds, "Align these objectives with your overall marketing and business goals, ensuring that every advocacy effort contributes to your larger strategy. You can measure the program's effectiveness and make data-driven adjustments by having well-defined objectives."

Provide Training and Guidelines

Equipping your employees with the necessary knowledge and skills is essential for a successful employee advocacy program. Offer comprehensive training on LinkedIn best practices, including optimizing profiles, creating engaging content, and effectively leveraging the platform's features.

Provide brand voice, tone, and messaging guidelines to ensure consistent representation across all employee advocates. Encourage continuous learning and provide ongoing support to help employees grow and refine their advocacy skills.

Foster Content Collaboration

Encourage employees to participate in content creation and collaboration actively. Foster a culture of knowledge sharing and creativity, where employees can contribute their unique perspectives and expertise.

Empower them to create and share content that resonates with their professional network, positioning them as industry thought leaders and amplifying your brand's reach. Facilitate collaboration through content calendars, brainstorming sessions, and platforms that allow employees to contribute and provide feedback.

Amplify Employee Success Stories

Highlighting and celebrating employee success stories boosts morale and enhances your brand's authenticity and credibility. Share stories of employees making a positive impact on LinkedIn, both within and outside the organization.

These personal narratives humanize your brand and create meaningful connections with your target audience. Encourage employees to share their experiences, insights, and achievements, demonstrating the real-world impact of your organization's work.

Measure and Adjust

Andrew Pierce, Founder of Real Estate Holding Company, explains, "To gauge the effectiveness of your employee advocacy program, establish key performance indicators (KPIs) aligned with your objectives. Monitor metrics such as engagement, reach, and content performance to track the impact of employee advocacy efforts."

Leverage analytics tools and feedback mechanisms to gather insights and make data-driven adjustments. Regularly evaluate the program's progress, iterate on strategies, and recognize and share successes to motivate and sustain employee participation.

Overcoming Challenges and Mitigating Risks

While the concept of employee advocacy on LinkedIn may seem promising, it is essential to recognize that this strategy does come with its fair share of challenges and potential risks. By understanding and addressing these obstacles head-on, you can ensure a smoother and more successful implementation of your employee advocacy program.

This section will explore the key challenges you may encounter and provide valuable insights on overcoming them while mitigating associated risks.

Alignment of Brand Messaging

One of the primary challenges in employee advocacy is maintaining alignment between the brand's messaging and the content shared by employees. Ensuring your team consistently communicates your brand's values, mission, and key messages can be complex.

Linda Shaffer, Chief People Operations Officer at Checkr, offers a solution, "To overcome this challenge, establish clear guidelines and provide training sessions that educate employees about the brand's voice, tone, and core messaging. Encourage open communication, allowing employees to ask questions and seek clarification, which fosters a deeper understanding of the brand's vision."

Regularly communicate updates and changes in messaging to ensure everyone is on the same page. You can align their advocacy efforts with your brand's identity by empowering employees with the necessary knowledge and tools.

Ensuring Authenticity and Credibility

In the digital landscape, authenticity and credibility are paramount. While advocating for your brand, employees should remain genuine and transparent to build trust with their networks. However, balancing personal expression and brand guidelines can be a delicate dance.

To overcome this challenge, emphasize the importance of authenticity and encourage employees to infuse their perspectives and experiences into their advocacy efforts. Provide them with a framework that allows flexibility while adhering to brand guidelines.

Empower employees to share their unique insights, stories, and expertise within the context of the brand's messaging. By striking this balance, you can ensure that employee advocacy remains genuine and credible, resonating with your target audience.

Managing Risks and Reputation

As employees become vocal advocates of your brand, it is crucial to have measures in place to mitigate potential risks and safeguard your brand's reputation. Mistakes or inappropriate behavior by employees can have a detrimental impact on your brand's image.

To mitigate these risks, establish a clear code of conduct and social media policy that outlines acceptable behavior, content guidelines, and disclosure requirements. Educate employees on the importance of responsible advocacy, emphasizing the need to respect confidentiality, avoid controversial topics, and exercise discretion when representing the brand.

Regularly monitor employee advocacy efforts, providing feedback and guidance to ensure compliance. By proactively managing risks, you can protect your brand's reputation while empowering employees to advocate effectively.

To Sum it Up

Effective employee advocacy on LinkedIn goes beyond simply sharing company updates. It empowers individuals within your organization to build genuine connections, leverage their networks, and establish themselves as trusted industry experts. So, embrace the power of employee advocacy on LinkedIn, empower your team, and amplify your brand's message in a way that resonates with your target audience.

Let your employees be the driving force that propels your brand to new heights of visibility, credibility, and success. With the right strategies and a commitment to authenticity, your organization can truly make its mark in the digital realm.

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George Colony - Forrester CEO

Data Taxonomy Best Practices

Data continues to be an increasing driver for businesses of all sizes and the need to effectively manage and organize that data has grown almost exponentially. Data taxonomy provides a framework for understanding how different types of data are related. It's then used to improve decision-making, strengthen the customer experience, and minimize costs.

All of this adds up to making it a critical tool for any company that wants to maximize its data asset value. New insights, analysis and actual business intelligence rely on data structures and models that are clean, accurate, and logical,

This growing role has increased the importance of having effective strategies for organizing information. A proper taxonomy helps to better understand customer requirements and preferences. This is accomplished by grouping similar pieces of information into coherent categories. Both from an internal perspective (i.e., categorizing sales leads) as well as from an external one (i.e., segmenting users).

By taking into account the various relationships between different types of information, valuable insights are gained. Additionally, having a clear structure makes it easier to find specific data. This helps conserve resources while also improving accuracy across multiple teams.

In this post we will explore the role of data in business and offer some best practices for structuring data in the future.

The Big Picture of Data in Business

Data plays an increasingly important role in helping organizations achieve their strategic initiatives. Different types of data can be utilized to inform and guide such initiatives. This includes customer demographics and behavior, market trends, financial indicators, performance metrics, and competitor activity.

Customer data can help companies understand their customers and how they behave. This can then be used to zero in on new customers and track the performance of existing ones. Market trend data can provide insights into the broader industry landscape. Financial and performance metrics can inform strategies around budgeting and resource allocation.

Competitor activity is also an important factor in business decision-making. Knowing what they're doing and how well they’re doing it allows you to adjust your strategy accordingly, either by leveraging their strengths or exploiting their weaknesses.

By having a clear taxonomy in place, companies can get the most out of their data. They can also ensure that they're using the data to effectively drive the continued growth of the business. Successful data taxonomy requires careful planning, thoughtful organization, and ongoing maintenance.

The Importance of Data Taxonomies

Data taxonomy helps companies understand their customers and the market, track their performance, and compare what they do with competitors.

What is a data taxonomy?

A data taxonomy is a system of organizing data into categories. It helps to structure information so that it can be located quickly and easily understood. Data taxonomies are made up of terms, which can be hierarchical or related in some way (such as “customers”, “leads”, and “opportunities”).

By structuring data in this way, companies can gain insight into the behavior and preferences of their customer base and betting insight into current market trends.

The positive impact of well-categorized data

Data taxonomies help with data governance. They provides a framework for how information should be collected, stored, and accessed to ensure it remains secure and compliant with regulations. Having an established taxonomy makes it easier to keep track of where data is located and who has access to it.

This practice also makes it easier to understand customer needs and preferences. By segmenting customers into different categories, companies can hone their marketing efforts and improve the overall customer experience. This can increase engagement and loyalty, which helps drive revenue growth. Additionally, data taxonomies help reduce costs by streamlining processes such as inventory management.

The negative impact of poorly categorized data

Having a poor data taxonomy can have damaging consequences. Without proper categorization, important information or insights may go unnoticed. This could lead to inaccurate predictions or decisions, which in turn could result in losses for the company.

In addition, having an inadequate data taxonomy can make it difficult to find information quickly and accurately. This increases time spent on tasks and can lead to errors or delays. It can also be difficult to track the origin of data when there’s no clear structure in place.

Finally, a lack of data taxonomy can make it hard to monitor access and ensure regulatory compliance. This could have serious legal and financial consequences if confidential customer information is mishandled or exposed.

Data Taxonomy Best Practices

When implementing a data taxonomy, there are some best practices you need to be aware of. Following these guidelines will put you and your organization on the way to clean data sets that are accessible, usable and capable of powering your business towards its strategic initiatives.

Start with desired outcomes and goals

You should work hard to craft specific criteria for what you want to achieve, both with your data and how it will be used. Develop a framework that fits your needs and tailor it to meet your unique goals and objectives.

Additionally, you should involve stakeholders in the process. Make sure everyone who is involved in data management is on board with the taxonomy. This will help get everyone familiar with the structure and that it works for all departments.

Determine how to measure against those goals

Metrics and goals are essential when it comes to developing a successful data taxonomy. When planning your taxonomy, it's important to determine how metrics will be used to measure its success.

Are you looking for data sets that integrate easily with tools and applications? Are you structuring data to be used cross-functionally without much hand holding? Whatever goals you set at the start of your taxonomy journey, it is crucial to measure progress and, ultimately, success.

Evaluate data integrity and completeness

It’s important to keep data integrity and completeness in mind when creating a taxonomy. This means making sure you have the necessary information to accurately categorize your data, as well as regularly checking to ensure that your categories are up-to-date. The data set itself should be qualified for both accuracy and completeness. A gap in either will ultimately render the insights provided by the data unreliable or even inaccurate.

Decide how you will categorize the data

Next, you need to decide which categories and subcategories will be used. Choose the ones that align with your plan and are easy to understand. Consider using industry standards if possible, as this can help ensure consistency across departments.

Apply the categorization to each data set

Applying categorization to data sets involves more than simply assigning labels. It also requires understanding the context and meaning behind each piece of data. Each data set should be thoroughly analyzed and categorized based on its purpose, source, format, and other relevant factors. This ensures that the taxonomy is accurate and complete.

Choose functionality over everything else

Functionality should be a primary focus. It’s important to keep in mind that your categorization will be used by people, so it needs to be intuitive and user-friendly. Consider the language and terminology you use, as well as how easy it is for users to find what they need.

Implement in stages

Creating a taxonomy for an entire company or organization can be a daunting task. To make the process easier, it’s best to break it down into smaller chunks and implement it in stages. This allows you to focus on one area at a time and adjust as needed based on feedback from stakeholders.

Test along the way, course-correct as needed

Testing is key to ensuring your taxonomy is effective. Gather feedback from stakeholders and test the categorization over time to make sure it meets all of your goals. If necessary, course-correct and refine your categorization as needed.

Finally, document each step in the process. This includes creating a detailed record of all the categories, sub-categories, and overall structure. This will help ensure that everyone is on the same page and familiar with the taxonomy when changes need to be made.

Conclusion

Developing a successful data taxonomy requires careful planning and consideration. It's important to:

Involve stakeholders
Determine metrics for success
Evaluate data integrity and completeness
Decide how to categorize the data
Implement in stages
Test along the way

Documenting each step in the process is also essential for ensuring everyone is familiar with the structure of the taxonomy when changes need to be made. With a well-structured plan in place, businesses can leverage their data more effectively to drive better decisions and long-term success.

Marin Software enables businesses to manage and optimize their online campaigns across search, social, and display networks using advanced analytics tools. We will ensure your data taxonomy is well utilized by tying categories to real business outcomes within your advertising initiatives.

With our powerful platform, marketers can easily measure the performance of their campaigns, identify areas for improvement and make informed decisions quickly. This helps to maximize returns on advertising investments while improving customer engagement and satisfaction. Marin also provides training resources to help users get the most out of their software products. With our comprehensive suite of services, we provide a complete solution for all your digital marketing needs. Contact us today to learn more about how Marin Software can help you take your digital marketing efforts to the next level.

Forrester B2B Summit Recap 2023 - Austin, TX

Navigating what tactics and strategies to use in B2B marketing is tough. To gather insights on how to stay ahead, we recently participated in the Forrester B2B Summit in Austin, Texas. Leaders and visionaries from various industries gathered to explore trends, strategies, and innovations. The sessions, discussions, and networking opportunities provided valuable knowledge that will shape our B2B marketing approach for 2023 and beyond. Here are our "TLDR" notes from our favorite sessions.

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Opening Remarks

Out of 100 presentations, 17 are focused on AI.
Out of 100 sponsors, 50 of them already have AI built in to their tools.
"Ironman effect" - this isn't about robots taking your job, it's about marketers putting on a robotic suit to create superpower-like efficiency and effectiveness.

AI's capability to analyze vast amounts of data enables B2B marketers to identify patterns, predict customer behavior, and personalize content and interactions. It also streamlines lead generation, automates repetitive tasks, improves customer service, optimizes for voice and visual search, aids in competitive analysis, and necessitates ethical considerations. Marketers should prioritize training and upskilling, refine Account-Based Marketing strategies with AI, and stay updated on AI's future directions.

Introducing Forrester's B2B Customer-Obsessed Growth Engine

John Arnold, Principal Analyst @ Forrester

Sam had an amazing experience meeting Sebastian Vettel's pit crew, sitting in the racecar, and receiving a personal letter from the racer himself. Despite Mercedes' dominance in racecar driving, being a Ferrari fan was essential to Vettel's winning mindset. Experiential marketing, particularly in the context of Formula I, played a significant role in driving customer loyalty and advocacy. Key elements of experiential marketing include interaction, engagement, personalization, and creating memorable experiences. Leveraging technology like VR and AR enhances the impact. Storytelling and adapting to virtual events are crucial, as well as considering emerging trends and building long-term relationships with customers. The Forrester B2B Growth Engine emphasizes aligning marketing, product, and sales to meet the changing needs of buyers, as evidenced by their dissatisfaction with providers in 2022.

Buyer Value is the Core of Your Customer-Obsessed Growth Engine

Katie Fabiszak, Principal Analyst @ Forrester

Katie and her son Drew faced the challenge of choosing a college among numerous options, feeling overwhelmed by the lack of differentiation. Similarly, B2B brands encounter a "sea of sameness" and must differentiate themselves by listening to individual customer needs. Key strategies include understanding buyer value, adopting a customer-centric approach, maximizing customer lifetime value, personalization, predictive analysis, customer feedback, crafting compelling value propositions, increasing customer retention, aligning product development with customer expectations, customer journey mapping, cross-functional collaboration, and evolving with changing customer preferences for sustained value delivery.

How CMOs Support the Six Ways a Company Can Grow

Barbie Mattie, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

CMOs can drive market penetration by implementing targeted marketing campaigns, enhancing branding efforts, and implementing customer retention strategies. Market development involves conducting market research, creating market entry strategies, and tailoring messaging to different market segments. CMOs collaborate with product teams in product development by integrating customer insights and developing marketing strategies. Diversification requires exploring opportunities, validating them through research, and executing marketing strategies for new products or markets. Strategic partnerships involve identifying compatible partners, creating collaborative marketing strategies, and maintaining brand alignment. CMOs also play a role in assessing potential acquisitions, overseeing post-acquisition integration, and developing effective communication strategies to inform customers about changes resulting from acquisitions.

Outreach: How Unified Revenue Operations Strategy Drives External Growth

Ashley Naumann Vonella, Sales Enablement & Operations Senior Team Manager, VelocityEHS

Ashley Naumann discussed the concept of Revenue Operations (RevOps) and its significance in driving business growth. RevOps involves aligning sales, marketing, and customer service departments to provide a seamless customer experience. It emphasizes the integration of data from different departments to create a holistic view of customer interactions, enabling informed decision-making. RevOps also streamlines business processes, enhances revenue forecasting and planning, and helps overcome organizational silos, fostering collaboration and improving performance. She highlighted the impact of RevOps on customer experience and provided strategies for successful implementation.

Making Sense of the B2B Intent Data Landscape

Brett Kahnke, Principal Analyst, Forrester

B2B intent data is defined as data that reveals the signals and indications of a potential buyer's interests and purchasing intentions. It plays a crucial role in modern marketing and sales strategies by providing valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences. There are various sources of B2B intent data, including first-party and third-party data providers. First-party data providers utilize a company's own data, such as website analytics and CRM data, to analyze user behavior. Third-party data providers collect data from external sources, offering a broader view of the market. Other intent data provider models include bidstream data providers, cooperative data providers, predictive analytics providers, publisher-based providers, and data aggregator providers. Understanding the pros and cons of different data sources helps businesses make informed decisions about utilizing B2B intent data in their marketing and sales efforts.

Dun & Bradstreet: True Stories of Successful Master Data Management

Neil Honaker, Data Hygiene / Data Privacy Manager, Essity

Jackie McBrady, Sr Director, Lead-Finance Applications EMEA, Cushman & Wakefield

Jenn Atkins, CMO, Dun & Bradstreet

Master Data Management (MDM) is a comprehensive method that helps organizations define and manage critical data, providing a single point of reference for all data elements. It ensures data accuracy, consistency, and uniformity across the organization, leading to improved efficiency, decision-making, and regulatory compliance. MDM consists of components such as master data, metadata, data quality, and data integration. Best practices for implementing MDM include having a clear strategy, securing executive buy-in, prioritizing data quality, involving stakeholders, starting small and scaling gradually, choosing the right tools, and planning for data governance. Common challenges in MDM implementation include inconsistent data quality and resistance to change, which can be addressed through data cleansing and effective communication. Successful MDM implementation results in enhanced decision-making, improved operational efficiency, and better regulatory compliance.

How We Plan to Use What We've Learned

Attending the Forrester B2B Summit was truly an illuminating experience that has invigorated our team at MarinOne. As we reflect on the invaluable insights gained from industry experts, thought leaders, and fellow marketing professionals, we are inspired to push the boundaries of B2B marketing and embrace innovation. Armed with a fresh perspective and a deep understanding of emerging trends, we are eager to implement the strategies and best practices we've learned to drive tangible results for our clients and stay ahead of the curve. The Forrester B2B Summit served as a catalyst for growth, igniting our passion for continuous learning and reaffirming our commitment to delivering exceptional B2B marketing solutions. We eagerly look forward to the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead, armed with the knowledge and inspiration we gained. Reach out to work with one of our team members to revamp your B2B advertising campaign strategy.

Creative

Create Marketing Assets That Convert: Best Practices and Design Strategies

If you’re a business looking to differentiate yourself from competitors, switching up your marketing strategy should be your go-to.

Creating killer marketing assets allows you to stand out, convert potential customers, and create an instantly recognizable brand identity.

But what exactly are marketing assets, and how can you make them as effective as possible? Let’s dive in!

See Freepik’s Guide on Visual Trends for 2023 (Image Source)

What are Marketing Assets?

Marketing assets are tools used by organizations to promote their products or services. The most common examples include landing pages, blog posts, social media posts, infographics, videos, and eBooks.

Marketing assets help you differentiate yourself from competitors, explain your unique offering to customers, and convert prospects.

With the rise of video platforms and sites like Instagram proving just how valuable visual content is, making your digital marketing assets visually appealing has never been more crucial. Creating landing pages that look stuck in the 90s or social media posts with questionable filters is a no-go.

The good news? There are tons of stock photos, videos, and vectors you can use to set your marketing assets apart from the rest, as well as fresh content ideas to keep your site and social media page up to date.

If you’re new to design or simply need a refresher, here are our top tips for creating marketing assets that will have your customers scrambling at your (virtual) door and your competitors scrambling to keep up.

Create a Strong Brand Identity

If you think about the biggest, most popular brands, they probably have one thing in common - a strong, instantly recognizable brand identity.

Consistency is key in cultivating a strong brand identity with the help of your marketing assets. The most important marketing assets will be your website, blog, and social media page, so keeping the types of images, font, and colors consistent across all three is critical.

Your tone of voice is equally as important as the visuals. Whether you write in an informal, conversational style or a formal, more authoritative one, picking a tone of voice that resonates with your audience and sticking to it is a must.

Make the Most of Social Media

Social media posts are some of the best marketing assets you can use in your strategy. People worldwide presently spend an average of 2 hours and 28 minutes per day scrolling through social media platforms, according to Hootsuite.

The best part is that creating a business account on a social media platform is free, so it’s one of the lowest-cost marketing techniques you can use.

To keep things simple, start by working with the channels most likely to connect you to your target audience. If you’re targeting Gen Z and millennials, this will be Instagram or TikTok, while Gen X and baby boomers are more likely to use Facebook.

To create a coherent brand identity across your social media profile, use the same colors, typography, and tone of voice that you use in your other marketing assets.

No design experience? No problem! You don’t have to be a professional graphic designer to create marketing assets that look good. Use templates, vector images, and easy-to-use image creation software to get started with social media posts.

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Tell Your Story

Implementing storytelling in your marketing assets can be a game changer for your marketing strategy. Creating a narrative around your brand can make it easier for potential customers to connect with you emotionally.

Using storytelling in your assets can even make your brand more memorable.

You can use free videos for your content on your social media channel or your product’s videos as part of your product descriptions to give customers a more realistic view of what they’re buying and reduce returns.

Bonus points if you feature a content creator popular in your niche in your video content or feature user-generated content in your marketing assets.

With 53% of shoppers saying they always do research before buying a product, having previous buyers vouch for what you’re selling can massively increase trust in your brand.

Create Easy-to-Read Blogs

Blogs benefit your business in various ways - they can improve your SEO, boost brand awareness, and cement your status as an authority in your industry.

Here’s the catch.

If blogs are thousands of words long with no subheadings, long paragraphs, and a lack of visual content, readers can easily switch off, and you’ll miss out on the desired effects of improved conversion rates and brand trust.

To keep your blogs as readable as possible (and optimized for Google’s algorithm), add subheadings to signal new topics, write in paragraphs no longer than four lines, and add visuals such as images and infographics where applicable.

Consider Video Case Studies

Case studies are widely perceived to be the gold standard of testimonials.

Proving how your product or service has benefited an individual or company by letting them tell their own story combines two of the most effective techniques in the world of marketing - storytelling and user-generated content.

Imagine you could take your case studies to a whole new level. That’s where video case studies come in. By tapping into the popularity of video content and its ability to build trust with consumers, you can increase the effectiveness of some of the most popular marketing assets, case studies.

Focus on Consistency, Authenticity, and Connection

Your marketing assets should allow your target audience to feel more connected to you and better understand what your brand stands for.

Using images and videos can make your content more visually appealing, while settling on color and typography brand guidelines can help you create an instantly-recognizable look.

For the best chance at capturing the minds of your potential customer base, focus on cultivating a consistent brand identity, using storytelling, and creating marketing assets across various platforms.

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Filip Nikoloski is a guest contributor to Marin Software's blog and website.

B2B

B2B Online Chicago Day 1 Recap: Navigating Modern Marketing, E-commerce, and B2B Marketplaces

We recently attended B2B Online in Chicago to get a sense of how distributors and manufacturers are delving into digital marketing to create full-funnel B2B customer journeys. Read on to get an overview of key themes industry experts shared on day one. Some of the most important topics throughout the day were about increasing ROI, developing the ultimate tech stack, aligning sales with your digital strategy, and leveraging the power of e-commerce marketplaces.

Modern Marketing to Increase ROI

To increase ROI, marketers should keep up with the latest trends and technologies. Key strategies discussed include:

Leveraging digital marketing channels: Develop a comprehensive strategy that includes social media, email marketing, SEO, and pay-per-click advertising.
Measuring ROI through analytics: Use marketing analytics tools to track website traffic, conversion rates, and customer engagement.
Personalizing marketing efforts: Segment audiences based on demographics, behaviors, and interests to create personalized campaigns.
Incorporating influencer marketing and user-generated content: Partner with influencers and encourage customers to create and share content.

Developing the Ultimate Tech Stack

Building an efficient tech stack requires understanding business needs and goals. Some of the most important tools for digital marketers to consider include:

Identifying key components: CRM software, marketing automation tools, and analytics platforms are crucial for managing customer data, automating marketing tasks, and gaining insights.
Evaluating and selecting tools: Research different options and choose those that meet specific business needs.
Integrating and optimizing the tech stack: Ensure seamless integration and collaboration between different tools for improved efficiency.
Ensuring data security and privacy compliance: Implement measures to protect customer data and comply with privacy regulations.

Aligning Sales

Aligning sales and marketing goals is crucial for driving revenue. The experts shared various methods for making this happen:

Implementing a sales enablement strategy: Provide sales teams with the right tools, resources, and training.
Using data analytics to optimize sales processes: Gain insights into customer behavior and preferences to improve engagement and increase sales.
Aligning sales compensation with business goals: Develop a compensation plan that rewards performance and aligns with objectives.
Providing ongoing training and development: Continuously improve sales teams' skills and knowledge.

Transforming Digital Experience with Nordson

Nordson Corporation's digital transformation journey highlighted the importance of enhancing the user experience and leveraging technology. Here's what Nordson did to be successful:

Leveraging the power of Coveo: Nordson used Coveo to scale their business and streamline the user experience.
Enhancing product discovery: Nordson's strong taxonomy foundation improved product discovery on their website.
Benefits of a streamlined user experience: A seamless and responsive experience leads to better engagement and business value.

Reimagining Sales to Include E-commerce

Integrating e-commerce into sales strategies is crucial for growth. Some key points that were shared more than once:

The importance of a digital frontend: Digital should be an integral part of the selling process.
Understanding headless selling: Leveraging technology and analytics to integrate digital selling and drive growth.
Personalization and customer experience: Emphasizing the role of personalization and focusing on customer satisfaction.
Measuring success and optimizing strategies: Tracking key metrics and continuously improving e-commerce sales approaches.

Proactive vs. Reactive: Enabling E-procurement

Procurement teams must adapt to remove inefficiencies in the Procure-to-Pay process. Key topics discussed include:

Understanding e-Procurement and its benefits: Emphasizing the cost savings, efficiency, and supplier relationship improvements.
Modernizing the e-commerce platform: Evolving e-commerce platforms to incorporate e-Procurement features and functionalities.
Managing suppliers and vendor relationships: Establishing effective requirements and measuring supplier performance.
Collaboration between departments: The importance of aligning procurement and e-commerce teams and breaking down silos for improved communication and efficiency.
ROI goals for e-Procurement and the company: Defining ROI goals, factors impacting ROI, and strategies for maximizing ROI.
Corporate social responsibility and hitting goals: Integrating CSR into procurement processes and aligning e-Procurement initiatives with CSR goals.

Bullsh*t Bingo in B2B Commerce: What Is Real, What Is Fake, and What Matters

This presentation highlighted the importance of transparency and authenticity in B2B marketing and sales. This was definitely the most lively, entertaining and informative presentation of the week. Here's what they ultimately had to say:

Identifying common "bullsh*t" in B2B marketing: Vague claims, jargon, and inflated statistics.
Negative effects of "bullsh*t" on trust and relationships.
Benefits of transparency and authenticity: Building trust and differentiation.
Strategies for avoiding "bullsh*t": Fact-checking, asking for proof, and focusing on specific outcomes.
Role of customer feedback and reviews: Separating real from fake in B2B commerce.
Ethical considerations in marketing and sales.

Myth Busting False B2B Online Beliefs

The presentation debunked common myths in B2B marketing. We've provided below the most common myths they "busted" and what B2B marketers should actually be doing:

B2B buyers using social media: Importance of having a social media presence as a B2B company as this is a key way to build trust, brand authenticity, and have potential buyers find you.
Importance of visual content in B2B marketing: Engaging B2B buyers through visual content should not be underestimated as it can have a lasting effect on your company's perception.
Digital channels in B2B sales: The role of digital channels and the increasing reliance of B2B buyers on them–it's well past time to move away from traditional methods.
Personalization in B2B marketing: Building stronger relationships with B2B buyers through personalization is a good technique for creating a healthy returning customer base.
Role of brand storytelling in B2B marketing: Differentiating a company from competitors through brand storytelling is not just for CPG or D2C brands.
Building brand awareness in B2B marketing: Importance of brand reputation beyond lead generation.
Emotional factors in B2B marketing: Considering emotional factors alongside rational decisions.

Building a Paid Brand Presence to Reach Consumers

A paid brand presence is vital for standing out in a crowded market. Here are the highlights of what was shared:

Importance of paid brand presence: Increasing visibility, brand recognition, and sales.
Understanding the target audience: Defining demographics, psychographics, and online behaviors.
Crafting an effective paid brand strategy: Setting clear goals, selecting appropriate channels, and determining budgets.
Creating engaging ad content: Using visuals, clear messaging, and A/B testing.
Measuring and optimizing paid brand presence: Tracking performance metrics and continuously refining strategies.

How the Modern PIM is Driving Growth with Automation and AI

The main presentation surrounding this topic focused on the role of modern Product Information Management (PIM) systems in driving growth. Some quick takeaways from that presentation are as follows:

Overview of modern PIM solutions: Core features, data modeling, enrichment, and syndication.
Importance of automation in PIM: Streamlining data entry, validation, and categorization.
Role of AI in PIM: Leveraging machine learning to analyze product data and optimize information.
Benefits of automating attribution: Reducing errors and increasing efficiency.
Generating potent product descriptions using AI: Personalizing descriptions for different channels and audiences.
Case studies of successful PIM implementations: Increased sales and improved customer experience.
PIM's role in omnichannel commerce: Delivering consistent and accurate product information.
Key considerations when selecting a PIM solution: Integration capabilities, scalability, and ease of use.
Future trends in PIM: Natural language processing and image recognition for automation.

Getting the Ball Rolling With Customer Adoption in B2B Global E-commerce

The fireside chat focused on the importance of customer adoption in B2B e-commerce. Key insights discussed include:

Customer adoption impacts revenue growth and sustainability.
Develop a customer-centric approach with personalized experiences and data analytics.
Address global e-commerce adoption challenges like cultural differences and regulatory compliance.
Navigate B2B e-commerce distribution channels for efficient supply chain models.
Build a comprehensive customer acquisition strategy using paid advertising and content marketing.
Leverage AI for cross-selling and upselling to optimize customer lifetime value.
Collaborate with technology partners for customized e-commerce platforms.
Embrace emerging trends like mobile and voice commerce for innovative experiences.
Measure and report customer adoption metrics for continuous improvement.
De-risk e-commerce platforms with fraud prevention and data protection measures.
Manage customer expectations for delivery times and product quality.
Ensure robust disaster recovery and business continuity plans.

Where B2B marketers may have some changes to make compared to their B2C counterpoints is in maintaining transparency, authenticity, and ethical standards in marketing and sales. With additional focus in these areas, all the experts who presented agree that long-term relationships with customers will ultimately lead to long-term success…especially for manufacturers and distributors.

To address these areas for potential improvement, the industry expert presentations shared at B2B Online Chicago provided valuable guidance for increasing ROI, developing tech stacks, aligning sales, leveraging e-commerce, and succeeding in the marketplace model. It's clear that by embracing digital technologies, personalization, and customer-centric approaches, B2B businesses can enhance their marketing efforts, streamline operations, and drive revenue growth.

6 Steps to Develop an Effective Change Management Plan

All businesses must undergo a change at one point or another. Whether it's a change in leadership, organizational structure, or technology, companies have to adapt to remain competitive.

But change can be disruptive and stressful for employees—and without a well-planned change management strategy, organizations may fail to achieve their desired outcomes.

Case in point: 70% of change initiatives fail due to employee resistance or unproductive management behavior. Luckily, you can mitigate this risk by creating an effective change management plan and ensure a smooth change transition.

This article will explore the steps to develop a change management plan, including the skills needed to lead a successful change effort, common reasons why change management plans fail, and how to avoid these pitfalls.

Why you need a change management plan

As an organization undergoing change, you must prepare your employees for what lies ahead. Change can be difficult for everyone involved. But if you have a process they can follow, it makes the transition easier and ensures everyone is on board.

A change management plan allows you to communicate the change early and often, provide training and support, and be available to answer possible questions. It also reduces change resistance, boosts employee morale, and helps to create a more positive work environment.

In addition, a change management plan helps control the effect of change during the execution and control stage, thereby avoiding overruns in cost and schedule, incoherent scope, or poor quality change management.

Skills needed to lead a change management plan

Leading change is not a simple operation. It's a very human process, requiring human skills. Soft skills like empathy, communication, and emotional intelligence are essential. A change leader must also have strong resilience and be good at motivating others.

Some other skills that are critical for analyzing change, creating a plan, and implementing the plan effectively include:

Leadership: Good leadership is essential for taking employees through organizational change and delegating roles to the right people. Good leadership styles include qualities like honesty and transparency. A change leader should be transparent about why the change is taking place. They should also have a clear vision of what the company aims to accomplish through the change.
Strategic thinking: Strategic thinking is a critical skill that helps you create change management plans. When you understand your company's needs, you can develop a strong plan that includes the timeline for the change, the deadline, specific tasks necessary to make the change, and key responsibilities for each employee.
Organization: Organization is another skill that can improve change management. Establishing a clear change management plan requires organizing various information, including employee roles, project goals, deadlines, and other key information.
Research skills: Developing research skills can enable you to assist your organization in planning for change. You can research other companies' change management tactics and methodologies to generate ideas for your company's change process.
Analytical skills: Change management plans also require analytical and critical thinking skills to analyze company data, understand the research, and make the best decisions for your organization.

Here are a few tips to help you develop and improve the skills you need to lead a change management plan:

Read articles and blogs about other companies' change management experiences to gain more insight and knowledge
Find a mentor to give you specific guidance and help you make good decisions
Hire a change management consultant to guide your company through the change and learning from their expertise
Take and complete an online management course

How to create a change management plan

You shouldn’t take a one-size-fits-all approach to creating a change management plan.

It requires careful consideration of the unique challenges and opportunities that come with the specific change. But, generally speaking, you'll find one to include the following:

A clear definition of the change
A timeline for implementation
A communication strategy
A training plan
A risk management strategy

Below are the steps to develop a successful change management plan.

Step 1: Define your change management goals

Start your change management plan by establishing the plan goals. This involves identifying the problem or opportunity the change will address and articulating the desired and expected outcomes.

Use these tips to define your goals clearly:

Understand the changes: Familiarize yourself with the changes that need to be made and their implications, as well as the methodologies you'll use to prioritize change requests. For instance, if you plan to introduce new software to your employees, it's not enough to simply know how the software works. You also need to understand how it'll affect existing workflows.
Have awareness goals: Employee awareness and adoption of the changes should be part of your plan, so ensure you incorporate that.
Define KPIs: Define quantifiable KPIs to define your plan's success. How will you measure your success? What metrics do you need to move? What is the baseline for how things currently stand? Apply the metrics that make sense given the context of the changes.

Step 2: Build your change team

In order to effectively implement change management, it's important to prioritize the building of a strong change management team with the necessary resources.

This team should consist of individuals in leadership positions from various departments, including:

Building alliances with various departments makes it easy to educate the rest of the team on the changes and provide support throughout the change process.

Additionally, it's important to build a finance team to manage change incentives and resources. This will help develop strategies for effective finance change management and avoid delays. You also need support from stakeholders, including the CEO and other members of the executive team, to increase the chances of success.

Step 3: Develop your change management plan

With your team assembled, it's time to develop your change management plan.

Create a task list: This is a checklist of actionable tasks you must complete to achieve your goals. It keeps your team on track and is easy to reference when determining the next steps.
Put together a timeline: Assign specific due dates to each task on your list and make sure that those deadlines are met. Your plan should revolve around the project's overall due date. If any tasks cannot be completed before the rollout of changes, consider adjusting their due dates or prioritize them according to their importance and feasibility. You may also complete some tasks after the rollout if necessary.

Change management can be complex, so using a project management tool like Asana or Trello to organize your plans and keep everything in one place can be of great help.

Step 4: Create a communication strategy

Developing a clear and concise communication strategy ensures everyone is onboard and understands what's happening throughout the change management process.

Keep the following pointers in mind when developing your communication plan:

Ensure all stakeholders, including employees, customers, suppliers, and external partners are aware of the project timeline and objectives.
Create a timeline for how often you'll communicate updates.
Have clear channels of communication. Examples include email, phone, or in-person meetings.
Ensure that everyone understands the company's change management process and procedures clearly.

Step 5: Execute your change management plan

Executing a change management plan involves several steps, including executing the communication plan, providing training, and monitoring progress.

During the implementation phase, change managers should identify and quickly address any roadblocks that arise. This can be accomplished by encouraging employee participation in the change, being transparent and communicative from the start, and addressing any resistance that may arise.

To help build momentum for the change, be sure to communicate all successes and provide incentives for embracing the change. Employees should also be encouraged to experiment and share their experiences to harness their emotional energy and overcome any natural resistance that may arise.

Step 6: Evaluate, review, and adapt

Evaluating the change management plan is essential to determine its effectiveness. This involves assessing the success of the change and identifying areas for improvement in the change management process.

A few ways you can do this include:

Use a change management tracking system to track all changes that are made in the organization. This allows you to identify and mitigate any areas of concern before they become major issues.
Use performance indicators to help you measure the success of the plan. With a collaborative KPI dashboard, you can see if the plan is being implemented correctly or whether there are unexpected side effects resulting from the changes.
Regularly review team progress to ensure that the employees adopt the changes and that all successful change initiatives are incorporated into future change management plans.

When do change management plans fail?

Not all change management plans are successful. They can fail for a variety of reasons. The following are some common reasons for change management plan failures and ways to avoid them:

Active resistance

People often resist change, especially if it threatens their job security or current way of doing things. This can result in a lack of cooperation and engagement, which can undermine the success of the change management plan.

It's crucial to communicate the why behind the change and how it will benefit the organization, involve stakeholders in the planning process, and provide training and support to help them adapt to the changes.

Poor communication

Clear communication is essential for the success of any change management plan. If stakeholders are not informed about the changes or the reasons, they may become confused or disengaged. Anxiety and resistance are higher when people do not understand the why behind the change.

An excellent way to avoid this failure is to ensure everyone impacted by the change is well-informed. Include the reasons behind it, the expected outcomes, and how it will affect them. Communication should be ongoing and two-way, with opportunities for feedback and questions.

Inadequate planning

Change management plans require thorough planning to be successful. If the planning is inadequate, the plan may not address all the necessary areas, or it may not be implemented effectively.

It's critical to ensure the planning process is thorough, considering all change aspects. Clearly understand the goals, timelines, and resources required to implement the change effectively.

Lack of leadership support

Without support from leaders, change management plans are unlikely to succeed. Leaders are critical in driving change, communicating the vision, and providing the resources and support needed to make the change happen.

Engage leaders early in the planning process and get their commitment. They should be involved in communication efforts and be visible and accessible throughout the change process.

Inadequate resources

Change management plans need resources such as finances, time, and technology to be successful. If these resources are inadequate, the change may not be implemented effectively.

The solution is to thoroughly assess the resources required to implement the change and ensure that they are available. Build finance teams that will be involved in reallocating resources or securing additional funding to finance change management.

Conclusion

Change is inevitable, especially in the business world. In light of the market fluctuations, digital innovations, and constant growth surrounding the marketplace, following an articulated change management plan can help guide your organization through any changes they need to adopt or decisions you need to make today for the opportunities you'll find tomorrow.

But to ensure all the information in your change management plan is well documented and easily accessible to employees or to make any needed changes, use a change management tool or software like Spendesk. Spendesk provides you with real-time data to easily manage your company expenses/budgets during change management, keeping you on top of your finances. Schedule a free demo to empower your team to make informed spending decisions.

The main aim of a change management plan is to stay on top of a growing business, manage change, and make the change process easier. A documentation tool can easily create a collaborative, robust, and interactive change management plan for your company.

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Rana Bano is a guest blog contributor to Marin Software.

Ecommerce

11 Proven Strategies to Increase AOV for an E-commerce Business

Businesses in the e-commerce industry are continuously looking for methods of boosting their revenue. The Average Order Value (AOV), the average amount a customer spends on a single purchase from an online store, is one crucial metric that can assist in achieving this.

Each e-commerce company strives for a high AOV since it shows that customers spend more on each purchase, boosting revenue and profitability. This post will examine a few tried-and-true tactics that e-commerce companies may employ to increase AOV and, as a result, reduce cart abandonment, improve customer experience, and accelerate bottom-line growth.

How to Calculate Average Order Value

We've already mentioned the formula for Average Order Value: AOV = Revenue / Number of orders. However, to get more precise data, you can also calculate the AOV for each traffic channel, including organic traffic, referrals, ads, etc.

Installing accurate reporting web analytics software is crucial. Use Google Analytics to determine the typical order value for each traffic channel. Visit your Google Analytics profile. You'll need the figures from the Transactions and Revenue tabs and look at the low and high values to determine the causes of these changes.

Best Practices for AOV Improvement

If you strive to raise the average order value for the company, the most important thing is to earn trust. You can do this in different ways, some of them are:

Offer a personalized approach where each consumer can discover the ideal product.
Provide consumers the flexibility to modify their orders to fit their unique schedules or lifestyles.
Ensure your organization has a fair pricing policy.

Let's look closely at some particular activities that can be done to improve the average order value.

Optimize Product Bundles

One of the tips for raising the AOV is putting up packages and bundles that drive customers to spend more. In this situation, the right thing to do is group related things that make sense to buy together. For example, if the person purchases contact lenses, they will likely need a solution for them as well.

Evaluate your product sales data to determine which goods are frequently bought in pairs. Make these goods available in product bundles that come with a discount. Use your website and other platforms to promote the bundles extensively.

Upsell and Cross-Sell

AOV may be improved by using cross-selling and upselling tactics. Upselling is the practice of persuading consumers to upgrade or purchase more expensive versions of the product they're interested in.

With product bundles, cross-selling entails making product recommendations that complement the items a consumer is already purchasing. A pair of shoes or a scarf, for instance, may be suggested items while someone is shopping for a coat.

Examine your product catalog to find items that may be cross- or up-sold. Add checkout notifications for upselling and cross-selling. Analyze the data to find the best recommendations for increasing AOV.

Screenshot taken on the official Asos website

Optimize the Pricing

Be very careful with the products' pricing. It might be hard to boost AOV if they are too low, and if prices are too high, consumers can be discouraged from purchasing. The price must be competitive within the market sector and allow the company to profit. Do a competitive study of pricing in the industry. Maintain profit margins while adjusting product prices to comply with industry norms. To raise AOV, consider providing superior items at a higher price range.

Offer Discounts and Special Offers

Product discounts can generate more purchases and raise the average order value on your e-commerce store. Deals can be presented as a gift card, or you may provide first-time buyer discounts. This is one of the most straightforward techniques to raise the average order value and help enhance conversion rates across the site. Since customers will get a better deal, they are more likely to add other products to their shopping cart.

Screenshot taken on the official Bodum website

Provide Free Shipping

The free delivery option makes customers willing to purchase more items. You may provide a shipping option once an order reaches a specific value. If you're shipping small things, this tactic could reduce shipping costs and encourage users to make larger purchases from the website.

Free delivery is one of many options available. You may ensure the customers that the deliveries will be made safely. Another option is to offer free returns or allow clients to select from various delivery variants.

Create a Customer Loyalty Program

To thank your loyal consumers, implement customer loyalty programs. Design a program that offers the clients value-adding incentives like gifts for spending a specific amount or discounts for making a particular number of purchases or returning customers.

These initiatives boost not only sales but also brand engagement, resulting in increased levels of customer satisfaction and steadfast brand loyalty. Due to reduced related marketing and advertising expenditures, loyal clients are more likely to leave more money at your store, which is excellent for AOV.

Screenshot taken on the official The Webster website

Create the Feeling of Urgency

Use time-limited deals to raise the average order value for your online store. Many shoppers simply can't resist a bargain, especially if it has a feeling of urgency. In this regard, you may create a limited edition of some products or launch a countdown with a discount.

Demonstrate Social Proof

If consumers see that others have bought similar goods from your store and stayed satisfied with the purchase, they are more inclined to do the same. So it makes sense that social proof is a valuable strategy for boosting your AOV and encouraging greater buy orders.

As a result, showing social proof from the customers may help build trust with potential consumers. Also, if potential and present consumers realize that you are a reputable company many people adore, they are more inclined to make larger purchases.

User-generated content is one of the finest methods to demonstrate social proof. You might also post reviews on the homepage and social media accounts to let people see what your clients think about the store.

Screenshot taken on the official True Botanicals website

Provide Free Trials for Premium Products

Customers prefer to try products out before purchasing them, especially if the product is expensive. Knowing that a product works well and corresponds to your expectations is comforting. Giving out free samples of more expensive or premium items is a highly efficient way to increase AOV and conversions for such products.

If you sell a digital product, promoting a trial period is also a working strategy for entry-level products. As a product's advantages are demonstrated, any remaining doubts are eliminated, which motivates clients to spend more money.

Ensure Live Chat Support System

A company has a better chance of decreasing the abandoned carts rate and converting customers if representatives are constantly available to answer customer questions. Clients are less likely to abandon shopping carts full of items when the company can answer their questions promptly.

For instance, a consumer who wants additional details about the shipping prices would demand a prompt response before purchasing. You have a greater chance of converting such consumers if you answer immediately, raising the company's sales and, thus, AOV.

Screenshots were taken on the official Farfetch website

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Perform A/B Testing

You should test each AOV-boosting strategy to ensure it works as effectively as possible. This may be accomplished through A/B testing. Split testing is a reliable technique for comparing several website components to get the best variables combined for positive outcomes. Making the wrong decision might result in your online store losing conversions at a staggering pace. With that in mind, make it a practice to test key components to make sure you're putting your attention where it belongs.

Final Word

To increase sales and profitability, an e-commerce company should raise its average order value (AOV). Businesses may successfully enhance AOV and boost sales by putting the tactics outlined above into practice, including upselling and cross-selling, offering free delivery, making individualized product suggestions, and others. Turning to analytics to customize these techniques to each customer's buying habits and interests is crucial.

Establish a baseline for the company before implementing any sales strategies, and then monitor changes in client behavior. By doing so, you may drive the success of your marketing initiatives, keep an eye out for any patterns or abnormalities, and adjust the tactics to better serve your target audience. In a similar vein, make sure to keep an eye on client feedback. You may keep improving customer experience by paying attention to what consumers say and how their comments change over time.

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Kate Parish is a guest contributor to Marin Software.

SWOT Analysis for Marketers: A Guide to Better Marketing Decisions

Marketing is a complex and ever-changing field that requires careful strategy and planning. One important technique that can help marketers navigate this landscape is SWOT analysis.

SWOT, which stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats, is a framework for evaluating a company's position in the market and identifying key factors that can impact success. In this article, we'll explore the basics of SWOT analysis and how it can be used to inform marketing decisions.

What is SWOT Analysis?

SWOT analysis is a strategic planning tool that helps businesses and organizations identify their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This analysis allows companies to assess their current position in the market and make informed decisions about their future. Identifying these key factors enables marketers to better understand their target audience, market trends, and competition, and develop effective marketing strategies.

Why is a SWOT Analysis Important for Marketing?

Marketing is all about creating value for customers and driving growth for the business. Using SWOT analysis, marketers can identify their key strengths and leverage them to create more impactful campaigns and marketing initiatives. At the same time, they can also identify areas for improvement, such as weaknesses in their marketing strategy, and take steps to address these weaknesses.

By understanding the opportunities and threats in the market, marketers can also better position themselves to capitalize on new trends and minimize the impact of challenges. This allows them to stay ahead of the competition and keep their marketing efforts relevant and effective.

The SWOT Analysis Framework

The SWOT analysis framework is simple and straightforward. Here's a closer look at each element:

Strengths

Strengths are the things that your company does well. These are your competitive advantages and the things that set you apart from other brands. Examples of strengths in marketing might include a strong brand image, a loyal customer base, or a highly effective marketing team. For instance, if you have a strong brand image, you may want to focus on leveraging this strength through your marketing efforts to increase brand recognition and build customer loyalty.

Weaknesses

Weaknesses are the things that your company doesn't do well. They are the areas in which you are lacking and need improvement. Examples of weaknesses in marketing might include inconsistent content creation, weak branding, or ineffective marketing campaigns. For instance, if you have identified inconsistency in creating content as a weakness, you may want to allocate more resources to hiring a good content team or even use AI marketing tools to automate the tasks.

Opportunities

Opportunities are the external factors that can positively impact your marketing efforts. They entail the trends and changes in the market that you can capitalize on to achieve better results. Examples of opportunities in marketing might include new demographic groups, new geographic markets, or changes in consumer behavior. For instance, if you have identified a new audience with high potential for growth, you may want to allocate more budget towards targeted marketing efforts to reach this customer base.

Threats

Threats are the external factors that can negatively impact your marketing efforts. These are the challenges and risks that you need to be aware of in order to minimize their impact. Examples of threats in marketing might include changes in consumer preferences, new competitors entering the market, or shifting economic conditions. For instance, if a new competitor has entered your market, you may want to evaluate your marketing strategies and tactics to ensure that you are effectively differentiating your brand from the competition.

How to Conduct a SWOT Analysis for Marketing

Conducting a SWOT analysis for marketing is relatively simple and can be done in several steps. Here's a basic outline for how to do it:

Gather data: The first step in conducting a marketing SWOT analysis is to gather data on your marketing efforts, your target audience, and your competitors. This can include customer feedback, sales data, market research, and other relevant information. The goal of this step is to gather as much data as possible to support your assessments in the next steps.

Identify your strengths: This is the internal analysis of your marketing plan where you make a list of your company's key strengths in marketing. Consider the things you do well and what sets you apart from your competitors. What are your unique selling points? What are your core competencies?
Assess your weaknesses: Next, make a list of your company's weaknesses in marketing. This is where you assess your internal shortcomings. What are the areas where your marketing efforts fall short? What can you improve upon?
Determine opportunities: Next up is the external analysis of your marketing plan, whereby you look at the market and identify the trends and changes that could positively impact your marketing efforts. What are the trends in your industry? Is there new technology, artificial intelligence software, or anything else to boost your productivity? What are the untapped markets you can explore?
Analyze threats: Here, you assess the external challenges that could negatively impact your marketing efforts. What are the challenges posed by your competitors? What are the changes in the market that may negatively impact your marketing efforts?
Evaluate the results: After you've identified your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, take some time to evaluate the results. Determine which factors are the most important and which areas need the most attention.
Develop a plan of action: Based on the results of your SWOT analysis, develop a plan of action for how you will address your weaknesses, capitalize on your strengths, take advantage of opportunities, and minimize the impact of threats.
Regularly reevaluate: Because marketing is something that keeps changing over time, it's important to regularly review and update your SWOT analysis. This will help you stay up-to-date with changes in the market and make sure your marketing efforts are always effective.

SWOT Analysis Example

Below is a SWOT Analysis example for a marketing agency:

Strengths:

Experienced and knowledgeable marketing team
Strong portfolio of successful marketing campaigns and projects
Wide range of services, including digital marketing, branding, and advertising
Strong relationships with media outlets and influencers

Weaknesses:

Relatively high prices compared to smaller or less established agencies
Limited ability to handle large-scale, complex projects
Dependence on key clients for a significant portion of revenue
Limited international reach and presence

Opportunities:

Growing demand for digital marketing services
Ability to expand into new industries and markets
Opportunities for growth and expansion through acquisitions or partnerships with other agencies
Growing awareness of the importance of branding and marketing to businesses of all sizes

Threats:

Intense competition from larger and more established agencies
Disruptions in the advertising and marketing industry, such as changes in consumer preferences or technology
Increased regulation of marketing practices and advertising
Changes in consumer spending patterns, particularly in a weak economy

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By considering these strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, the marketing agency can develop a plan to address its weaknesses, capitalize on its strengths, and position itself for success in a competitive industry.

Common Mistakes in SWOT Analysis

While it can be a valuable tool, SWOT analysis is not always done correctly, and there are several mistakes that can occur.

Lack of Objectivity

One of the biggest mistakes in SWOT analysis is the lack of objectivity from those conducting the analysis. When evaluating your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, it's important to be honest and unbiased. This can be difficult when personal opinions and emotions are involved. To avoid this mistake, it's important to gather data and opinions from a variety of sources, including employees, customers, and industry experts.

Not Considering the Right Factors

Another common mistake in SWOT analysis is not considering the right factors. As you identify your strengths and weaknesses, it's best to focus on factors that are relevant to your business and the market.

For example, while a strong company culture may be important, it may not be relevant to your marketing efforts. It's important to focus on factors that are directly related to your marketing strategy and can impact your success.

Ignoring External Factors

SWOT analysis is designed to evaluate both internal and external factors, but some organizations tend to focus too much on internal factors and ignore external ones. This can lead to a limited understanding of the market and can impact your ability to capitalize on opportunities and minimize threats. That’s why it's important to consider both internal and external factors when conducting a SWOT analysis.

Not Updating Regularly

It is important to keep in mind that a SWOT analysis is not a one-time event. Marketing is a constantly evolving field, and it's important to regularly reevaluate your SWOT analysis to stay up-to-date with changes in the market.

However, many organizations make the mistake of not updating their SWOT analysis regularly, which can lead to an outdated understanding of their position in the market.

Not Using the Results

Finally, a common mistake in SWOT analysis is not using the results. After conducting a SWOT analysis, it's important to integrate the results into your marketing strategy. Plan how you will address your weaknesses, capitalize on your strengths, take advantage of opportunities, and minimize the impact of threats. Even so, many organizations make the mistake of not following through on these plans, which can limit the effectiveness of the SWOT analysis.

Conclusion

SWOT analysis is a powerful tool that can help marketers make better decisions and achieve more impactful results. Understanding your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, marketers can help you identify areas for improvement, capitalize on new trends, and stay ahead of the competition. By incorporating SWOT analysis into your marketing strategy, you as a marketer can drive more success for your business and create more value for customers.

In case you need assistance with paid search, retail or social advertising, Marin Software may interest you. The platform offers expert solution for digital marketers to save time and scale their campaigns. Get in touch today!

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Mike Stuzzi is a guest blog contributor for Marin Software.

SIS Deer Valley Content Highlights - December 2023

Some months ago, MarinOne attended Search Insider Summit’s Performance Marketing event in Deer Valley, Utah. While skiing, snow shoeing, snowmobiling and more winter fun set the tone for a casual, social atmosphere…the insights and expertise that were shared during the speaking sessions I would call anything but casual. Here are our quick and brief “too long didn’t read” notes on the content that was covered.

Keynote Presentation: Super Coffee's Digital Marketing Blend in an Omnichannel World

Super Coffee has been one of the nation's top five ready-to-serve coffees since 2015 when they quickly reached a $400 million company. They can now be found in over 70,000 stores and online, prompting the need for an update to their digital marketing efforts to continue their success. Jimmy Dicicco (co-founder and Chief Brand Officer) and Tyler Ricks (Chief Executive Officer) talked about their journey and how their digital strategy transformed over time. They also explained their strategy for maintaining a balance between expanding their business and staying profitable, along with the methods to measure ROI.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Jimmy DeCicco, Co-founder, Chief Brand Officer, Super Coffee

Tyler Ricks, Chief Executive Officer, Super Coffee

"We shouldn't think in silos"

Stopped dividing ecomm goals and retail goals, looked at all business holistically

Clued into their target market, initial targeting was very broad but it did give them the data they needed to establish the right audiences

Seeking protein, avoiding sugar, keto

Primary focus on lifetime value, built up the subscription model
With the growth of revenue and reduction of paid media spend, they were able to raise a significant amount of funding for the business
All consumers are omnichannel

Presentation: Winning at Retail Media: Leveraging Retail Media in Today’s Unique Economy

Morgan Chemij, HP's Global Senior Director of Marketplaces, offered great insights about retail media and shopper marketing! He discussed how marketers can ensure that they remain up to date and well-informed on new retail media trends. The recent trend of diverting money away from traditional media channels and allocating it towards retail marketing, means understanding the importance of this type of marketing is paramount for any brand or advertising team. He went into depth about how retail media has been gaining immense traction in the marketing sphere.

Major players like Amazon, Walmart Connect, Target Roundel and Instacart are taking advantage of this trend to leverage their reach and engagement, while new platform partners like Costco and Best Buy are rapidly growing and making a mark. Major retail d2c brands particularly have been using these platforms to propel growth and success for their businesses. Chemij gave tips on where to place bets, what types of activations are likely to be the most successful, and HP's approach and learnings during their Retail Media journey.

PRESENTER

Morgan Chemij, Global Marketplace Strategy & Execution, HP

Amazon is still leading in retail media, but Walmart and Instacart are both taking a significantly higher share than they once did. Multiple media networks is critical at this point.
Wayfair, Ebay, Costco, Macy's, Best Buy, The Home Depot, Target, Tesco, 7-11, and Kroger are all emerging networks that are gaining traffic and taking market share. (we need to get with all of these!)
Retail media networks offer a convenience to consumers that they really enjoy. Buyers like to have a personalized experience, especially when it's with a brand they trust. Not everyone may want to share their information or activity to any advertiser online, but they may be more willing to "allow cookies" when it's a specific brand they like.
HP invested in search on smaller media networks like Costco and had a 13% conversion lift and lowered their CPA to just $12.

Panel Debate: Automation - Friend or Foe?

The ad tech industry has progressed significantly by automating a great deal of the process for building, publishing and optimizing paid media campaigns. This shift has taken away more control from marketers. It's understandable to be wary of AI algorithms when it comes to content creation and optimization. Figuring out the perfect balance between automation and human input is key for a successful campaign. To gain more insight into this topic, Annie Stickney moderated a debate-style panel discussion where leading marketers discussed their experiences with artificial intelligence and automation.

MODERATOR

Annie Stickney, VP OmniChannel Analytics - Head of Search Analytics, JP Morgan Chase

PANELISTS

Michael Aburas, Director of Digital Marketing, Icon Parking

Brett Geeser, Head of Paid Search, Cross Media

Jonathan Kagan, VP, Search, 9Rooftops @jonkagan

Brett - "Trust but verify"
Annie - Gonzalez vs. Google
Jonathan - Content terrorism, Twitter is a danger

Difficult brand decisions to ethically rule out or keep geographical areas where controversial bills are passed, like Texas vaccination law

Michael - brand association, his view is to keep things right in the middle

Free speech vs. brand messaging
US and New Zealand allow pharmaceutical advertising

Many global countries do not allow it

Presentation: Peak Behind the Curtain – Driving Organizational Change During Uncertainty

In this time of ongoing uncertainty, marketers must be nimble and flexible to stay on top of consumer's evolving needs. Being able to respond quickly is critical for success is critical. Vivian Chang, the head of direct-to-consumer at The Clorox Company, discussed how the iconic CPG brand is optimizing and adapting its organization to ensure a successful long-term outlook. During her presentation, she covered essential tactics for marketing operations success like delivering over revenue, successful change management, and finding a balance between short-term and long-term objectives.

PRESENTER

Vivian Chang, VP Growth, Clorox DTC, The Clorox Company

Martech landscape is overwhelming
How do you determine the tools that are needed?
How do you be agile?
How do you develop teams to be successful at driving strategy?
Be a growth engine

Get started! Be aware you'll probably pivot, but you won't know until you try SOMETHING

Balance long term and short term mentality

Be more reactive
Respond to the customers' wants and needs

Get creative on showing success

Incremental omni revenue
High quality first party data
Insights to drive brand efficiency
Early learning for R&D innovation

Mobilize support through allies
Build a flexible people organization

FTEs, contractors, AND agencies
Put people in the places that they will have the greatest long-term impact

Clarify and simplify
Own, don't abdicate decisions
Check your ego
Celebrate the small wins
Take care of you

Keynote Presentation: The Future of Traffic Generation - Why Branding & SEO Matter in a High CAC Environment

Despite a complex customer acquisition climate, companies are still looking for effective solutions to drive traffic and sales. Brands and retailers are held to high expectations to achieve their goals in this landscape. Establishing a strong presence through conventional branding and SEO is essential for achieving success within a performance marketing strategy. These channels provide valuable assistance to paid media for maximizing the return on your investments.

Amy Madonia, Executive Director of Global Ecommerce at The Estée Lauder Companies, explained how the world's biggest makeup brand made use of storytelling techniques to differentiate themselves online. She also covered the future of demand generation in today's digital environment which is changing rapidly.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Amy Madonia, Executive Director, of Global Ecommerce, The Estée Lauder Companies

$500M in charitable donations to those affected by HIV or AIDS
Focus on AOV - virtual try on or "trend try on" is increasing the number of products each user buys
Commitment, persistance, and elbow grease - there was no ownership for SEO, so they created a team of engaged and committed people that would work on easy tasks in sprints

Case Study: Becoming Relevant via Cultural Moments

H&R Block saw an opportunity to reach a younger audience and enhance its brand perception when the NCAA updated its Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) regulations in 2021. College athletes had the chance to make a large profit off of their NIL, which presented an appealing opportunity for tax preparation companies. It enabled them to join in on a relevant cultural moment and effectively connect with consumers. Pierson Curtis, Director of Growth Marketing at H&R, talked about how their culturally sensitive and purpose-driven campaign led to better performance across various paid, earned and owned channels.

PRESENTER

Pierson Curtis, Director of Growth Marketing & Engagement, H&R Block

Case Study: Affiliates & Partnerships: Where Brand and Lower Funnel Merge

It's possible to achieve a mutually beneficial situation among Brand and lower funnel marketers. Through Affiliate and Partnership programs, teams can collaborate in creating profitable strategies and tactics for all involved. Kristina has done a commendable job at Big Island Coffee Roasters as their lower funnel marketer. 'Partnerships' has become her priority, right after her love for coffee. This initiative has enabled Kristina to support her Brand colleagues in various ways. By thinking out of the box and applying creative strategies, marketers can create fresh opportunities and deliver excellent results that are beyond usual PR and Brand activities.

PRESENTER

Kristina Smith, Head of DTC, Big Island Coffee Roasters

Digiday Media Buying Summit Recap 2023 - New Orleans

The media buying industry is constantly evolving, and staying on top of the latest trends and strategies is crucial for success. That's why events like the Digiday Media Buying Summit are so valuable. Industry experts and thought leaders come together to share insights, discuss challenges, and explore new opportunities.

The recent Digiday Media Buying Summit in New Orleans was no exception. Over the course of several days, attendees had the chance to hear from a variety of speakers, participate in workshops and panel discussions, and network with peers from across the industry.

One of the key themes that emerged from the summit was the ongoing challenge of data privacy and how it's impacting media buying. As more and more consumers become aware of the data being collected about them and the ways it's being used, there's a growing push for greater transparency and control. This has led to increased regulation, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the United States.

Media buyers are having to adapt to these changes by being more transparent with consumers about how their data is being used, and by ensuring that they're only collecting and using data that's truly necessary. They're also exploring alternative ways to target audiences, such as contextual advertising, which targets ads based on the content of the page rather than the user's data.

Another topic that received a lot of attention at the summit was the continued growth of programmatic advertising. Programmatic has become an increasingly popular way to buy and sell advertising, as it allows for greater targeting and efficiency. However, there are still challenges to be addressed, such as ad fraud and brand safety.

To combat these issues, media buyers are investing in more sophisticated fraud detection tools and partnering with trusted publishers to ensure that their ads are appearing in safe and reputable environments. They're also exploring new approaches to programmatic, such as bringing programmatic in-house, which can give them greater control over their campaigns and data.

In addition to these challenges, the summit also highlighted some of the exciting opportunities that are emerging in media buying. One such opportunity is the growing importance of connected TV (CTV). As more consumers shift away from traditional TV and towards streaming services, CTV has become an increasingly important channel for advertisers.

Media buyers are exploring ways to take advantage of this trend, such as by using data to target specific households or by partnering with streaming services to create unique ad experiences.

Advertisers are being faced with new, ever-changing obstacles due to fluctuating budgets, varying company and industry objectives and unpredictable customer behavior. This creates tension between brand marketers and the platforms from which ads are purchased.

This puts additional pressure on agencies and third party tools like MarinOne to bridge the gap and represent both parties well–ensuring marketers get the best possible return on their advertising investment, while the ad platforms' requirements are met to ensure their audiences are protected. Speak with one our expert consultants to learn how you can increase ad efficiency while remaining compliant.

We were glad to be apart of this years' Digiday Media Buying event in New Orleans, alongside our partner LinkedIn, to bring you, our clients and partners, the most up to date information possible. Continue to watch our blog for more insights that were gathered throughout this 3 day event over the coming weeks.

Content Marketing

Creative

Unlock the Secrets to Efficient Content Creation: 10 Fresh Ideas for 2023

Creating high-quality content that resonates with your audience is more important than ever in 2023. The amount of content produced and shared online is staggering, and you need to find ways to stand out from the crowd.

Marketers also need to be consistent, so finding ways to make your content creation more efficient, impactful, and memorable should be a priority. To help, we've put together 10 fresh ideas for efficient content creation in 2023 that will help you connect with your audience, drive engagement, and reach your content marketing goals.

From beginners to those who wish to revamp an existing content strategy, these tips will make things easier for you this year, and beyond.

Tip #1: Plan and organize your content

To ensure you create content efficiently, you must have a clear plan and strategy. A content calendar is a great way to accomplish this strategy while also guaranteeing that you publish relevant and engaging content regularly. Always prioritize your tasks based on audience demand and your content goals, and use a mockup generator with pre-designed templates to provide an idea of the look and feel of your content.

With a content plan, you can ensure your content focuses on your current products, releases, services, and business happenings while aligning with the overall marketing strategy. Your content plan should be a roadmap for creating, publishing, and ensuring that you achieve a better return on investment (ROI) for your content marketing efforts.

Tip #2: Repurpose and upcycle old content

Instead of starting from scratch every time you create new content, consider repurposing and updating existing content. For example, you could turn a blog post into an infographic or use it to create a podcast. This approach saves time and ensures that you're making the most of the content you've already created; no one is scanning back through your feed to see what you posted a year ago, and if they do, they likely won't point out a double-up.

Take your existing content and modify it in new and innovative ways to speak to new audiences, drive engagement, and above all, save time. Extending the lifespan of your content by turning a blog post into a video, for example, also means you'll see more value from all content efforts while building brand recognition and creating a strong, consistent brand image.

Tip #3: Collaborate with micro-influencers and crowdsource ideas

Collaborating with other departments, influencers, or subject matter experts can help create better content. Use crowdsourcing techniques, such as surveys, to gather feedback and understand what types of content your audience wants to see.

This strategy will help point your content creation in the right direction, whether it be a social post or a high-converting blog. You can also leverage the audiences of the people or organizations you collaborate with to see higher reach to new audiences, who are potential customers. For example, micro-influencers, individuals with a relatively small but dedicated social following, can be a great way to generate sales.

Some benefits of working with micro-influencers include:

Higher engagement rates: Micro-influencers often have higher engagement rates than more significant influencers, as they have a more dedicated and engaged following. Your brand message has a better chance of reaching and resonating with your target audience.
More authentic relationships: Micro-influencers often have personal relationships with their followers. This connection means their endorsement is more authentic and trustworthy.
Cost-effective: Micro-influencers typically charge less for their services, making them a cost-effective option.
Niche reach: You can target a specific niche or area of expertise, which can help your brand reach a targeted audience.
Long-term relationships: Micro-influencers are often open to forming long-term relationships with brands, which can help build brand recognition and credibility over time.

Tip #4: Use storytelling and other visual elements

Make your content more engaging and memorable with images, videos, and other data visualization to understand complex information. Where possible, try to tell a story about your brand, the products, or whatever your content is focusing on. People want to be entertained and interested by the content they see; if you can achieve this, your content will perform much better.

To weave storytelling into your content, consider the following tips:

Identify your story: Determine the main story you want to tell and ensure that it aligns with your brand and messaging.
Use relatable characters: Help audiences personally connect with your story, either with relatable fictional characters or real people such as customers or employees.
Create a strong emotional connection: Use emotional appeals such as humor, excitement, or heartache to create an emotional connection with your audience.
Use vivid imagery: Descriptive language, images, and video help bring your story to life.
Make it relevant: Ensure that your story is relevant by tying it to your customer's needs, wants, and interests.
Keep it concise: A focused story is good; avoid unnecessary details that can distract from the main message.

These storytelling tips apply to everything from social posts to sales promotion examples and landing pages. Great visuals and interesting stories go hand in hand with other SEO tactics. If you run a Shopify store for your business, some of the best Shopify apps can help you combine all of these elements seamlessly.

Tip #5: Inform your content with data

Data is a powerful tool that can inform your content strategy and help you create stories that resonate with your audience. By using analytics and metrics, you can track the performance of your content and make data-driven decisions to improve its effectiveness.

If you build a scalable content marketing campaign, you can easily pivot as you receive new data about content performance. From the types of people reacting to your content to the most popular pages of your website, data helps you understand what your audience wants, which is the key to successful content creation.

Tip #6: Incorporate voice and audio content

Voice-activated and audio content, such as podcasts, are increasingly popular. These formats allow you to reach new audiences and create more immersive experiences, making them a great way to diversify your content and engage with your audience in new ways.

You can also think about voice-activated video content designed for voice assistants and triggered by voice commands. This strategy can be a great lead magnet if your video content is engaging and informative.

Tip #7: Create interactive and immersive content

Engage your audience by encouraging them to take action. This can be done with interactive quizzes, 360-degree videos, or augmented reality experiences. These formats help you create a deeper connection while driving higher engagement and conversion rates.

Consider elements such as user input, which encourages audience engagement and involvement as they build a deeper connection with your brand. Immersive content can also help users to better understand complex concepts. For example, imagine a 360-degree view of a product or VR experience demonstrating how a service works.

Tip #8: Use higher quality video content

Video content is a powerful tool for engaging and building a deeper connection with your audience. However, whether it is live video or animation, it needs to be of a certain level of quality to help bring your content to life in a more impactful way.

Invest in high-quality video editing and production to help maintain your audience's attention and show the value of your products and services. Poor-quality video can create a negative effect, reflecting poorly on your business and lowering the perceived quality of your products and services. Once completed, enlist the help of tools that ensure quality and secure uploads for efficient content processing with large video files.

Tip #9: Specific content tailored for social media

While you can use social media to distribute and promote any of your content, it is important to think about specific content built for designated platforms. This content can be short and humorous videos for TikTok, industry-relevant opinion pieces for LinkedIn, and carousel posts or reels for Instagram. Craft content that suits the platform, then engage with your audience in real-time.

To do this successfully, you will need to understand the unique strengths and weaknesses of each platform. As some social media sites reward users who post regularly, use an AI Content Creation Platform to get a head-start on your social media-specific content and create in advance.

Tip #10: Benefit from personalization and targeting

Personalization and targeting are essential for creating content that speaks directly to your audience. Be it personalized email campaigns or targeted eCommerce ads, this method allows you to work smarter as opposed to harder with your content marketing.

Ensure that your content reaches the right people at the right time to see higher engagement and conversion rates. This strategy is a cost-efficient way to spend your marketing budget and will likely yield greater results as your attention and effort are focused on people who are somewhat already interested in the products or services you offer.

Focus on these areas to enjoy quality results

These efficient content creation ideas will help you make sure you provide quality output for your audience in 2023. Always remember that the key to success is understanding your audience, goals, and whatever makes your content stand out.

Experiment with these ideas and find the ones that work best for you and your audience, then lean into them and reap the rewards. We also recommend supercharging your paid search, social, and e-commerce advertising with MarinOne, and maximizing the return on every single marketing dollar you spend.

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Luke Carlino is a guest contributor to Marin Software.

Social

Why Managing Your Brand's Online Reputation is More Critical Than Ever Before

You’re a customer-first brand that prioritizes customer satisfaction, but no matter how hard you try, there will always be a handful of unhappy customers who leave disgruntled reviews or share negative sentiments about your brand on social media. Perhaps they received a faulty product, or maybe they were just having a bad day and the product didn’t live up to their expectations. You can’t please everyone, but having a strong online reputation management (ORM) strategy can minimize the impact of negative feedback to help your brand maintain a positive reputation.

Online reputation management (ORM) involves monitoring mentions of your brand name on the internet, primarily in reviews and on social media. This may sound like a job for your PR team, but ORM is different. PR teams work proactively to increase exposure to your brand and strengthen your reputation. ORM is a more defensive strategy that centers around seeking out negative content and working to minimize the damage.

Virality's Role in Online Reputation Management

In the age of Instagram, ORM is more important than ever before. Social media algorithms favor viral content, and unfortunately negative and controversial content has some of the highest potential for virality. This is because virality is based on engagement. Engagement meaning, how many people are watching the video (most likely a tiktok or reel) from start to finish? How many people are liking and commenting? The more controversial a video is, the higher the engagement will be. This can cause negative press around a brand to spread quickly. However, the phenomenon of virality also causes trends to come and go rapidly. So while negative press around a brand could be trending for a day or two, as soon as a new scandal happens, the internet will all but forget about it.

Internet trends move so quickly that most viral mishaps are often looked past within a matter of weeks. For example, many of us remember the Kendall Jenner + Pepsi Ad Debacle of 2017. For those who don’t, Pepsi released an ad where Kendall Jenner walked into a crowd of protestors, approached front line police, and handed the police officers a can of Pepsi which miraculously ended a conflict between police and protestors. Viewers were outraged as they felt this ad belittled protestors and minimized the issue of police brutality.

In April of 2017 it felt like this ad was all anyone was talking about. Folks on Twitter were calling for boycotts of all Pepsi products, and Pepsi’s stock certainly took a hit. But today, most people scarcely even remember that it happened. This scenario exemplifies how brands can quickly move past even the most ‘cancellable’ scenarios. Between Pepsi’s reputation as a staple household soda and the speed at which internet gossip moves, Pepsi recovered quickly. By May, the internet had moved on to other scandals, and nowadays no one thinks twice about drinking a Pespi. Virality is both an enemy and a friend to brands trying to maintain a positive online reputation.

Online Reputation Management aims to get ahead of any negative sentiments and address them before they become a larger, or even a viral issue. Things rarely escalate to the viral level, but regardless, social media has made people more connected than ever before which enables negative or positive sentiment about a brand to spread quickly if you let it.

Here are a few key steps to an effective ORM strategy:

Hire a Community Manager or Community Management Team

If someone tweets about a negative experience and tags your brand, they expect a response within a few hours. The speed of communication on social media demands a dedicated employee or team to monitor mentions of the brand on Twitter, Instagram and Tiktok. Additionally, if a customer contacts a brand via social media and does not receive a timely response, they may post a negative comment on the brand’s account in order to get the company’s attention, or to express their frustration and gain sympathy from others online. Instagram has even started including a ‘typically responds within’ blurb that users see when messaging a verified business account. People are utilizing social media as a way to get a quick response from a company representative when they have an issue. And this makes sense; we scarcely talk on the phone anymore as everyone communicates through Instagram instead. So instead of relying on a customer support hotline, brands need to meet customers where they're at, which is on Instagram and Twitter. For example, check out this helpful exchange with a member of the community management team at clothing retailer Savage X Fenty:

Their community management team responded within minutes and began working to answer the question at hand. This quick response was possible because Savage X Fenty has a dedicated team managing their social media accounts. If this customer were to receive no response to their direct message, they might start commenting on the brand’s posts asking why they’re being ignored. Then, others will see the comments and develop a negative impression of the brand.

It’s interesting; people spend so much time on Instagram talking to their friends who are also on Instagram all the time and therefore respond quite quickly to each other. But now, people expect the same behavior from brands. Which is fair, since brands want their followers to see their social media content as native and relatable, just like a post from a friend. In turn, brands are held to the same standards that we have for our peers when it comes to social media interactions. These high expectations are exactly why having a community management team is so important.

Provide a Respectful Public Response, then Move the Conversation to Private Messages

Let’s say a customer tags a clothing company in a tweet stating their pants developed holes after just two wears. The customer likely wants two things; a refund and a public apology. A generic example of an appropriate response would be to reply to the tweet stating “This is not the experience we want our customers to have. Please message us directly so that we can make it right.” This way, you’re showing you care and will work to correct the situation, but you're also taking the conversation out of a public forum so the details can be handled privately. The disgruntled customer gets their resolution, and the public viewers of the tweet see that you value customer satisfaction.

The same goes for responding to negative reviews on your website. Publicly state that you are sorry to hear about the customer’s negative experience, and ask them to email your customer service team directly so you can make it right. This way future customers who read the review will know that if they receive a faulty or defective product, the situation will be remedied.

Here’s an example of a great response from Starbucks to a customer complaint on Twitter:

The Starbucks care team expressed empathy, apologized, and provided clear and concise instructions on how to continue the conversation in a private forum. That’s how it’s done!

Be Honest

Do not delete negative reviews or “bury” negative reviews under positive ones. Customers are smart, and an overwhelming amount of 5 star reviews will be seen as a red flag that your company is hiding negative reviews. It may seem counterintuitive, but a couple bad reviews actually help to validate the positive reviews by proving that the feedback is unbiased. However, if a review has overly vitriolic or profane language, it’s best to delete it as that is an unreasonable reaction and you don’t want other customers to be confronted with foul language when visiting your site.

If your company makes a more widespread mistake, quickly post a public apology stating why the mistake happened and what you plan to do to fix it. Utilizing the pants with holes example again, I’d recommend an instagram story post explaining that the fabric was faulty and the team will be sending out higher quality replacements or refunding customers who experienced that issue. The Instagram story is the best placement for a public apology because it is easily visible by your engaged customer base, but it won’t live on your Instagram grid forever like a feed post will. This way, you’ve addressed the issue without drawing unnecessary attention to it, so it can be resolved and your brand can move on.

Be Helpful

In order to be forgiven in the court of public opinion, you must truly take action to remedy the issue at hand. This often comes in the form of issuing a refund or store credit for a problematic item. Or if you provide a service, making fixes easy for the customer. Here’s a great example of a helpful response from Jetblue Airways:

The ORM team responded quickly and helpfully. Rather than just telling the customer to stay on the line until they reach a customer service representative, the community manager offered to fix the issue for them. The key here is that they are making issue resolution as easy as possible for the customer, diffusing frustration. This experience could have caused K. M. Sutton and their followers to stop being brand loyal to Jetblue, but by fixing the issue, their team was able to retain a loyal customer.

Stay Informed with Google Alerts

Set up Google Alerts for brand terms so that you know immediately when any negative press arises. Setting up a Google alert is easy. Simply visit https://www.google.com/alerts, type in your brand name and enter in a few settings around where the alerts should be sent and how often you would like to be alerted:

Google alerts are a great way to monitor sentiment around your brand, both positive and negative.

In conclusion, a branding issue or bad review can feel like a big deal, but utilizing our ORM tips, your brand should be able to recover quickly. The internet moves fast! So as long as you’ve got a plan in place that involves reacting to negative sentiment with empathy and truly making things right with your customers, you’ve got nothing to worry about.

ORM is a part of your business that requires empathy, energy and genuine connection between the customer and the brand representative. If you're struggling to find the budget to hire a dedicated community manager, or your current team lacks the time to do community management yourselves, consider using a tool like MarinOne to automate some of your more mundane and time consuming tasks like reporting, paid media ad creation, and ad account optimization. Automate the things you can, so that you can focus on the things you can’t. Click here to schedule a demo of MarinOne today.

How to Develop the Most Effective Demand Generation Strategies in 2023

Businesses all over the world strive to convert brand awareness into customer conversions and profits, but marketing and customer service efforts are only as effective as the principles that are driving them. Demand generation is the strategy that helps B2B and B2C companies create reliable brand interest that translates directly to high quality leads.

Gordon Ferris, Director of Growth Marketing at Marin Software, shares significant insight to help us understand the principles that will define the success of demand generation strategies in 2023 and beyond. With more than a decade of experience in search, social media, and ecommerce marketing, Gordon generously explains the key tenets of demand generation that every marketer must understand to succeed in both B2B and B2C companies.

The Core Tenets of Demand Generation

Understand Your Brand

Most brands believe they know what they stand for in a general sense but this does not always translate into effective messaging. A major reason for this disconnect is not knowing how the brand is perceived within the minds of internal and external stakeholders. Each brand makes a promise to their customers and these promises must be ratified through consistent, concrete behaviors. Businesses that successfully communicate their marketing messages consistently have seen a 33% rise in overall revenue.

Gordon shares that businesses must “understand the power of their product and what makes their brand unique because this is what people will respond to. This needs to be actively pushed through across marketing activities and channels.”

Understand Your Customer

Once a business defines the promise it makes to its customers, it needs to understand how those promises relate to each customer segment’s needs. Marketing can be viewed as one-way communication from a brand to its customers, but successful demand generation requires more than that. Businesses should actively collaborate and engage with customers to collect customer insights to better define and meet their needs. This can also help businesses create brand advocates that further amplify a business’ message through organic communication.

Even if businesses want to listen to their customers, it can be challenging to define what they’re looking for. Gordon explains how businesses can break down a customer’s needs into two distinct categories. “Businesses need to identify a customer’s rational and emotional needs. Rational needs relate to the functional needs and attributes they want from your product. This can be quality, variety, efficiency, saving time, reducing cost and effort, and more. Emotional needs, on the other hand, relate to how your customers want to feel when interacting with your product. This could be a customer feeling confident or enjoying exclusivity through the ownership or use of your product.”

Understand Your Product Positioning

In an ideal world, the relationship between a brand and its customer would be enough to translate effective communication into active demand. However, brands don’t exist in a vacuum. Competing services, products, and brands present constant challenges. This has led to almost three quarters of people actively avoiding advertising with the use of ad blockers or other tools. To avoid overwhelming the customer, businesses must position themselves as a partner customers can trust.

Gordon adds that “positioning can only be done appropriately when businesses know their brand and all its components. They also need to understand the competitors they share space with. Marketers should ask questions such as what are some of the brands in your direct category? What brands fall just outside the category, but have an overlap or affinity with your customers? Analyze competitor brand positioning; how do they want to be perceived by their customers?”

How to Generate Demand Effectively in 2023 and Beyond

According to Gordon, “Once you do those first three steps of understanding your brand, your customers, and your positioning, then you get into tactics and the tactics become easier.”

The principles listed above should apply across all demand generation activity. They can help businesses be more proactive in learning about their customers, themselves, and their competitors.

Remain Authentic to Your Customers

Authenticity has been cited by 88% of customers as an important factor in determining whether they like and will support a brand. Even if marketing messages have a proven track record of success with a customer base, if the brand that is sharing those messages doesn't believe it, it will not resonate with customers. Businesses should identify and amplify the messages that lie in the overlap of the brand’s beliefs and the customer’s needs.

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Learn to Make the Most of First-Party Data in a Cookieless World

Businesses have been trying to phase out the use of third-party cookies as major browsers and search engines ditch the information-gathering method in favor of first-party data. However, a staggering 83% of marketers still rely on third-party cookies to learn about their customers. Businesses must learn to extract actionable insights from the information they already have or are able to gather.

Gordon explains that “once someone is on your site, you need to make the most of that engagement. Allow your customers to find what they’re looking for, but at the same time, by the way they click or navigate your site, find what’s important to them.”

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Make it as Easy as Possible for Your Customers to Buy into Your Messaging

Marketers can sometimes overlook the needs of the average customer when designing messages that seem eloquent to their own eyes. While there is value in including flair in a brand’s marketing, it should always be accessible and easily understood by the business’ most important customers – and the message must connect to the priorities of the intended audience.

Businesses should actively “create bite-sized paths that are addressing specific value propositions or questions that your customers might have for your product or the industry you’re in,” shares Gordon.

With MarinOne, businesses can gather information about how well each message is resonating with their customers, learn what their customers are actually interested in, and how their competitors are faring with different marketing tactics and messages.

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To learn more about how MarinOne can help you reach your audiences more effectively, request a free demo of our solution now.

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Optimize Many Publishers With One Click

Advertisers know how important optimization is, whether it’s major changes or several small changes throughout the week. With Marin Insights, making these regular optimizations is easy. Our Insights are designed to save you time and to catch important details that may have been missed.

Many advertisers are used to looking through multiple publishers and making adjustments within each of them. With the recommendation engine in Marin, you can easily make adjustments to multiple publishers at once. Whether that is downloading the Insight and re-uploading with the desired changes or using the one-click implementation that will seamlessly adjust each publisher included in the Insight. Leveraging data from multiple publishers can be useful for advertisers as well.

How Various Marin Insights Work

In Marin's “Duplicate Keywords” Insight, the MarinOne tool will look through your account and find keywords with the same text, publisher, match type, location target, and audience. Instead of looking through the account to find these, they will automatically be searched for every day and show up in the Insights section. We have now made the process of this Insight and several others easier by adding a one-click implementation. Saving more time with the click of a button, rather than manually updating these.

In the “Keyword Expansion” Insight, artificial intelligence technology looks at top-performing keywords across publishers and recommends adding them to other publishers. If Microsoft has great performance with a specific keyword, our Insight AI will pick up on that and suggest it be added to Google as well.

About the Insights Algorithm

We have years of digital experience that we’ve applied to perfect these algorithms. Every day automated machine learning will search your publishers, seeking out new opportunities for performance improvement. Using the Insights tab can save advertisers time, effort, and money. There are also separate sections of the Insights page that divide the Insights by category. Insights are a key initiative, and we are continuously working on creating new Insights and finding the best way to implement them.

One-Click Implementation

Our one-click implementation Insights have been created for ease of execution, you click the button and we’ll do the rest. The one-click implementation Insights currently include;

Amazon Keyword Expansion - Add high performing search terms as exact keywords to gain bid control and improve performance.
Amazon Keyword Match Type Expansion - Add missing phrase and exact match keyword variations for high performing broad and phrase match keywords.
Apple Keyword Expansion - Add high performing search terms as exact keywords to gain bid control and improve performance.
Apple Keyword Match Type Expansion - Add missing exact match keyword variations for high performing broad match keywords.
Keyword Expansion - Add high performing search terms as exact keywords to gain bid control and improve performance.
Keyword Match Type Expansion - Add missing phrase and exact match keyword variations for high performing broad and phrase match keywords.
Negative Keyword Expansion - Add negative keywords for non-converting search terms to reduce wasteful spending.
Amazon Negative Keyword Expansion - Add negative keywords for non-converting search terms to reduce wasteful spending.
Budget Capped Campaigns - Increase budgets on high performing campaigns to improve overall efficiency. If spend needs to be maintained, reduce bid targets.
Ad Optimization - Pause or replace underperforming ads to drive more traffic to top performing ads.
Duplicate Keywords - Pause or delete duplicate keywords, keeping the keyword with the higher quality score or spend, to improve performance and make more informed bid decisions.
Landing Page Errors - Pause keywords directing traffic to broken landing pages until the issue is resolved.
Landing Page Errors (enhanced) - Resolve landing page errors or replace with functioning URLs.
Keyword Bid Overrides - Remove keyword bid overrides to allow Marin Bidding to optimize towards the bid strategy goal.
Bid Caps - Remove or raise bid strategy caps to allow Marin Bidding to operate more efficiently.
Bid Floors - Remove bid strategy floors to allow Marin Bidding to operate more efficiently.

Bid Changes Preview - Review bid changes recommended by Marin Bidding and set Bid Strategies to Traffic.
Bidding Reactivity - Prevent drastic daily bid changes by setting ‘Limit Bid Change under %’ to 25%.

The MarinOne Difference

There are many other Insights that we have within the platform as well. Some will eventually have one-click implementation, while others require more analysis. Advertisers have the ability to download any Insight on the page for a more thorough review if desired. We have set up our tool to include complete transparency on how we define an Insight which allows you to understand why specific recommendations have been made; and you will be able to implement Insights to several publishers from one page. By utilizing this tool, you will have more effectively optimized accounts and more time to focus on the real building blocks of your business.

To learn more about our automated paid media management Insights or any other campaign management quandary you may be facing, schedule a consultation with a MarinOne expert today.

Automation

How Augmented Analytics Will Affect Marketers in 2023

Augmented analytics is drastically changing the way marketers work, empowering them with better ways to identify customer needs, develop more effective campaigns, drive conversions, and ultimately improve business outcomes.

Using advanced tech solutions such as artificial intelligence to collect and analyze data, augmented analytics helps marketers make more informed, data-driven decisions. Simply put, it’s a smart and powerful solution that enables marketers to move way ahead of competitors by helping them achieve more with less. From providing smart insights to revealing valuable intelligence, augmented analytics is a game changer that can transform your business in 2023 and beyond.

What is Augmented Analytics?

Augmented analytics is a data processing approach that uses a variety of techniques, including data mining, statistical modeling, and machine learning, to analyze a wide range of historical and current data to improve data exploration and analysis. Applying advanced algorithms to the data enables businesses to better understand customer behavior, identify trends and anomalies, and make predictions that inform decisions based on facts, rather than intuition. By leveraging these complex algorithms, augmented analytics enhances the way businesses can use data for further analysis in business intelligence applications. This strategy has huge potential and is a key tool in helping marketers develop a strong competitive advantage. In fact, the augmented analytics market is expected to grow by 25% in the next five years, reaching $22.4 billion by 2025.

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4 Ways Augmented Analytics can Help Your Business

Using augmented analytics can multiply your business’s success by improving your bottom line and introducing new ways to boost campaign efforts.

Maximize ROI

Marketing teams confronted with frozen or shrinking budgets are nonetheless still expected to generate leads and build pipelines to increase revenue. Using augmented analytics, marketers can make data-driven decisions and optimize their marketing investments through accurate insights and recommendations. Instead of just relying on past experience, estimates, gut instinct, or trial and error, the technology provides an accurate picture of which campaigns are performing well and which aren't, enabling marketers to allocate their budgets effectively to maximize returns. Here are two ways augmented analytics can help optimize marketing budgets.

Budget Forecasting

Budget forecasting supports operational improvements that can lead to greater business success. For many marketers, monitoring spend versus allocated budget is a time-consuming process that is often prone to inaccuracies — especially when juggling several clients simultaneously. With augmented analytics, however, forecasting allows marketers to stay on track by providing historical and current information about budget spending so they can act on timely suggestions. This way, marketers can ensure that allocated budgets are spent according to plan, freeing time to spend on granular analysis of under- and overspending, preparing them to navigate future campaigns that will achieve higher ROAS.

Anomaly Detection

Another practical way augmented analytics can help marketers maximize ROI is through anomaly detection, a tool that uses historical data on metrics including clicks or CPM and impressions to identify and self-learn expectations for the metrics. When an anomaly is detected, the outlier is automatically flagged, indicating issues that can drain a budget. These anomalies reveal campaign performance problems that might have otherwise gone unnoticed, helping to minimize negative effects – or eliminate them altogether.

Rapid Time to Insight

The beauty of augmented analytics is the way its powerfully constructed machine learning algorithms reveal important insights that can save time and improve a company’s bottom line. Through real-time insights and recommendations based on data analysis, marketers can make more informed decisions, understand customer behavior and needs, and tailor their campaigns accordingly.

With such proactive insights, augmented analytics can not only help reduce risk, but can also minimize issues by allowing marketers to use its highly sophisticated number crunching to drive more sales, build effective pipelines, and retain customers.

Improve Customer Experiences

Augmented analytics give marketers accurate and detailed information about their customers that they might have not been able to obtain through other means. With greater insights about prospective and existing customers, marketers can improve customer experience by understanding how their customers will interact with their brand.

Since augmented analytics is able to unify a diverse range of datasets such as demographics, CRMs, psychographics, and more, it can provide critical information marketing teams need to maximize customer value. By exploring large volumes of different data, augmented analytics can also model and predict customer behaviors, calculate customer lifetime value, and discover customer trends and patterns — all of which can be used to improve customer experiences.

Task Automation

Marketers can also harness augmented analytics for smoother operations. By automating certain tasks, such as data preparation, data discovery, and data visualization, marketers can save heaps of time and effort. Additionally, augmented analytics can automatically generate charts, graphs, and other visualizations based on data analysis, helping marketers to quickly and easily understand and communicate the results of their analysis. When data is streamlined and manual tasks are automated, marketers can spend less time combing through data for insights, and more time focusing on other strategic business initiatives that demand attention.

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Getting started with augmented analytics

Here are three steps to help you get started with your augmented analytics journey.

Start Small and Choose a Use Case that is Aligned with Your KPIs

To begin using data science and artificial intelligence, your data doesn’t need to be perfect. Identify the business problem or opportunity you want to address. Focus on a use case that is aligned with your KPIs and has high business value. Once you see that it is successful, you can move on to other larger projects.

Invite your Whole Organization to be a Part of Your Analytics Initiatives

Being strategic about rolling out augmented analytics and collaborating with your entire company can help build trust and show employees that you want them to be involved with the implementation. Communicating with different stakeholders in your company will help them understand the value of the technology and how it can be used to drive business results. Encourage employees from across the organization to play a role in the initiative, demonstrating that you value their input and cooperation in achieving your business’s mission and goals.

Provide the Right Training to Gain the Most Value out of Your Investment

Concentrate on creating a data-driven culture. When you’re ready to start using augmented analytics as part of your company’s daily operations, establish strategies and offer training in place so employees can get the most out of the valuable data assets. When you include users from the beginning, they will likely be more invested in the outcome.

Exercise Flexibility

Be prepared to make changes along your augmented analytics journey. Encourage others to contribute feedback so you can gather insights and make adjustments as needed. A flexible approach supports iteration. In turn, when you iterate with stakeholders, you’ll be better equipped to adjust to their needs. Adopting a flexible outlook will help ensure a successful transformation for your business and make for a more seamless transition.

Using Augmented Analytics to Improve Your Campaigns

From identifying user segments to refining your target audiences, you can use augmented analytics to gain a deeper understanding of customer data and optimize your campaigns. With the right insights, you can effectively focus on those customers most likely to buy or respond positively to your offers, putting the right messages in front of them at the right time.

As you embark on your augmented analytics journey, remember that success is achieved through collaboration, training, flexibility, and the right data-driven strategies. When implemented properly and consistently across all areas of your business, these principles can help you maximize the value of your investment and take your analytics initiatives to the next level.

If you're eager to elevate your marketing efforts with sophisticated analytics, reach out to MarinOne for help. As a customizable, enterprise-class solution, MarinOne can help you more efficiently analyze your customer data, better understand your customers’ needs, and take advantage of the opportunities augmented analytics provides.

5 Persuasive Ads to Inspire You in 2023‍

There is surely something in our collective consciousness that responds to well-produced persuasive advertisements. From the highly memorable “Mac vs PC” series of ads to Coca-Cola’s use of a classic song from yesteryear, most people have an ad they remember fondly.

Businesses are constantly trying to gain the attention of customers through new persuasive advertising ideas and some have found more success than others. What’s their secret? Here are a few of the attributes that make some advertisements more persuasive than others.

Persuasive techniques in advertising

The following are psychological triggers that can be used to nudge people toward making a purchase.

Tell a Story

A persuasive ad should focus on telling a story that is hard for the viewer to forget. Research suggests that people are 20x more likely to recall stories than facts or figures. More often than not, people remember the story even more than the product, service, or brand being advertised!

How to do it: When you create an ad, use settings with characters that cause the viewer or listener to identify with a character's plight. Give your ads a narrative arc and watch as customers become more engaged.

Use Tailored Messaging

While there are a variety of persuasive advertising tactics that can work for your ad, focus on those that will resonate most with your target audience. Audiences respond better to tailored messaging that illustrates the benefits of what you offer and how it can improve their lives.

How to do it: In addition to making your messaging emotionally impactful, strive to make it short and sweet. Keeping things simple is a marketing strategy that works best to keep consumers interested.

Tap into Emotions

Emotions are responsible for the decisions we make in more ways than we realize and they play a far greater role in decision making than logic does. In fact, studies reveal that 70% of viewers are more likely to purchase a product after experiencing an intense emotional response. Connecting with your audience using emotional cues in your advertising — whether you’re making them laugh or pulling at their heartstrings — will make your brand more memorable.

How to do it: Emotional persuasion begins with understanding your audience. Once you know your audience well, you’ll be able to determine which trigger words are likely to work best. Combining trigger words with storytelling creates emotional engagement. But to truly evoke emotional appeal and gauge attention, make sure to be authentic.

Incorporate Celebrity Endorsements

The public is highly influenced by celebrities — what they say matters to a lot of people. Using celebrities as part of your promotion strategies will make your ad more persuasive. Tap into the ethos of popular people and online influencers and get them to tout your brand.

How to do it: Look for celebrities that are relatable to your target audience and a good fit for your brand. Better yet, reach out to celebrities who are already using your product or service. Plan to work through a talent manager or agent. And remember, make your ask very clear and be sure to provide the details of your campaign goals.

5 Persuasive Ads to Inspire You in 2023

With a new year ahead, it’s time to look back and take stock of some of the most persuasive ads that launched during 2022 and why they worked so well.

Dove “Toxic Influence”

Together with the marketing agency Ogilvy, Dove created this ad as a sequel to their previous campaigns such as “Reverse Selfie”, “Show Us”, and “Legacy” in pursuit of fighting for real beauty standards.

As part of their self-esteem project, Dove has made it their mission to inspire young individuals to remove toxic beauty advice from their social media feeds. The ad features teenage daughters and their mothers discussing the disturbing promotion of false beauty advice through using deepfakes and face-mapping technology to expose the dangers of social media’s toxic influence.

What they got right: By ensuring that their ad messaging is authentic, Dove has successfully reframed purchasing their beauty products for their audience. Beyond making people feel good about their brand, the ad focuses on connecting with others, evokes an emotional reaction, and expresses important values.

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Pringles “Stuck In”

During 2022's SuperBowl, the chip brand used its ad spot to highlight the 43% of consumers whose hand gets wedged at the bottom of the Pringles tube while trying to get to the last shattered chips.

The commercial declares that any discomfort their customers experience is “worth it” by highlighting the misadventures a determined Pringle snacker faces as he goes through life with a chip can permanently wedged on his arm.

What they got right: The brand took a comical approach to address a common pain point that Pringle fans encounter. Their sense of humor caters to the playful side of consumers by pointing to their brand’s heritage as a snack intended to be fun. They also appropriately combined the ad’s message with the perfect soundtrack: “Stuck on You” by Lionel Richie.

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Specsavers “I Don’t Go”

The optical retail chain Specsavers uses a playful tactic to raise awareness around its home visit proposition. The ad’s goal is to challenge public perceptions around the variety of services the brand offers. It showcases a series of characters laughing off the idea of going into a store since they can experience the service from the comfort of their own home.

What they got right: Through their ad, Specsavers successfully spotlights its home visits service while also driving brand reappraisal. It’s both powerful and emotive, and most importantly, aims to charm its customers while emphasizing the brand’s purpose of changing lives through better sight.

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Samsung “Love Hurts”

Cleverly crafted, this Samsung ad features a spider named Sam who falls in love with the Samsung Galaxy S22. The ad depicts the arachnid’s rollercoaster of emotions — ardor, pain, and joy — as it realizes the beauty of the phone’s camera lenses. The commercial closes with a happy ending and runs to the tune of “Love Hurts” by the legendary Scottish rock band Nazareth.

What they got right: Through the use of emotional storytelling, Samsung creates a memorable love story that is hard for consumers to forget. By doing so, the brand is able to shed light on its new camera innovation and also ensure a strong positioning in the highly competitive smartphone market.

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Apple’s “911”

Apple’s suspenseful ad revolves around how three individuals are conveniently able to call for help from their Apple Watch in the midst of an emergency. It’s as simple as dialing 911 from your wrist, by using Apple’s Emergency SOS feature.

What they got right: By using real-life trauma to advertise their product and portraying how it can make the difference between life and death, Apple’s ad becomes relatable, effective, chilling, and dystopian all at the same time. It creates a strong emotional response from viewers by striking a balance of fear and goosebumps, illustrating how powerful it can be in saving lives.

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These ads all attract and persuade viewers through emotional connection, relatability, and shared values — but above all, storytelling. These are the most powerful ways to create an ad that is sure to resonate with your audience.

How MarinOne can help you reach your audience

MarinOne can help you extract maximum value from your most persuasive marketing materials across different mediums, platforms, and channels. To find out how, contact one of our MarinOne experts today.

13 Advertising Techniques that Deliver Results (with Examples!)

Modern consumer expectations and behaviors demand a creative edge from advertisers and a winning strategy that customers will respond to. Even when you know your target audience well, it’s not always easy to figure out the secret formula that gets consumers to say, “here’s my money.” However, when the right advertising techniques are used, you will captivate your audiences’ attention and direct them enthusiastically into your marketing funnel without them even realizing it.

In a world where digital overload has made consumers resistant to ads, if you want to keep your audience engaged, you need to go above and beyond. Here are 13 compelling advertising techniques that will help you do just that and deliver the results you're seeking.

13 Advertising Techniques the Deliver Results

Color Psychology

Many colors elicit a specific emotional or physical reaction and, in doing so, shape human behavior. When it comes to your brand and your marketing strategies, they not only influence perceptions, but can create an intentional mood for consumers, setting the right tone and conveying a desired message. In fact, research has proven that between 62% and 92% of people make a subconscious judgment to purchase something based on color alone.

Lego’s “Make Your Own Story” ad, for example, uses color psychology to develop a playful scene with Star Wars figures. The brand strategically places the figures into a fun, casual atmosphere to tell a new story. By selecting orange — known to evoke emotions of warmth, friendliness, and enthusiasm — as the background color, they’ve created an open and inviting mood.

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Partner with Influencers and get Celebrity Endorsements

Partnering with a well-recognized influencer can help fast track your marketing efforts by getting your brand on the map. Doing so will also help build a big following. When consumers see popular influencers vouching for your products or services, it has a much more powerful impact on consumers than it would if the message were to come from your brand directly.

Take Nike, for instance. In their video ad with Billie Eilish, the brand successfully reached audiences through partnering with a star who’s recognized for her distinct style. The pop artist gave meaning to the campaign, placing an emphasis on sustainability.

“I want my collaboration with Nike to tell a story that not only highlights the importance of recycling but also reminds us that we need to take better care of our planet,” said Eilish.

By taking a stance on a social issue, the star took the brand initiative to new heights, tying into the emotion of the buyer to help create a following. As Nike has demonstrated, celebrity marketing is a high-impact marketing tool that can produce significant gains — an increase in brand awareness, credibility, and sales.

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Remember Time is a Valuable Asset to Consumers

According to recent statistics, 64% of customers prefer to shop with companies that can accommodate their needs in real time. In this day and age, consumers expect businesses to deliver results immediately, and if they can’t, consumers will look for someone else who can. No matter what product or service you offer, consumers are drawn to speed — how fast you can meet their expectations, or how you can save them time so they can spend it doing other things. Be sure to incorporate your time-saving advantages into all of your messaging across various marketing channels.

Sedex, a supply chain company, demonstrates their commitment to speed by using extreme illustrations in their ads to support their promise to consumers: “Trust us. We deliver it fast.” Consumers take comfort in knowing that they will get what they want, when they want it. When brands live up to consumer expectations, it results in customer loyalty, brand trust, and more.

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Focus on Needs, not Features

It’s easy for advertisers to fall into the trap of focusing on their product’s features. However, customers aren’t compelled to make a purchasing decision based on features alone. When you sell an outcome that impacts the consumer on an emotional level, customers are more persuaded by the value a product has to offer to them.

In the case of WeTransfer, their global brand campaign politely asks consumers to “Please leave”, explaining that their file sharing service is designed with the customer’s needs in mind so they can make the most of their time and get back to living their real lives. By focusing on needs instead of its features, WeTransfer highlights its company’s values: that it puts people first.

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Make it Relatable

To resonate with your customers on a deep level, create an ad that feels immediately familiar and establishes a meaningful connection. When you inspire a strong emotional reaction, you are more likely to convince consumers that you understand how they feel.

Nivea Men’s brilliant ad for Active Age moisturizers is a stellar example. In their “Because Life Makes Wrinkles” campaign, the brand illustrates how ordinary moments in life take a toll on us, causing wrinkles— something many people can relate to. Whether it’s taking care of children or getting in a fender bender, Nivea makes it apparent that stress affects everyone, and using a moisturizer is something everyone can benefit from.

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Use Landmarks in your Design

Using landmark images in your advertising campaigns can be a valuable visual asset. In fact, they can influence consumers' attentional focus and subsequent judgments. Take Asics, for example. To entice their marathon runners, the brand used a beautiful print ad to appeal to its consumers, conveying that they have the entire city of Los Angeles on the sole of their shoe. With a piercing image like that, who wouldn’t be motivated to go for a run?

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Minimalism

Implementing minimalism in advertising can be profoundly effective. When thoughtfully crafted, minimalist digital ads can get your message across without distracting clutter or over-stimulation, and are also more likely to increase conversion rates. These simple messages can be both thought-provoking and enticing for your consumers, ultimately capturing their attention in a way that motivates them to take action.

McDonald’s McDelivery service has mastered the art of this advertising technique. Their ads are simple, yet bold. In their campaign, elegant illustrations speak louder than words. As you can see from the example, the iconic food chain has proven that less, really is more.

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Repetition

Repetition is key to keeping your brand or product at the forefront of consumers’ minds. The marketing Rule of 7 states that a consumer needs to see or hear something seven times before it actually sinks in. Exposure to repeating images, words, and messages makes consumers more likely to remember your brand. Thankfully, today’s digital environment provides multiple channels like your website, social media, video, and online advertising to make it easy to add repetition to your marketing strategy.

Of the many brands that have utilized this approach, L’Oréal has proven that frequency paired with repetition can make a brand memorable. Their famous slogan “Because You’re Worth It” sprinkled throughout all their ads has been ingrained in the minds of millions of consumers. The cosmetics giant has not only created a sense of familiarity and trust amongst its customers, but has also successfully achieved brand recognition.

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Body Language

In advertising, body language can have more influence on an audience than words can. Body language is a powerful form of nonverbal communication that can translate a message without relying on text to prove a point. A person’s body movements, posture, and/or facial expressions are three of the most common forms of body language that can be adapted for your ads.

In its “Melt” series of campaigns, Perrier incorporates a Renaissance twist into its advertisements based upon a Surrealist classic painted by Salvador Dali. By combining it with attractive models who use body language to exaggerate extreme heat, the brand creates an emotional trigger response from audiences, making them realize how much the sparkling refresher can quench a person’s thirst. Through using timeless and thoughtful imagery, Perrier is able to communicate a strong resonating image that makes their brand stand out.

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Association

Association marketing relies mostly on sophisticated psychology and aims to create associations for the viewer through feelings, ideas, places, or nostalgia. Associations often lead to strong, positive brand recognition and affirm its position as a premium service or product.

Throughout Lacoste’s Ageless campaign, the brand seamlessly emphasizes its ageless style. By featuring unusual pairings of people across their print ads and commercials, Lacoste points to the fact that no matter what your age is, clothes can still make you look fashionable.

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Turn to Pop Culture

Using pop culture cleverly has been a mainstay of pro marketing campaigns for years. Leveraging pop culture icons in your advertisements is a great way to gain content visibility, increase brand loyalty, and build a strong connection with consumers. Not only does it have an enormous impact on buying behavior, but pop culture influences also shape your brand's personality, making your customers feel like you’re one of them.

In this imaginative ad, Band-Aid selectively chose the Hulk to represent that its brand heals, protects, and is strong. The brand’s messaging is clear, concise, and uses a pop icon to market their flexible-fabric band-aids. The ad speaks volumes and the color choices effectively set a healing and calming mood.

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Symbolism

Symbolism attracts consumer attention and alters buying psychology. Symbols play a crucial role in successfully conveying messages and creating meaning. The most common uses for symbols are dramatic visuals, metaphors, or similarities that draw attention or interest towards a product. Essentially, symbols are a creative visual shortcut that can be used to effectively build your brand and convey a concept that will be remembered.

In its cleverly designed park assist ad, Volkswagen compares a spiky hedgehog squeezed between two goldfish in vulnerable plastic bags to the difficulty of parallel parking. With a unique image, the brand makes a powerful statement and a lasting impression in consumer minds.

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Highlight the Problem AND the Solution

Consumers respond more favorably when brands make it easy for them to spot a solution quickly and affordably. IKEA is no exception. They have mastered the art of solving space-related challenges for their customers through smart storage solutions.

As is their tradition, IKEA usually uses quirky means to get their message across. In their brilliant “Need Space” campaign, they highlight the issue of space crunching, depicting how users stuff one shoe into another to save storage space. But, they don’t just address a pain point. They provide the solution too — a sleek and thin shoe cabinet to help customers make the best use of their living spaces.

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Mastering your Ad Campaigns

While there are countless tactics you can use in your advertising strategy to create a strong appeal, using the ones that resonate best with your audience will ultimately generate the most success.

Change is constant in digital advertising, but these techniques and strategies are timeless and will continue to be effective now and in the future. In the campaigns above, we can see that clever visuals, subtle symbolism, strong associations and pop culture influence can go a long way.

From the advertising examples above, it’s clear that if done right, ad campaigns have the power to evoke emotions and keep products in our minds, influencing our buying decisions both directly and indirectly.

If you’re looking to create a lasting impact with your ads, MarinOne can help. Contact our team to get started today and learn more about how we can help you continuously improve your marketing campaigns.

8 Proven Strategies to Become a Sales Prospecting Pro

For marketers, there are more ways than ever before to conduct outreach, contact your target audience, and increase sales. With so many different methods available, it can be a challenge to determine which will produce the best outcomes and which ones are worth incorporating into your marketing efforts.

While everyone has their favorite strategies, certain forms of outreach have proven to have a higher rate of success. The key is in the variety of methods you employ, and the consistency with which you use them.

8 Proven Prospecting Techniques That Actually Work

While excelling at prospecting still demands mastery of many of the same age-old techniques that worked 30 to 50 years ago, there are new approaches you can take to level up your game.

Here are eight advanced tactics you can use to secure more sales.

Use a Qualification Framework

To assess which prospects are strong potential buyers, you’ll need to identify the major criteria that you and your salesforce team consider to define a good candidate. Before you reach out to your leads, develop a set of qualification questions to help prioritize your outreach efforts. This way, you’ll discover which leads are worth connecting with, and which can be ruled out immediately.

Create a Lead Scoring System

Don’t let your hottest leads grow cold while you spend time on lukewarm prospects. After you’ve identified which leads are qualified, rank them using a lead scoring system so you can prioritize advancing those most likely to close. Develop a lead scoring system by assigning value based on data pulled from previous lead successes.

Follow your Prospects on Social Media

The best insights into your leads will come from your leads themselves. Scanning their social media channels can help you determine whether or not they’re a good prospect by yielding relevant data. LinkedIn research reveals that social selling influences more than 50% of revenue. Staying informed about your audience’s interests and values can give you a deeper understanding of their needs while simultaneously allowing you to build rapport and win their trust.

Strategically Structure Your Communication

The way you approach your prospects can impact how you close a deal or lose one. Use these methods to discover the best ways to reach out.

“Wow” them: You don’t need a complex strategy to capture attention. If you’re going to draft an email, go beyond a standard pitch. Instead, use a clear statement of what you do and how you’re different, one that makes the prospect say “wow.” With so many software suites available on the market today, testing emails to see which work best is easy to do. If your outreach involves phone calls, recognize that leads warm up more when you make it personal. Pay close attention to what their needs are, gain a clear understanding of their industry, and research your competitors. By knowing what they want, you can tap into solving their needs and “wow” them with a golden pitch they’ll respond well to.
Offer added value: With any kind of sales communication, adding value is critical. Leads are more responsive when you win them over with free offers. Consider giving them a free demo or providing a sales guide. Not only does this give you an opportunity for a follow-up later on, but it gives your prospects a chance to become more familiar with your products.
Use a single call to action: Whether you’re pitching your lead via email or on the phone, ending with a single call to action is key to encouraging them to take the next step. Request a follow-up phone call, another meeting, or ask them directly to buy. When presented with a single, clear CTA, your lead is more focused and you’re more likely to close a deal.

Ask for Referrals and Recommendations

Referrals and recommendations are a powerful sales prospecting technique that can earn you the credibility you deserve. Word-of-mouth is incredibly impactful and should not be underestimated. In fact, when making buying decisions, 91% of B2B buyers are heavily influenced by first-hand accounts.

With numbers that high, it pays to be proactive about tapping into your network. You can use this opportunity to build relationships with your current customers by offering them discounts or other incentives for referring new people. Sometimes, it might be as simple as getting a testimonial, quote, information for a case study, or other social proof from past customers, all of which can elevate your leads’ confidence in you, ultimately converting them into a prospect.

Consider Using Video

The rise of video is one of the latest trends sales prospecting pros are using as a marketing and outreach tool. Incorporating video throughout your sales cycle can boost your numbers significantly. According to current statistics, after watching a video, 88% of buyers continue to complete a purchase, and 73% prefer to learn about products this way. With video rising in popularity, it’s worth taking advantage of this medium.

Be Well Aware of the Competitive Landscape

To be a sales prospecting pro, it’s critical that you scope out your competition. By keeping a close eye on the competitive landscape, you can rest assured that you are optimally positioned for your intended audience. If you aren’t already doing so, analyze magic quadrant results, follow competitor news, survey competitor websites, and track the latest advancements across relevant industries.

Leverage Marketing Automation Tools

Complement your prospecting strategy with an automation tool so you can nurture your leads and convert stragglers into sales. By using these tools, you can link content distribution, allowing you to get the right message out to the right people at the right time. Automating various processes to optimize your marketing-sales pipeline can convert leads into customers more quickly and efficiently. With the right tool, you can segment groups based on specific criteria, prioritize based on highest needs, generate interest along every step of the buying process, and much more.

Closing More Deals with MarinOne

To stay ahead of the curve, sales pros need to be proactive about leveraging the latest prospecting tactics and technologies. From researching your prospects to using automation tools, every step counts when it comes to closing deals faster and more effectively. By mastering each of the above techniques, you’ll have an edge over competitors and will see better results from your outreach efforts. With so many opportunities to help you outsource work and many automation tools at your fingertips, along with a vast array of software choices to help you work more efficiently, you can multiply your successes and fill your pipeline with an abundance of qualified leads.

Using tools by MarinOne can help your marketing team optimize paid advertising processes, bring in more interested candidates into the sales funnel, and ultimately close more deals. MarinOne is a customizable, enterprise-class solution that can help accelerate your paid media efforts.

Ready to start prospecting for new leads? To learn more about how MarinOne can help you achieve the results you want, get in touch with one of our team experts today.

Content Marketing

How to Develop Affiliate or Influencer Content That Your Customers Will Actually Like

Affiliate content has skyrocketed in popularity alongside social media marketing and other digital marketing tactics. Since social platforms have inconsistent monetization policies, influencer content offers creators a way to vouch for their favorite brands while generating income. Lifestyle brands, in particular, can align themselves with creators whose audiences overlap with their own.

Lauren Neels, Customer Engagement Manager and Marin Software’s resident expert on all things related to ecommerce, paid search, and digital marketing, shares some valuable insights about how lifestyle brands can use creator content to reach highly specific audiences more effectively.

How influencer content can help brands reach their audience

Shed the negative perceptions associated with advertising

While advertisements used to be a popular way to reach large audiences, viewers seem to have had enough. According to research from Statista, 41% of people online find themselves regularly annoyed by advertisements. More than a quarter of web surfers went as far as installing ad blockers to make their browsing experience better.

Advertisements are everywhere but Lauren shares that “people are more likely to trust influencer content since it comes from trusted creators that already have a relationship with their audience. This is evidenced by higher conversion rates experienced by businesses that leverage this type of content in their marketing campaigns.”

Allow your customers to engage with your content using actionable touchpoints

It’s not enough for your customers to view your content. Businesses must be able to measure how their ads are performing and ensure that each investment is yielding the appropriate results.

“Affiliate content is generally better than television ads for businesses that want to engage with the customer. This content is usually clickable or has some other CTA that customers can actively engage with,” Lauren shares.

Encourage greater conversion rates compared to cheaper outreach alternatives

Businesses can sometimes show a preference for alternatives such as television or billboard advertising. However, each method of outreach has a place within a greater marketing campaign.

Lauren explains that “paid ads work well for people who already have intent to purchase, but are less effective when people need convincing. Influencer content would be more effective at convincing or when trying to build a brand.”

Influencer content can be repurposed as paid social media posts or ads if needed

Some influencers have very niche audiences, but the reach of their content can be amplified when it is converted or repurposed as paid social media posts. However, Lauren warns that when creator content is converted to paid ads, “not all of that audience has chosen to follow that influencer so some of the trust won’t carry through to the new, wider audience. Conversion rates could go down but your reach is larger. This could help brand awareness, and boosted creator content would still have more trustworthiness than just a paid ad.”

Things to keep in mind while engaging creators for content

Social media trends often change before businesses can hop on them

All social media marketers are intimately aware of how quickly trends can change online. What is fashionable and topical today might be outdated next week. Businesses must always have their finger on the pulse of running trends and have employees that understand these trends to take charge of marketing campaigns that need to run alongside certain fads.

“If trends change before your approval process is complete, you’re too late. Millennials, for example, have a good idea of how trends work online. Put them in charge and trust them when it comes to trends and how to use them for effective marketing,” Lauren suggests.

Trends can differ wildly across platforms, content types, and audiences

Marketers often view social media as an effective channel for reaching younger audiences but each platform is unique. Trends, content types, audience demographics and more can differ significantly from platform to platform. TikTok, for example, is more likely to host a younger audience with a preference for short-form video content while Facebook is more likely to host a middle-aged audience with a preference for image-based content.

Background checks should be conducted for every collaborator you work with

When businesses sponsor a particular creator, they connect the brand with the creator in the minds of the viewer. While this can be a powerful way to gain the trust of customers, it also means that any misdemeanor committed by the creator can be associated with the brand or can lead to backlash against the brand.

“While apologies are more readily accepted now, it is always better to be in a position where an apology is not required at all,” Lauren recommends that you should “do your research to check the background of people you might be sponsoring to make sure they’re legitimate and not problematic.”

Rates can vary greatly depending on a creator’s reach, engagement, and more

As audiences become more diverse and use more social media channels, marketers must be strategic in how they spend on each platform and each creator. Marketers must always measure how much a creator is charging against their reach, engagement, history, alignment with the brand, and more. Each of these factors can lead to great variations in asking price from the influencer.

Affiliate or influencer content should be part of a larger marketing strategy

Affiliate content is a great way to reach targeted audiences and improve engagement rates with the brand. However, it’s not enough for a marketing team to rely exclusively on affiliate or influencer content. Like every other marketing method, creator content should be a smaller part in a larger marketing strategy designed to cover all of a business’ customer bases.

MarinOne’s modern optimization solution helps marketers ensure that each dollar spent on partner content and other marketing strategies yields maximum results. Our paid advertising management solutions creates automated recommendations to optimize your marketing configurations that will improve return on investment.

If you would like to reach your customers with relatable and likable content, reach out for a free demo of our solution today.

8 Native Advertising Examples To Inspire Your Creativity

Do you remember the last advertisement you saw on social media? Chances are the answer is no, and not just because your memory is poor. As soon as you (and most consumers) recognize an ad, you are far more likely to scroll on.

That's why native advertisements are becoming increasingly popular. These “disguised” ads are meant to blend in with their surroundings and give advertisers an extra moment to hook viewers. Native ads are usually found in social media feeds, but they can be used in other places like email newsletters and search engine results pages.

If you are interested in testing this marketing approach at your own business, read on for 8 native advertising examples you can use to start brainstorming.

What is Native Advertising?

Native advertising is a form of online marketing associated with branding that integrates promotions into the content that people are already consuming. Native advertisements are designed to blend in with the surrounding content, making them appear less intrusive and more natural.

Because of their strategic placement, native ads are a powerful way to build brand awareness and connect with a highly targeted audience. Most often found on social media and in long-form written content, these ads have the potential to drive much higher click-through rates and engagement rates when executed well.

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Keys to Effective Native Advertising

Native ads are meant to be a non-disruptive way to share your product or service, so it’s important to keep a few principles in mind when creating them. Here are three key elements to consider:

Relevancy: Native ads need to be relevant to the user’s interests and what they are already browsing. While this is highly platform-dependent, native ads can be used to provide additional context around a topic, highlight a related offering, or feature customer-generated content.
Creativity: Although they are intended to blend in with their surroundings, native ads still need to be creative and engaging enough to keep people’s attention. Use AI to create new images, visuals, formats, and messaging to see what works best with your audience.
Authenticity: The modern consumer can see right past an obvious sales pitch, so it is necessary to be genuine and honest in your native ads. Native advertising should not feel overly promotional — instead, focus on providing value and educating your audience.

How Native Advertising can Backfire

Native advertising sometimes gets a bad rap due to the potential for users to be misled or taken advantage of. Native ads can easily blur the line between an organic post and a sponsored one, which can damage the trust and credibility of a brand.

To make sure that doesn’t happen, avoid these pitfalls:

Overpromising: Native ads should never make unrealistic or exaggerated claims that don’t align with the product or service you’re offering. Even if the ad is more disguised than normal, always be true to your brand and the value you provide.
Using misleading visuals: Native ads should never use visual elements that are intended to deceive. This includes images that don’t represent the product or service you offer, or presenting facts or data in a way that might not tell the full story.
Not being upfront: Native ads should be clearly labeled as sponsored content and not made to look like editorial pieces. To maintain your brand's integrity and reputation, be transparent about who is behind the ad and make sure users can distinguish between promoted content and organic material.

8 Native Advertising Examples for Inspiration

Native ads are all about finding clever ways to advertise while still blending in with the surrounding platform. To give you an idea of what this looks like, here are 8 native ad examples to inspire your creativity:

1) Adidas on Spotify

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Adidas partnered with Spotify to create a unique experience and promote their new shoe line — the Nite Joggers. Users who opted into the interactive campaign would receive a "Nite Score" based on their evening listening habits as well as a personalized playlist. This soundtrack was a blend of favorite hits, new recommendations, and promotional content for Adidas.

This native advertisement is a great example of nondisruptive yet nondeceptive marketing. Although it was clearly an advertising campaign, Adidas was able to engage a targeted audience without interrupting their listening experience. Plus, the company effectively tapped into a growing marketing opportunity in the music streaming industry.

2) General Mills on The Guardian

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General Mills wisely sponsored content on The Guardian to align its brand with regenerative agriculture and small-scale farming. These themes are reinforced with high-quality closeups of their sustainable practices and the families that they work with.

The photos and videos show the human side of food production, which helps viewers establish an emotional connection to the brand. Other than its "Paid content" label, this informative article looks and feels like a regular piece of expository news on The Guardian — making it a powerful example of subtle native advertising.

3) SpongeBob on Instagram

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Where are SpongeBob's original fans hanging out? On Instagram, of course. Nickelodeon's hit show recently partnered with Instagram to create an interactive filter called "What SpongeBob character are you?"

This collaboration is one of the most engaging native advertising examples on this list because it tapped into the nostalgia of an older generation and made it easy for anyone to participate. The SpongeBob fan base didn't care whether it was a marketing ploy or not. This filter was genuinely fun, it fit in with other content on the platform, and it allowed people to reconnect with the characters they love.

4) Purina with BuzzFeed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJPJUaZZOss&t=12s (to embed)

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Purina teamed up with BuzzFeed to create a clever marketing video from the perspective of a cat. The cute and comical two-minute production explains how cats view their responsibility to take care of humans.

Although it highlights Tidy Cats, Purina's cat litter product, the video is not purely promotional. In fact, it offers real entertainment value to its targeted audience and anyone who can appreciate cats' quirks. Even almost 10 years after its creation, this content marketing example still sets the standard for how to both reinforce brand identity and drive sales.

5) Taco Bell on Snapchat

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Taco Bell created a Snapchat filter that turned users' faces into a taco. Released just in time for Cinco de Mayo, the filter was an instant viral hit with more than 224 million global views.

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This campaign was a success because Taco Bell nailed both the timing and the culture of Snapchat with its native ad placement. Plus, the company was able to boost brand awareness by prominently including its logo on every snap.

6) Netflix on WSJ

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To promote its upcoming show Narcos, Netflix worked with the Wall Street Journal to create an interactive webpage on "Cocainenomics", the business of the Medellin cartel's drug trafficking operation. This detailed profile of a $4 billion underground empire is the perfect fit for the business and finance-minded readers of the WSJ.

Netflix put together one of the most compelling native advertising examples on this list by elevating a standard piece of content from the daily newspaper. The article reads like a piece of investigative journalism but is paired with clickable maps and timelines, and a timed quiz.

For most WSJ consumers, the portal likely serves as one of the most interesting stories they read that day. And if readers are hooked by the topic, watching Narcos is a natural next step for even more detail.

7) Allbirds on The New York Times

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Allbirds partnered with The New York Times to create an incredible full-page experience for readers, complete with sound, vivid imagery, and responsive video. This native advertisement ran as an article in the paper, but rather than promoting its signature footwear directly, the brand instead focused on sustainability.

The Allbirds article dives into the importance of birds to our environment, and what eco-conscious readers can do to help birds. At the conclusion of the post, the brand offers a single call to action — visit the Allbirds website to learn more about conscious commerce.

8) Samsung on TikTok

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To raise awareness for the Galaxy Z Fold3, Samsung launched a Branded Hashtag Challenge on TikTok. Boosted by TopView ads, Brand Takeover ads, and Reach & Frequency ads, the phone maker was able to eclipse more than 1 billion video views.

Samsung's "I'Mpossible Generation" campaign slogan was a nod to the innovative foldable smartphone. And the challenge's catchy tune and promise of prizes engaged creators from all over Vietnam. The native ad strategy not only caught fire boosting Samsung's brand awareness, but it also proved social commerce is alive and well with a 14% uplift in sales.

Final thoughts

Native ads have the potential to hook viewers in a more subtle way than traditional advertising methods. With relevant and engaging content, brands can communicate their values, foster an emotional connection, and fill their marketing funnels.

The most successful native advertising examples leverage creative content and fit in seamlessly with the surrounding user experience. By matching the appropriate look, feel, and voice of the adjacent content, brands can break through the noise to capture attention and form authentic relationships with potential customers.

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Daniel Anderson is a guest contributor to Marin Software.

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How Customer Service can be a Demand Generation Channel

Communication is the most important arrow sales teams have in their quiver for generating leads and producing sales. It also happens to be the most important tool for marketers to create relevant, qualified content, personalized customer query forms, and more. Making excellent communication an initiative throughout your organization will help you approach more prospects and increase conversion rates.

Unfortunately however, most demand generation tactics still do not encourage easy two-way communication between the brand and the user. You can create loyalty with existing customers and attract new potential customers by reaching them with your content, but for most companies, users can really only get in touch with a brand via the customer service team.

This is why we as marketers need to start to view customer service as a lead-generating channel. Opportunities to keep customers with your organization for the long run, upsell customers or encourage repeat purchases, and create an incredible brand reputation are omnipresent in the customer service process. These are all key ways that your customer service team contributes to the overarching bottom line. So how can you formalize making customer service a cog in your larger demand generation machine? Read on to learn more about strategies for making customer service a revenue-generating team.

Customer Service and Demand Generation

Freshdesk’s blog says, “Customer service is the key to generating leads in your marketing strategies that can be used not only to develop prospects but to nurture them and enhance customer retention.”

Still, customer service will only have a positive effect on your customer journey if buyers feel their concerns are heard and addressed. The first step is to follow customer service best practices to leave every person who contacts your company on an individual basis with a great experience. Once your team has a solid understanding of how to make customers happy and resolve issues quickly, then you can funnel energy toward retention and lifetime value.

Marketing strategies have evolved as catchy advertisements and self-promotional events no longer attract consumers. Now organizations are turning their focus to being recognized for their services and products and learning to develop long-term customer loyalty. Here are a few ways you can do the same.

Be methodical about the number of audiences you target and create a unique customer journey for each persona. This will create an inbound dynamic that will engage prospects more efficiently.
You can build brand awareness among customers via email marketing. This helps to keep your business top of mind–it can be particularly impactful for service-oriented companies that may not have a physical product to sell. The more people recognize your brand, the greater likelihood you will see more ratings and customer responses coming in, increasing brand equity and website traffic.
Advertising is the best short-term tactic any marketer has. While it can sometimes be pricey, especially when compared to PR, SEO, or other slow-burning channels, a great digital advertisement can capture the attention of thousands very quickly. This will kickstart your business and help you create a pool of people to nurture for lifetime sales.

How can you Integrate Customer Service into your Demand Generation Channels?

Customer service can easily use your marketing team's messaging to directly communicate your brand’s ethics. Do this by showing how your team emulates those values in real time instead of simply telling prospects what your company stands for without supportive action. Here are some ways to optimize that communication cycle.

Use Personal Lead Information to Endow Future Communications

Before initiating any communication with a customer service contact, ask the user relevant questions like their name, email address, or contact number. It helps your team to have the data they require to develop future relationships with the client and be proactive should technical issues arrive, like dropped phone calls or ineffective email sends.

Employ Chatbots to Streamline Response Processes

Automated chat features have assisted quite a bit in this area. Developing frequently asked questions are a great way to get your chat feature up and running. It also allows wiggle room in the customer service process that keeps you in the drivers seat. Once a customer has exhausted the FAQ series in chat, your CS team members can then jump in and interact with customers with more complex queries to help them get their issues resolved. You'll be surprised how many customers will get the answers they need from the pre-loaded questions, which saves your customer service reps valuable time.

Engage with Customers Even When Your Team is Offline

In addition to saving time during regular office hours with FAQs, chatbots can also be setup to communicate with customers 24/7 when your customer support agents need to go offline. For issues that require a representative, these chatbots can ask potential visitors for their email address or phone number for your team to respond later the same day. According to the latest surveys, 82% of visitors who interact with these chatbots are more likely to convert into long-term purchasers.

Maximize Your Efforts with an Outbound Call Center

Outbound call centers have been an integral part of sales and marketing strategies for a long time, adopting methods beyond cold calling. They can coordinate with your CRM platform and various other tools delivering targeted user experiences. This can also be a good way to utilize customer service teams' time when they don't have a high number of inbound calls.

Get the most out of your call center services by transitioning from analog to online phone services, as VoIP mechanisms provide customer service attributes like call recording, automatic tracking, customer concerns analysis, and more.

Key Takeaways

Customer service is a crucial part of your association for building a strong brand identity and to keep customers coming back to your organization again and again. Demand generation tactics are far more successful when paired with great customer service. Look at how to streamline these processes and make your CS team a revenue contributor to the company's bottom line by using tools like chatbots and live chat, seeking customer feedback, and training your customer support representatives on how to identify and take advantage of upsell or cross-sell opportunities.

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Joy D'Cruz is a guest contributor to Marin Software.

Automation

How to Choose the Right PPC Campaign Management Tool for Your Company

PPC advertising is already used by 45% of businesses to promote their products and services, and 62% of marketers plan to increase their PPC budgets. With figures like this, it’s clear that advertisers need to set themselves apart from competitors to drive more qualified leads and visitors.

Using the right PPC campaign management tool is a good place to start and can make a world of difference in how you manage your campaigns. In short, they can make your campaigns more effective and less time-consuming. But with such a vast array of tools on the market, choosing the best one can be a complex process—especially if you aren’t sure what to look out for or what features you need. We've put together a quick guide on what to keep in mind as you start exploring your options.

Choosing a PPC campaign management tool

So, what do you need in a PPC campaign management tool? Here are seven things to look for.

Meets your short-term and long-term business needs

Look for a tool that can help your business achieve its goals and enhance performance. The ideal solution should help you find new opportunities to improve your PPC campaigns and produce lasting results. When you begin your search, clearly outline your business needs. Once you’ve identified your goals, you can turn them into measurable objectives. Doing so will help you easily narrow down your options and find the solution that suits your business best.

Saves you time

The right PPC optimization tool will afford you more time to monitor and manage campaigns instead of getting bogged down with small, tedious tasks. Some tools are designed to create bulk campaigns or PPC ads using a keyword research tool or receive automated recommendations on bid adjustments. Using a PPC campaign management tool will also enable you to reduce in-house resources you’re currently devoting to digital marketing. Not only will it cut your expenditures, but you’ll have more free time to focus on other core areas of marketing that matter the most.

Has several different features

You want a tool to do more than just run audits or produce results on a dashboard. Pick a tool that has robust functionality and can help with:

Analyzing your performance
Monthly progress reports
Providing recommendations for improvement
Automating workflows
Optimizing bids
Keeping you on budget
ROI calculations

Cost-effective

The price of a PPC campaign management tool may ultimately impact which solution you choose. However, using one allows you to determine an effective budget for your ads by channel and increase the ROI of all your campaigns, making it a worthwhile investment. By automating your campaigns and working at scale, the right tool can also help save costs on additional resources in your organization. So be sure to choose wisely and consider more than just the cost of the tool itself.

Helps you through the entire PPC journey

A PPC journey begins with an agency offering potential clients a proposal, which is typically done through a PPC audit that illustrates past success stories in the form of case studies, and a bit of sales know-how. After a client is on board, an ROI calculator and monthly reports will be needed. A solid PPC campaign management tool will be able to easily generate performance reports that can be converted into PDF format so everyone has access and can track your team’s success through the journey.

PPC campaign management tool features

When you purchase a PPC campaign management tool, you’ll want to be sure it includes all of these basics, and hopefully some additional unique extras too. Creating a criteria checklist of which attributes you need can help you spot which tool meets all of your requirements.

Standard tool features

Intuitive keyword search
Campaign optimization
Competition analysis
PPC monitoring
PPC channels to target

Extra features

AI-led customer rules
Split A/B testing
Cross-platform management capabilities
Ad scheduling

Why MarinOne is the right optimization tool for you

With the digital market constantly evolving, it’s crucial to keep up with the most current technology, especially when it can help improve your bottom line. The right PPC campaign management tool will deliver measurable results and minimize costs to drive your business forward. Additionally, it can help you stand out from your competitors and stay ahead of the game.

The success of your PPC campaigns depends on them being fully effective and efficient. If you’re looking to boost your sales and streamline your PPC campaign management, the right tool can make it easy. By taking a strategic approach to selecting the ideal PPC campaign management tool that’s best for you, you’ll achieve maximum results that will grow your business.

Now that you’ve read about how to choose the best PPC campaign management tool, take a look at why MarinOne is the best option on the market for both B2B and retail-focused marketers. Just a few of the time-saving features our tool offers include:

Optimization Automation
AI-powered Keyword Bid Changes
Ad Extensions
Unique Audience Segmentation and Testing
Ad Scheduling
Custom Parameters
Dynamic Targeting

We offer free audits on your performance marketing campaigns and our team of expert consultants is ready to help you today.

Finance

Using Predictive Analytics To Optimize Your Marketing Budget

Marketers are commonly tasked with making educated guesses covering an array of topics, such as buyer’s journey, which accounts are worth targeting, what content will resonate best with their customers, and so forth. While these guesses help drive business decisions and are used to create marketing campaigns, they are not the best tactic for accelerating your business.

To maintain a true competitive edge by making smarter, more informed decisions, marketers must stay on top of new technologies and trends such as predictive analytics. Let’s take a closer look to see what it’s all about and hear from MarinOne expert Joe Southin on how it can help you improve your business and increase your company’s bottom line.

Understanding predictive analytics

Predictive analytics is the use of machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), data mining, predictive modeling, and other statistical techniques to forecast behavior, trends, and activities by analyzing past and present data. Using these analytics, you can strengthen your marketing efforts, enabling you to respond to developments more strategically. Predictive analytics can be used for predicting:

Which factors impact customer preferences and their buying decisions
Customer behaviors and their purchasing journey
Bidding
Marketing strategies and forecasting sales

5 ways predictive analytics can optimize your marketing budget

According to Gartner, marketing budgets are steadily climbing across all industries in 2022, increasing from 6.4% to 9.5%. That’s why using predictive analytics is more important than before.

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Predictive analytics can be immensely useful. Here’s how:

1. Analyze data to predict how your strategy will perform over the next few days and the immediate future

For enhanced marketing performance, applying predictive analytics is crucial. With accurate data, you can implement a marketing strategy that will generate the impact you need to be successful. When you use predictive analytics to guide your strategy, you'll be more prepared to make informed business decisions and deliver campaigns that drive the results you’re seeking with minimal risk.

“Here at MarinOne we predict with confidence how an individual object is going to perform, not just tomorrow, but for the next few days,” says Joe Southin.

2. Use forecasts to manage, adjust, and optimize budget allocations

Predictive data helps you determine where to focus ad spend. It identifies the advertising channels and times that warrant increased spending and resources, and it provides useful insights so you know when to reduce investments. Use your forecasts to pinpoint where adjustments need to be made and how you can allocate your budget more efficiently.

According to Joe, “Forecasting gives you the opportunity to accurately project sales, revenue, and expenses. When you can map out how an object will respond with marketing spend, you can evaluate different price points.”

3. Respond to the latest trends to stay current and relevant

You can optimize your marketing budget by staying up to date with the latest marketing trends. Not only will it make your marketing campaigns more targeted and effective, but it will improve ROI, customer retention, and customer experiences as well. Competition in today’s marketing landscape is fierce. Understanding current market trends is key to remaining competitive. With predictive analytics, you can predict future shifts and plan your campaigns accordingly.

“Keeping up with the most current trends is key to strategizing so you can make better business decisions,” says Joe.

4. Use customer data to adjust campaigns

Provided it’s assessed and interpreted properly, customer data can be used to maximize the efficiency of advertising expenditure. By harnessing the power of predictive analytics, you can pinpoint everything from usage to customer buying behaviors. Customer data can help ensure that you don’t waste ad spend on irrelevant ad positioning or unnecessary communications. In turn, this can free up part of your budget for other revenue-boosting opportunities.

“No matter what industry you’re in, predictive analytics provides you with the necessary insights you need so you can make your next move. With a deep understanding of customer data, you can change your course of action for your campaigns to be more successful,” explains Joe.

5. Manage spend across different publishers to optimize effectiveness

If you are looking to optimize your marketing budget and maximize profitability, it's essential to allocate every dollar effectively. To fine-tune your budget allocation across different publishers, focus on the ones where you can fully control targeting and cost instead of spreading your budget thin. This will condition you to get rid of what does not work and focus your resources on what does.

Joe adds, “It’s essential to manage spend efficiently so you can yield the most optimal results. To do so, pay close attention to what’s actually working and what’s not by using predictive analytics to maximize value.”

3 Predictive analytics best practices

Managing and coordinating all steps in the analytical process can be complex. By following best practices, you’ll be well-positioned to glean the maximum benefit from predictive analytics.

1. Define your objectives

Predictive analytics empowers you to optimize operations by predicting outcomes. The predictions directly inform the action to take such as focusing marketing efforts on those most likely to make a purchase or identifying those who may commit fraud. To get the most value out of your data, be sure to align your strategy with your business objectives.

Also remember that you can pull down data from a variety of different sources, and even integrate additional functions from third party platforms, thanks to widely available APIs. Learning the basics of APIs and what they have to offer will show you just how much potential they have in a predictive analytics context. They’re well suited to expanding the potential of internal tools, and letting you squeeze even more value from every data point that you gather across your operations.

2. Organize your team

Before you determine your marketing spend, thoughtfully assemble your marketing and sales teams. By making sure everyone is on the same page, departments will be able to work together more successfully. Having a transparent approach is not only beneficial for collaboration, but it also helps generate useful feedback regarding marketing tactics from different teams.

3. Plan for disruption and continue to refine your predictive analytics models

There will always be factors that change. As a result, as you develop your predictive analytics models, you must continue monitoring them, improving them where necessary, and refining them when needed. These steps ensure the accuracy of your analytics.

MarinOne powers success with predictive analytics

No matter what industry you are in, the need for predictive analytics is more critical than ever before. Predictive analytics can help you make better marketing predictions so you can start to achieve real growth. By mastering predictive analytics, you will also gain a competitive advantage.

For a deeper understanding of how you can put predictive analytics to work for you, consider MarinOne.

When you partner with MarinOne for your predictive analytics needs:

Your marketing spends go further and you can make effective use of your budget
You can scale campaigns that are predicted to perform well and filter out those that are not achieving your desired results
We can advise you on how to allocate your spend across multiple publishers and campaigns and much more.

Want to learn more about how our platform can help you integrate predictive analytics into your marketing campaigns and bring added value to your business? Schedule a demo with one of our MarinOne experts today.

Apple Search Ads

Mobile

Apple Search Ads launches new ad placements

Apps are now discoverable in more places across the App Store thanks to the new Today tab and product page ad placements. Thanks to these new placements, your ads can now reach users when they first visit the App Store, and while they browse. This expands the touchpoints you can reach users along the App Store customer journey, increasing your chances of snagging your target customers’ attention.

The Today tab ad

This is where visitors (over half a billion of them) start their journey on the App Store. You can now advertise your own app here, using high-impact creatives to capture App Store visitors’ attention. The ad will leverage a custom product page you create in App Store Connect. The custom product page has to include at least four portrait or five landscape assets. It also has to use the correct language for the countries and regions where the campaign will run.

The custom product page has to be approved first by App Store Connect then by Apple Search Ads for advertising. Once it’s approved, you can head to Apple Search Ads Advanced to begin Today tab campaign creation and submit your Today tab ad creative to Apple Search Ads to be approved for advertising. If you don’t schedule a start date or click Pause while the ad is still in review, it will run as soon as it’s approved. You can always create and submit ads for approval ahead of time to ensure they’re approved and running by a specific date. Note that Today tab ads aren't currently available on mainland China, so keep this in mind when running any international campaigns in the APAC region.

Because these ads are featured right on the front page of the App Store, they are the first content users will see. This makes them solid options for driving app awareness for new launches, special events, and seasonal promotions.

Today tab ad guidelines

Promotional messaging should be 50 characters or less, with the lines of text not to exceed three.
Creative assets have to be screenshots from the app you promote. Promotional, lifestyle, or other images aren’t allowed.
The screenshots must be prominent and undistorted, filling up at least ⅔ of each creative asset.
Pricing, offers, and ranking claims are not allowed in ad creative assets.
Creative cannot include a font style similar to the App Store Today Card. Phrases “Game of the Day” and “App of the Day” are also not allowed.
The language in the ad creative must match the language in App Store Connect.
Any image that mocks a device and contains a bezel (the border between the screen and the frame of the device) must feature a bezel accurate to the most current Apple devices.
The ad creative must comply with Apple Advertising Policies and cannot contain any images considered violent, sexually explicit, or otherwise inappropriate.

Product pages – while browsing ads

Product pages – while browsing ads are a new ad placement that shows your app to interested users as they browse the App Store. These ads appear at the top of the You Might Also Like list to users who scroll down relevant product pages. You can run your ad across all relevant product categories, or you can refine the categories where it runs. Product pages ads aren’t currently available on mainland China either.

These ads are created using the metadata already uploaded to your App Store product page. They include your app name, icon, and subtitle.

Time to get started

With these new ad placements, you can reach customers at multiple points during their journey through the App Store. The Today tab places your app in front of users before they think of a solution to their problem. And once they start browsing, product page ads present them with your app as they scroll through similar options.

With so many new features to explore in Apple Seatch Ads's new ad placements, the next question is what are you waiting for? You can start running these ads now and they're certainly worth a test, especially as we enter the busy holiday season.

Meet with a Marin marketing consultant today to learn how to effectively integrate Apple Search Ads into your omnichannel marketing strategy.

Getting Started with Market Segmentation

‍Market segmentation is the foundation of a successful marketing campaign. There are likely many different types of consumers that could be interested in your products, and sending the right message to each type of customer is key to acquiring new users. Whether it be targeting customers based on their age, or understanding that different types of customers value different aspects of your product or service, you’ll want to deliver unique, personalized messages to different segments in order to foster enthusiastic brand loyalty.

Let’s run through the 5 different types of market segmentation in detail so that you can understand which is right for you.

Demographic Segmentation

This is usually the first type of segmentation we think of when starting to define our different customer personas. These are basic defining characteristics such as age, gender, race, income level and education level. Demographic targeting can be anything from advertising high end products to those with higher income levels, to a clothing company advertising gendered clothing to women and men separately.

This is mostly used in B2C marketing efforts, as these traits focus on the individual. The B2B counterpart is firmographic segmentation.

Firmographic Segmentation

Firmographic segmentation is the most basic form of market segmentation for B2B marketing efforts. Firmographic traits of a company include size, location, industry, structure and financial performance. For example, you’ll want to use different messaging when marketing towards a small business than when reaching out to an organization with hundreds of employees.

Geographic Segmentation

A subset of demographic segmentation, geographic segmentation entails segmenting customers by their location. You can segment by city, country, zip code or even language region. The most straightforward example of this is trying to drive foot traffic to a brick and mortar store by targeting people who live within a certain number of miles from the store. But even for online businesses, it’s important to analyze which geographic areas your website traffic is coming from. Sometimes these answers may seem obvious, like a company selling cowboy boots targeting states in the south. But you may be surprised what other regions are interested in your product, beyond the most obvious opportunities. Often market research brings about data that cannot be acquired by intuition alone. Who knows, there could be a lot of cowboys in Vermont…

Behavioral Segmentation

This is the most complex and arguably the most valuable type of segmentation. Behavioral segmentation is the ongoing process of tracking and targeting users’ behavioral trends. As you collect data about your target market over time, you’ll be able to segment your audience into groups based on things like purchasing habits, brand interactions, buying history, website visits and interactions with competing brands. This form of market research is very valuable because it brings to light users with intent to buy, allowing you to target your most interested audiences.

Psychographic Segmentation

This form of segmentation attempts to understand the consumers’ motivations. It’s not the what, or where, but the why that psychographic segmentation strives to make sense of. Why do customers buy your product, or choose your competitor's product over yours? Is it their values? Their political beliefs? Their interests? This sort of segmentation is extremely valuable for media companies, for example. News stations will market towards those with aligned political beliefs. Gossip magazines will target those interested in celebrity content. This form of segmentation can be difficult to nail down, but is very powerful.

Now that we’ve got an understanding of the different types of segmentation, let’s discuss how to begin segmenting your market.

Start with testing

The first step is market research. You’ll want to cast your net wide with broad targeting, then see what content appeals to different segments of users. Once you’ve identified segments based on engagement with your different categories of content, you’ll understand what sorts of products or services they are interested in. Then you can hit those segmented audiences with more specific retargeting ads.

It’s important to set a measurable goal when testing. Let’s say you’re trying to understand if your products appeal more to women or men. Send ads to both groups equally, and measure performance with a metric such as click through rate or conversion rate. If women seem to drive a higher conversion rate for a particular product, break men and women out into separate audiences and allocate proportionately more ad spend to the female audience. This is one simple example; but there are countless ways to run this same sort of test based on the segmentation factors you believe could apply to your particular campaign.

Never stop analyzing

It’s important to continually analyze these different sorts of user trends, as things can change over time and new segments may emerge. Moving forward, allocate a small portion of your marketing budget to testing ongoing so that you can make sure you're capitalizing on emerging segments and keeping your audience fresh.

Streamline analysis with MarinOne

If you create strong audience segments and send the right message to each segment, you’re sure to win in performance marketing. With so much data to navigate when analyzing the unique performance of your various market segments, it's best to bring it all together in a powerful tool like MarinOne. MarinOne makes your life easier by enabling you to optimize campaigns in bulk, pivot bidding types on the fly, and get a holistic view of all your paid media campaigns in one place. Start your journey to better market segmentation and great advertising performance with MarinOne today. Our team of experienced marketers is ready to help you achieve your goals.

Change Your Business With Growth Marketing

The marketing world is constantly changing and developing with new tools and methods. Strategies that are effective today may not work next year, or even next month. What we know for certain is that successful marketing requires looking beyond the top of the funnel for customers who will stick around. Without retention, there is no growth.

That’s why growth marketing is more important than ever. So, what is growth marketing all about? Learn why growth marketing is important, what its core components are, and five different ways to turbocharge your business with it.

Growth marketing defined

Growth marketing is a spin on traditional marketing with additional digital layers such as A/B testing, SEO optimization, data-driven blog posts and email campaigns, and careful attention to each aspect of a user’s experience. Insights inform strategies that are quickly implemented to achieve sustainable and robust growth. Unlike traditional marketing, growth marketing prioritizes small hypotheses, fast experimentation, and rapid iteration over large, long-term campaigns.

Why growth marketing matters

An average of 4 million businesses are opened every year, and over $297 billion is collectively spent on marketing expenditures. With those figures, it’s more important than ever to make your business stand out. To compete, it's crucial to have a growth marketing strategy. A strategy that is creative and compelling will:

Help improve customer acquisition rates and allow you to expand your loyal user base
Allow you to grow and scale your business rapidly

Enable you to maximize your marketing activities across many different channels
Provide you with insights into the full customer journey

Core components of a growth marketing strategy

The primary focus of your marketing strategy should be based on metrics like retention rates, acquisition rates, conversion rates, and customer lifetime value. Some of the most frequently used tactics that growth marketers find successful include:

A/B testing

A/B testing can be used in a variety of formats, such as email marketing, landing pages, social media ads, and more, making it one of the primary tactics to be used in a strong growth marketing strategy. By deploying “A” or “B” tests, you can gain a better understanding of which content pieces are performing better. With better insights into how to engage your audience, you can optimize future campaigns and increase your likelihood of boosting conversion rates.

Pro tip: Just because one test proves to be more effective with a particular audience segment doesn’t mean you should stop testing. Concentrate on customized segments and keep testing new content variations to understand which content resonates best.

Cross-channel marketing

With cross-channel marketing, your focus should be on building a plan to extend customer reach. It can include push notifications, email marketing, direct mail, in-app messages, and other action-driven initiatives. The key is to know your audience’s preferences. When you incorporate your plan into your growth marketing strategy, zeroing in on communication preferences will help you build your campaigns accordingly.

Pro tip: When you integrate multiple channels into your marketing plan, your audience can remain engaged from anywhere. Use contextual campaigns to help you gain a deeper understanding of your audience’s behavior across different platforms.

Customer lifecycle

As part of your growth marketing strategy, be sure to pay close attention to the three critical life cycle stages: activation, nurture, and reactivation. You need to:

Target your audience with introductory campaigns to build credibility
Nurture them to strengthen relationships through cross-channel marketing efforts
Re-engage them to drive retention and loyalty through post-purchase or win-back campaigns.

Pro tip: Each customer will progress through the life cycle at their own pace. However, proactively accommodating users' changing needs will help you create more need-specific campaigns, setting you up for success.

5 ways to turbocharge your business with growth marketing

Know your clients and competitors

To optimize your campaign, know your clients. Analyzing their data can often shed light on surprising insights such as discovering which leads have a higher likelihood of converting. It can also help you tailor communications to improve retention rates.

While it’s important to analyze your client base, it’s equally important to determine what your competitors are doing. Seeing what works well (or doesn’t work at all) for them can give you insight into new marketing opportunities to test, too.

Pro tip: To see what your competitors are doing well, use an online competitor analysis tool. To learn what media your clients consume or what terms they use when searching for your product, use the Google Keyword Planner and try client and industry surveys.

Optimize your content marketing

When done right, content marketing can create a lasting impact as part of your growth marketing strategy to help you generate new leads. Demonstrate your expertise in your field with articles, videos, and other sources that your potential customers are searching for. By optimizing your content around keywords your audience is looking for, you can boost the chances of them coming to you and staying.

Pro tip: Be sure to plan, test, and analyze which content is working. When you determine which content is attracting the most attention, adjust your campaigns to ensure you improve results.

Maximize your advertising

You’re probably already employing advertising as part of your marketing strategy — be it sponsored content, display advertising, remarketing, pay-per-click, social media ads, and so on. In most scenarios, real-time data is accessible, allowing you to closely monitor your ads’ performance. Dig into the data and follow growth marketing principles by planning, testing, tweaking, and repeating.

Pro tip: By digging into that data, you will be able to identify insights that enable you to improve leading indicators over time. But to truly maximize your growth marketing efforts, don’t lose sight of the big picture. While data is important, stay focused on broad performance metrics (like sales and revenue) over time so you don’t repeat ineffective advertising moves.

Prioritize your website

Optimizing your website is key to generating more leads. It’s important for communicating why prospective customers should choose you. If you haven’t already done so, advance your SEO strategy. Ultimately, your goal should be to funnel your clients to the action you want them to take. Additionally, your site’s aesthetics and user experience should be familiar for your target audience.

Pro tip: Seeking advice on your SEO strategy is wise, since it’s a specialized technical area. You can also consider identifying CRO improvement opportunities by conducting A/B testing, individual user testing, qualitative research from focus groups, and client surveys.

Make sure your customer service team is motivated

For growth marketing to be sustainable and successful, focus on the customer experience. Having quality service will help you build loyalty and turn consumers into brand advocates. Your products alone will not keep customers happy — they must be coupled with high-quality customer service. Make sure that all brand interactions leave your customers feeling satisfied and valued. If your customer service team isn’t motivated to give each person the "white glove" treatment, your customers probably won’t be coming back…which can make the colossal effort of attracting new users feel like a waste. As we said at the beginning of this article, growth marketing is nothing without a great retention strategy.

Pro tip: To create a good customer service experience, collect customer feedback through surveys and ask for suggestions on how to improve. You should also empower employees with the latest solutions so that they can fulfill their roles effectively. For instance, using a telephone system that automatically distributes incoming calls will benefit team members and customers alike.

Scale Growth Efforts with MarinOne

With growth marketing comes countless tools, channels, platforms, and tactics. One thing is clear: growth marketing requires work, but the return makes it very worthwhile

MarinOne has the tools you need to be a successful growth marketer and can help you focus on both testing and optimizing to boost engagement and provide a better customer experience.

Ready to take your growth marketing to new heights? Contact one of our MarinOne experts today.

The History of Digital Marketing

Advertising is more of an art than a science, and digital marketing is certainly no exception. In the last decade, a lot has changed in the world of online marketing, and the field will continue to adapt along with the quickly evolving technology landscape and ever-shifting consumer trends. In this article, we’ll take a look at how it all began, how it has evolved, and where it's headed next.

The evolution of digital marketing

Let’s first take a look at how digital marketing has developed over the years by looking at some major milestones in its history.

The late 1990s: The rise of the internet

Digital marketing made a strong start in the 1990s due to the rising popularity of personal computers. Between 1994 and 1996, the number of people using the internet jumped from 25 million to a whopping 77 million. Why? Well, when the World Wide Web launched in 1989 and the first popular browser, Netscape, arrived on the scene, it caused an explosion of new users. From then on, the digital landscape began to grow exponentially as more and more browsers and search engines popped up, including many of the most popular search engines we know and still use today.

Early 2000s: The social media revolution

The invention of the World Wide Web created a collaborative space for sharing information, leading to a social media revolution. You may or may not remember MySpace, but it was the first truly popular platform of its kind, and it set the trend for all the others to follow. After its release in 2003, Facebook made its grand entrance. As a social media leader, it quickly became an outlet for businesses to reach global audiences. Brands began to realize the immense opportunities that could be achieved through tweets, posts, videos, emails, blogs, PPC advertising, and more—and this opened the door for digital marketing to expand.

By 2011, TV viewership began to decline for the very first time in history, and marketers were taking note of the transition. With this shift came the introduction of “cookies.” If you’re not already familiar with them, cookies are small pieces of code that are useful for tracking user behavior and content retargeting. Advertisers took advantage of tracking techniques, giving attention to browsing habits and usage patterns so they could fine-tune their campaigns and other marketing efforts.

The emergence of the internet and the rise of search engines also created an ideal space for what came to be known as native advertising. Using native advertising, marketers can promote content more effectively and connect with target customers through search ads.

Mid 2000s: Mobile devices surpass desktop internet usage

When iPhones became available around 2007, they completely changed how we access the web. As the world quickly invested in the many glories of smartphones, mobile usage served as a major motivation for brands to undertake search engine optimization. By 2014, mobile device usage crossed a key threshold and predictive analytics started to gain some traction.

In 2016, marketing automation went into effect and marketers started to build more personalized and efficient campaigns. When Facebook and Google prevailed as the two most recognized leaders of the internet in 2017, influencer marketing skyrocketed—and advertisers took the opportunity to grow their audiences. Paid advertising was no longer considered a supplementary strategy for marketers.

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2018 and beyond: content popularity surges

When 2018 rolled around, marketers continued to improve their SEO efforts, realizing that long-form content was another strategy they could use to increase session durations. But SEO wouldn’t be the only strategy on the minds of advertisers. By 2019, marketers were dealing with an entirely new frontier: the quickly growing landscape of video platforms. By this time it was clear to advertisers that if they wanted to succeed, they would have to prioritize content creation as part of their marketing strategy — be it short-form or long-form text content, or videos.

However, the digital marketing landscape changed once again in 2020 when the pandemic hit and there were restrictions on many daily activities. Digital marketers were forced to keep up with skyrocketing social media use, new purchasing behaviors, and changing consumer behavior patterns. Consumer expectations skyrocketed and marketers had to shift their strategies to create more digital experiences. Marketers realized to adapt they would need to focus on customer values and experiences while placing a stronger emphasis on relationships than ever before. While online strategies are nothing new to the marketing world, COVID-19 initiated a stay-at-home virtual age that couldn’t be ignored. Since then, marketers have needed to focus on online strategies more than ever as a channel for reaching their existing and potential target audiences in order to remain competitive.

The future of digital marketing

As it has done in the past, digital marketing will continue evolving and developing every year. So what can you expect for digital marketing next? Current trends forecast that AI, automation, and machine learning technologies will likely become more pervasive. Influencer marketing will continue to grow and voice search and chat bots will soar in popularity. Interactive marketing content will pop up more, and you can also expect to see digital marketing become algorithm-driven.

While it’s impossible to say with complete certainty where the ever-changing digital marketing landscape is headed in the future, it’s exciting to see where it will go next.

How to stay in the loop

Digital marketing has come a long way in its development. However, the digital market industry is continuously evolving and digital marketers must keep up with the rapid acceleration of changes. They must be able to identify emerging trends as well as the creation of newer and more intelligent search engine algorithms.

To help you keep up with trends and make the most of your digital advertising campaigns, MarinOne gives you full visibility into your campaigns while continuously integrating the latest developments in digital marketing.

MarinOne can help you elevate and scale your paid search, social, and ecommerce advertising by helping you automate your campaigns. To see how contact one of our experts today and schedule a personalized demo.

B2B

Social

How to Create B2B Content That Resonates With Your Audience

Content marketing is buyer-centric. It’s measurable, compounding, and scalable. In fact, it typically performs more reliably than other tactics, which makes it one of the best foundations to build marketing success. Creating unique, consistent, and valuable B2B content is simply the best way to connect with your audience. In this article, we’ll explore what B2B content marketing is, why it’s important, how to build a strategy, and how you can use it to grow your business.

What is B2B content marketing?

Business-to-business (B2B) content marketing is the practice of producing and distributing content methodically to increase brand awareness, improve traffic, generate leads, and boost sales. It’s the process of using content to grow your audience, strengthen brand affinity, and ultimately improve your bottom line. Traditional forms of B2B content marketing include blogs, podcasts, email newsletters, and infographics.

Why do B2B companies need content marketing?

Builds brand awareness

Content marketing directly influences your organic traffic. When traffic is flowing, you’re building awareness for your brand. Done right, content marketing can help

Improve customer retention rates
Boost organic ranking of your site
Help you create brand partnerships, and
Attract more followers on social media.

Creates better engagement rates

Simply focusing on content creation isn’t enough to create an effective B2B strategy. Marketers must also take notice of leading metrics like engagement rates, clicks, and bounce rate. When content is tailored to suit their interests, audiences will continue to consume it. If content is geared towards a buyer’s tendencies and intent, it will also improve overall engagement as well as conversion rates.

Affordable, cost-effective, and supports long-term growth

A good SEO strategy coupled with high-quality content produces long-lasting results that compound over time. Once content is generated, it has great potential to drive organic traffic to your site—without you having to compete for top spot ads.

Although upfront costs for content marketing may initially seem high, it is considered to be more cost-effective than other traditional forms of marketing, paid advertising, and video marketing.

Additionally, the content you create can be frequently updated and repurposed, costing you a fraction of the price it took to make it. In the long term, the more you use your content, the cheaper it will become.

High ROI

According to Statista, 30% of marketers believe content has the highest ROI of any channel. Marketers commonly try to amalgamate content’s strategic and financial value into a single metric: campaign ROI, or the success of a single campaign. When measuring the value of your content, be sure you stay focused on the challenge you are trying to solve. Content assets can be employed in numerous ways and can simultaneously be used across multiple platforms. It can also be used for video purposes, on your website, as a transcript for a blog, and so on.

Perceived level of ROI generated by selected digital marketing
channels according to marketers worldwide - Image Source

How to build a successful B2B content strategy

Every B2B content marketing strategy is unique. However, to create a successful roadmap, you need goals and understanding of your company's long-term objectives. Don’t let the idea of a content strategy be too daunting. It’s actually not very complicated and once you understand what it takes to plan one, you can start creating content that can drive success in your business.

Understand your audience

When you know your audience well, you’ll find it a lot easier to create the right content for them. Even if you have a large audience, explore your Google Analytics data on a granular level. By doing so, you can learn a great deal about your site’s visitors such as gender, age, location, and what topics interest them the most. Once you have more insight into your audience, you can expand content into new relevant subject areas.

Map the customer journey

When you have a good understanding of your audience, review the customer journey. This can be complex, as they probably went through multiple touchpoints. However, it will help you discover which kinds of content are most effective at leading prospects down the sales funnel. When you have a good idea of where a prospect is in the customer journey, you can adjust your content to keep them interested.

Set yourself apart from competitors

Determine who your biggest competitors are and what kind of content they’re producing. To distinguish your company, aim to deliver content in engaging ways that your competitors can’t. Present content that highlights the unique value of your business and services. If they have specific content that is performing well, you can use an AI writing solution like Quicktools to quickly generate copy that is similar to the competitors' content, yet unique and approachable enough to give you a better chance of attracting ideal customers. Unique and approachable messaging will give you a better chance of attracting ideal customers.

Measure leads and micro-metrics

Data can provide a lot of information, allowing you to measure what’s working and what’s not. To advance your B2B content, you must take analytics seriously. Some metrics that are worth measuring include:

Current statistics such as total views, conversions, and shares of posts
Benchmarks and trends
High-performing content

Once you understand how your content is performing, you can adjust your strategy accordingly. If there is specific content that gets better than average conversion rates, promote it via sponsored content or paid social ads.

Common mistakes content marketers make

Content marketing pitfalls can often be prevented with careful planning. With the market so crowded, there’s little room for error and missed opportunities. Marketers need to focus on getting it right as they are limited by a finite number of potential customers. Common mistakes include:

Not taking advantage of user-generated content

When user-generated material goes ignored, marketers miss out on a major opportunity to build a solid foundation of trust with consumers. To ensure content reaches their audience with a greater impact, marketers can include reviews and testimonials where appropriate, and even outsource content creation to users. This saves time and resources.

Not having a content approval process

A review and editing process is vital to ensure high-quality content that is relevant and engaging. It is also wise for marketers to create a content review and approval checklist. Alternatively, using a content management platform can help mainstream the process, making it easy to create, approve, and publish your content.

Not promoting content enough

Promoting content is key to extending your reach to relevant audiences. Include new content in your emails and social media posts to drive more traffic to your content pieces and help nurture potential prospects. Keep in mind that producing content is only as effective as the efforts you make to advertise it. Native ads, display ads, and paid social are also great tactics for distributing articles or whitepapers as far reaching as possible. It no one reads the content then it doesn't matter how much you have or how good it is…which is why content creation is just as important as content promotion.

10 quick tips and tactics for effective content marketing

Use personalized nurture journeys
Engage employees in active audience building
Create content for ALL search engines
Make sure your case studies aren’t too formal or stuffy
Use “smart” popups
Maximize digital PR to extend promotions and reach
Use content snippets to make product education more digestible
Segment your retargeting audience
Promote your high-converting blog posts
Partner with brands and influencers in your industry

MarinOne can help you supercharge your content

As a B2B company, MarinOne is well versed in what it takes to reach the right audiences with the right messages. Through our cross-channel approach, your campaigns will persuade and convert like never before.

Business to Business advertisers gain a competitive advantage by identifying and analyzing the right data and integrating insights from that data to help campaigns perform. With MarinOne, you can easily optimize your content and automate key workflows using first-party data.

Get in touch with one of MarinOne’s experts today to see how we can help you with your marketing needs.

Social

Ecommerce

Getting Started in Community Marketing

We all have a fundamental need to belong. In fact, this is not unique to humanity; some animals only survive or thrive in groups as well. The foundation of a community is built upon support from acquaintances or family, as well as shared interests or backgrounds. Churches, schools, clubs, neighborhoods are some of the primary ways people get a sense of community or togetherness. Brands can create a community using the same methodology: a group of people that are all passionate or interested in a central topic.

Why Should Community Marketing be Important to Brands?

Community marketing's primary objective is to help companies engage with members of their target audience through their products, creating an engaged and long-term audience of customers. A key component to true lifecycle marketing, creating an active brand community can keep the same customers coming back to your brand again and again. It is a pillar of brand loyalty.

Community marketing leverages the power of social media or other online platforms to build meaningful relationships with consumers. Many consumers want to get the "brand perspective" on various topics they are interested in, and this can impact how the community members interact. Many companies underestimate the influence they may have to start meaningful conversations online. Fitness, beauty, and lifestyle brands often do this quite well as consumers of these products are addressing needs that are quite personal, like their appearance or health, and they crave a safe space to discuss those needs. Organizations doing community marketing well are hosting and owning that safe space for discussion.

What Goes Into a Successful Community Marketing Plan?

There are a few crucial aspects to establishing a healthy community marketing strategy. One component of this involves creating messaging that focuses on everything your target consumers love doing. Look at the broader universe surrounding your product and the problems it solves.

Savage X Fenty did this successfully when they set out to have a unique discussion around body positivity and inclusivity in the lingerie space. Their approach in setting up email lists, and Facebook groups, and community boards, all added to that sense of togetherness where many people of different backgrounds could connect on feeling "on the outside" with other lingerie companies marketing tactics. The result of this harmonious messaging resulted in incredible growth for the brand. Making your company mission about more than just a set of products brings customers or prospective customers together, getting them psyched about what they already have a genuine interest in.

Advantages of Initiating and Running a Brand Community

If you still have doubts about using community marketing for your business, here are some benefits that might help you make up your mind.

Improved customer experience for your prospects. By constantly interacting with the community, you get first-hand information about customer satisfaction. In turn, you can use this info to upgrade your products to suit their needs.
Increased customer retention and brand growth. An effective program seeks to build loyalty in customers who buy from your brand severally. The goal of every business is to achieve loyal relationships with their customers.
Instead of monitoring your brand reputation like an eagle overlooking an expansive landscape, with community marketing you're more like a deer living within the environment, overhearing what is being said and interacting with the other creatures in your brand forest. Your company becomes an integral part of the conversation. The opportunity to answer questions, redirect customers, and have ownership over public opinion in this way, especially if there are any questions being thrown your way from a PR standpoint, is invaluable.
New members of the community easily become your customers. Although a larger following does not always translate to more significant sales, you get new customers from the brand awareness that comes through your existing customers interacting and enjoying the community.
The business grows organically. Thriving communities have people willing to share their good experiences with the world. These advocates can result in tremendous growth, and this kind of engagement becomes a great funnel and natural segue into ambassador, influencer, or affiliate marketing strategies.
Customers can feel the product's authenticity. We all know that advertising can sometimes be a bit fabricated. Community branding brings out honesty and transparency, resulting in an authentic feel to your product and brand.

Misconceptions Surrounding Community Marketing

Even with many benefits to businesses that use community marketing, the lack of clarity in some areas has led to misconceptions surrounding it. Let's look at a few that are the most common.

An extensive community is always the best.
Communities can only spring up naturally.
A product can only have a single community branding.
All the members should be customers.

Best Ways to Start and Run Community Marketing

If you are starting or want to better your strategy, brace yourself and put your best foot forward. You do not want your audience feeling too much pressure, coercion, or any form of spam. Here are some tips to get you started without coming across too "salesy."

Interact with the members of the community on general topics surrounding your industry. Start with an internal brainstorm session to have a full list of ideas that you can refer back to whenever in doubt. Remember too that you're facilitating conversations, not lecturing. No need to stand on a pulpit and declare things–ask questions and let the community bring their ideas to you. The community will tell you what they care about and want to discuss.
Exercise your expertise in the specific field. If you strike your followers as an expert, people will start coming at you with questions and seeking clarification. Seek more knowledge in the niche and focus on helping your audience build their expertise. Positioning multiple employees as thought leaders and including them in the engagement process also builds authority for your company and humanizes the interactions that take place.
Be reachable. Group participation alone is not enough. Show up regularly, respond to direct messages, and avoid ignoring reactions. After all, you want followers to see your brand as authentic and human.
Be consistent. If it has been a while since you created a community and no one has shown up yet, or you can only hear cricket noises, don't lose hope. Keep sharing, and in time, the audience will gain confidence in your products and their ability to contribute in a meaningful way.
Engage with the audience. This is the surefire way to quickly learn what your community values and what they appreciate, between plain posts and videos. If you can also do a poll, that would come in handy. Sometimes simply liking, commenting, or tagging community members is enough to make people feel they are important to the company.

Conclusion

Community marketing contributes significantly to accelerated growth and a positive brand reputation. Incorporating this channel as a tactic can help keep company goals in line with the audience's wants. Identify the best platform for building your community based on where you believe your existing target market spends their time online.

Once your organic social media strategy is inline, MarinOne can assist in continuing to drive brand awareness, revenue growth, and holistic omnichannel analysis. Our tool provides an all-in-one place to see how all your campaigns are performing against each other, and how organic channels are assisting paid channels. Speak to our marketing team of experts today to learn more about cross-channel paid media management.

Precision Marketing: What it is and Why You Need it

It’s hard to keep up with what’s new in the world of marketing with so many new strategies emerging every day. A decade ago, marketers focused on creating catchy ads and putting them in the right places at the right time. However, a lot of things have changed since then. For one thing, effective marketing now requires businesses to implement a more holistic approach.

With more competition than ever before, simply creating an ad won’t yield the best results. In this day and age, customers are more in control and are more discerning. You must understand your buyer, learn what they want, and develop a strategy to meet their needs. One of the best ways to do that? Precision marketing.

Read on to learn about precision marketing and gain meaningful insights and advice from one of our very own MarinOne digital advertising experts, Anu Adegbola, on how to create an effective strategy that will get your brand noticed and help you win your customers’ loyalty.

What is precision marketing?

Precision marketing uses data and relationship-building to precisely target a brand’s customers. The technique involves nurturing relationships—specifically, prioritizing existing customers over new ones and connecting with them in a more relevant way. It’s about customer retention, upselling, and cross-selling. Using precision marketing, marketers rely heavily on market segmentation to analyze shopper habits, behaviors, and other patterns to help increase the success of their marketing efforts while providing a better and more intelligent customer experience.

Why precision marketing is important

Marketing needs to be agile

The internet has made it easy for customers to respond to marketing campaigns and ads in real time. If you want to stay ahead of your competition, you need to be prepared to adapt quickly.

Marketing is more complex than it used to be

To thoroughly understand your customer base, you need more than just demographic information. While it’s helpful to know the basics of where and who your customers are, it’s just as critical to know what’s important to them, how they communicate with one another, and more. When you have accurate data, you’ll be able to create messaging that resonates with your key audiences.

Customers have high expectations

Customers expect their user experience to be frictionless. In this new digital age, they want what they want, when they want it. To ensure customer satisfaction it is critical to stay up-to-date with the latest marketing trends. If you don’t, your customers may look elsewhere, seeking out your competitors instead.

Connections matter

Marketing is no longer about copy that sells. While engaging ads are still very important, success now requires social insight along with an understanding of psychology. When you understand why customers are making their purchase decisions, you can develop a more tailored marketing strategy.

5 tips for an effective precision marketing strategy

Implementing an effective precision marketing strategy that produces results requires following a careful and comprehensive plan.

Engage with your customers

When promoting your product, don’t forget that commitment to your customer comes first, and their purchase comes second. Developing real relationships will help foster more brand loyalty along the way.

“If all you’re focusing on is getting clicks, you’re not going to get the return you’re looking for. It’s not all about volume—it’s about the right volume. You need to make sure you’re showing things to the right audience,” says MarinOne marketing expert, Anu Adegbola. “Those who have focused on just the data and not building a relationship with their clients won’t succeed because they don’t have the whole picture.”

Have a strong online presence

Besides having had a profound effect on marketing, social media has proven to be an essential part of a successful marketing strategy. Old marketing strategies like live events and cold calls may have worked in the past, but not now. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social media platforms give you a way to connect with customers more personally.

Anu’s advice: “If you’re going to have a presence on a social platform, you need to do it well. Test the various platforms to see what’s working for your brand or company—if it’s not working for you, move on and find what does. Make sure you’re on the appropriate platform for your brand and your customers. If you’re in the wrong space, you may get a negative reaction.”

Offer real value to repeat customers

Customers respond well to brands that cater to their needs and consistently offer them real value. “It’s not just about targeting the single purchases, but it’s about building repeat customers,” Anu explains. Make lifecycle marketing an integral part of your precision marketing strategy by creating interesting and dynamic content that brings your precisely targeted customers back to your brand again and again. Personalized offers that relate to past products they've bought, birthdays, or unique interests are all great ways to get repeat purchases from the same customer over time.

Be authentic

Customers appreciate authenticity. Understand where your brand sits in the market and what makes it unique. To be effective, know your brand values and make sure you represent those values through your marketing efforts. It also helps to have an approachable brand voice–test out multiple variants of landing page or ad copy when running a targeted campaign. Most likely the assets that will perform the best will be the most simple to comprehend; making things too complex increases the likelihood that you'll lose interest by those unfamiliar with your brand.

Create a desirable customer experience

Customers today live in a digital world with unlimited options. Give them a compelling reason to work with you. By delivering an exceptional customer experience, you can win their trust and expect that they will keep coming back.

“You need to make things easy for the customer,” suggests Anu. “For example, if the return process is easy, they’ll come back to shop again, and hopefully buy something even more expensive the next time they shop with you.”

5 keys for success in brand loyalty

Here are some of the best ways to get in front of your customers and build their loyalty.

Maintain a strong brand

Customers naturally gravitate towards brands they’re familiar with and can trust. Aim to align your brand with your values, mission, and your customers’ expectations.

Understand your audience’s habits

Use precision marketing to gain accurate insight into your audience’s behaviors. When used effectively, audience data can help you create content that is engaging and relevant.

Stick to your goals

Setting realistic goals will make it easier for you to track the success of your marketing efforts. By measuring what’s working and what’s not, you can adjust your goals accordingly. Consider evaluating click through rates, the number of email newsletter subscribers, how effective CTAs are working, as well as ups and downs in website traffic.

Make retention a priority

While it's good to attract new customers, it’s far more cost effective to focus on retaining your existing ones. The goal is to have people keep coming back. To drive more conversions, focus on creating personalized experiences and deals that your existing customers will find appealing. Segment your audiences, collect data about each audience group and their behavior, and you’re sure to be on your way to higher retention rates.

Stay on top of trends

You may already be aware that marketing trends change frequently. Staying on top of trends—even if they come and go—gives you a competitive advantage and helps you maintain a close connection with customers. When a new trend pops up, assess whether it will be effective for your brand. To make sure you're in the loop, read current blogs and listen to your customers so you can meet their needs.

Use MarinOne to boost your precision marketing efforts

The marketing industry is constantly evolving and it will continue to do so in the years to come. To remain responsive, marketers must use precision marketing to build solid relationships with their existing customers and attract the right audiences for new potential customers.

MarinOne can help you streamline and amplify your precision marketing campaigns using the latest analytics and automation tools. We can also provide tactical and strategic advice, guide you on what strategies will work best for your specific needs, and much more. Learn more about MarinOne today.

‍Get in touch with one of our experts to see how we can help you get the information and tools you need to increase the effectiveness of your precision marketing campaigns.

How to Migrate from Universal Analytics (UA) to Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

In 2023, Google will stop supporting Universal Analytics and switch all customers to Google Analytics 4. Prepare ahead of time to make your transition as seamless as possible by making GA4 an integral part of your tech stack now. We will discuss how Google Analytics 4 differs from earlier versions and there will also be pointers for maximizing the platform's functionality.

Google Analytics 4: What’s new?

So now comes the question of what new features there are in GA4, and the answer is, in short… a lot. The data collection algorithm and data structure in GA4 are quite different. Now, rather than sessions as in the past, everything is built around users and events. Every user interaction is treated as a separate event in an event-based approach.

This shift is important since, in the past, we relied on a session-based model that categorized user activities over a certain time. Marketing grows significantly from shifting the focus from sessions to events, including improved pathing analytic capabilities and cross-platform analysis.

By switching to an event-based approach, GA4 becomes more adaptable and has improved user behavior prediction.

Google Analytics 4 property events

Normally, the data in your reports comes from activities that occur as people engage with your website or blog. A page view event is triggered whenever a user accesses a page on your site.

The following events may be gathered without the use of any code:

Automatically collected events: Events that are automatically captured when data collection is set up include first visit, ad clicks, and file downloads.
Enhanced measurement events: This option automatically gathers enhanced measurement events such as page view, scroll, and video engagement.
Recommended events: This represents events that you design but that have fixed names and parameters. Common events in this category could be ad impressions, coupon use for purchases, or a search performed by the user on your website directly.
Custom events: Custom events are ones you designate and give a specific name. If none of the events in the other categories meet your requirements, you can build events that are completely bespoke to your business.

How to make the transition from Universal Analytics to GA4

To update the GA version, you can follow the steps that are listed below:

Step 1:

Easily install GA4 by navigating to the admin part of your reporting view in your GA3 property. Open the admin section and start the process.

Step 2:

You will see that the "Setup Assistant" link for GA4 located under the Property column. Click on it.

Step 3:

You will find the heading "I want to create a new Google Analytics 4 property," click the "Get Started" button.

Step 4:

In this step, you need to click on the Create Property button. New GA4 properties will now be created automatically by Google Analytics. Your current GA property will continue to exist. So you will have access to at least two GA properties. With gtag.js, the GA4 setup assistance operates automatically. You must add the Analytics tag manually if you use a website builder like WordPress, Wix, etc. However, this new GA4 property won't start gathering data automatically. For the data to begin flowing into your new GA4 property, you must configure your GTM (Google Tag Manager).

Step 5:

Now click on the "see your GA4 button. A new tab will open. Click on the Data stream link.

Step 6:

In this step, click on your web data stream. Note: Both "web stream" and "data stream" are used in Google Analytics 4. These two terms refer to the flow of analytics information your website sends to Google Analytics.

Step 7:

Select "Use existing on-page tag" from the Tagging instructions section. Select Google Tag Manager from the drop-down option. Now you will see the instructions for setting up a tag to track your website data in the new GA4 property. Note down the measurement ID.

Step 8:

Go to your GTM account and click the link for New Tags. Give your new tag a name like "GA4 tracking - All pages" and choose Google Analytics: GA4 Configuration as the tag type.

Step 9:

In the Measurement ID text box, type the measurement ID you recorded earlier. Make sure that your trigger fires on all pages. To save your tag, click the Save button.

Step 10:

Click on the Preview button, which is situated in the upper right corner. The Tag Manager Preview mode window will appear in a new browser tab. If it doesn't, it indicates that your browser is blocking the window.

Step 11:

Now enter your website address and click on the Connect button. Your website will appear in a new tab in your browser window as soon as you click the Connect button.

Step 12:

Return to the tab of your browser that displays the Tag Manager Preview mode window, and click the Continue button. Your tag is firing properly if you see the tag "GA4 tracking-All pages" in the Tags Fired column.

Step 13:

Now again, open your GTM account and click the submit tab. Click the Publish button after naming your version. Go back to your website, click on a few pages, and open them. After scrolling up, open your GA4 property again and click the cross button next to the Web stream details.

Finally, check your reports

From the menu on the left, just select the Reports icon.

Your home page report's quick response will be:

What are the locations of your new users?
Which of your campaigns performed the best?
Which screens and pages receive the greatest traffic?

Select Real-time report by clicking over it. Your real-time report should show new data. Remember that Google Analytics 4 reports differ significantly from the Universal Analytics reports. In addition to using the new catalog, several well-known metrics and reports have been totally removed. Basically, you would have to start again with Google Analytics 4 if you were using standard reports like the Top Landing Pages report.

Keep in mind that GA4 property is the default option while establishing a new property from within an existing GA3 property. However, you can still use the GA4 Setup Assistant option in your GA3 property even after you have created your new GA4 property.

The option to "See your GA4 property" should appear when you click the GA4 Setup Assistant link once more, indicating that you have successfully set up the GA4 property and connected it to your previous GA3 property.

What is an App + Web Property?

App + Web was basically Google Analytics 4's beta version. All App + Web properties are now accessible as GA4 properties. This means that you don't need to do anything.

Open the property in your Google Analytics account. The previous Universal Analytics interface will have been replaced with the new GA4 interface.

Next Steps

Google Analytics 4 uses artificial intelligence (AI) to effectively gather user data, provide statistics based on customer life cycles, and help you customize your advertising to your target audience. Combining these elements can increase your chances of conversion and ROI while also building your business.

Using GA4 in combination with MarinOne reporting and conversion tracking tools will give your marketing team complete visibility on all your website impressions, engagement, and actions…with a holistic view of users and events across channels and devices. By automatically connecting and combining siloed marketing data from thousands of sources, you can understand the impact of your marketing at both high and granular levels.

Ready to know your best-performing tactics across the consumer’s journey and optimize every marketing dollar? Speak with one of our expert consultants today to learn how to get started.

Ecommerce

Create a Profitable E-commerce Website

The global e-commerce market reached a value of $13 trillion in 2021—and is forecasted to rise to $55.6 trillion by 2027. What are some of the major factors that led to this growth? There was an explosion in demand for smart devices like smartphones and tablets, making it easier than ever for people to shop online from anywhere. COVID was another big factor: when stores closed, consumers all went online—and they liked it.

In this article, we'll share some of the benefits of the current e-commerce landscape, then give you some tips on getting your e-commerce site to perform at its best this year and beyond.

Reasons to Ramp Up your E-comm Presence

There's no doubt that online sales are more important than ever, regardless of your company structure. With a growing population of e-comm shoppers and a marketplace that's constantly expanding, it's essential to have a strong e-commerce presence if you want to stay competitive and meet customers’ demands. Here are five reasons you should focus your efforts on e-commerce:

Meeting Consumers Where They Are

Since the onset of the pandemic, consumer behavior has dramatically changed, shifting more towards digital shopping habits. A study done by Pew Research states that 79% of U.S. consumers shop online, indicating that this new habit is here to stay. And for good reason: it’s far more convenient than having to step foot in any physical retail store. It saves time, gives consumers the flexibility to shop for the best prices, and allows them to choose from a wider range of products.

Unrestricted Store Hours

Having an e-commerce site means your store is theoretically open all day, every day. With 24/7 access consumers can browse whenever they want, be it 1 AM or 1 PM. Not only does this make digital shopping more appealing for customers, but it also increases sales opportunities.

Manage Your Business From Anywhere

As opposed to a traditional brick-and-mortar storefront, using an e-commerce site allows you to run your company from anywhere. Whether you prefer to sit in an office, work from home, or even your local coffee shop, you can watch your business grow without being tied to a physical space.

Extend Your Reach

As an e-commerce company, your number one priority is to get the word out about your products and services. It is possible to advertise in different ways and improve traffic to your site. However, this is easier said than done. It's always hard to get noticed online with so much noise and competition shouting their message out. By honing in on the right niche messaging for your target demographic, and utilizing an omnichannel marketing approach with SEM, email marketing with proper authentication protocols, influencers, and more…you can "find your people" on a global scale. Once the right brand message is identified, the opportunity to extend your reach to a wider target audience is virtually limitless.

Reduce Your Costs

If you were at all hesitant to start an e-commerce site because of the cost, think again. Launching a site is more affordable than owning a store, and it minimizes infrastructure, communication, and other overhead costs.

Tips for Creating a Profitable E-commerce Site

Follow the Latest Trends

With e-commerce best practices constantly evolving and changing, it’s vital to keep your e-commerce site current and your business competitive. By keeping up with the latest trends, you'll find new and innovative techniques that will offer your business huge value, while identifying the tactics that may not be suitable for your specific company needs. To determine which trends are worth pursuing, know your customers and competitors well so you can make the right move.

Understand How to Optimize your E-Commerce Presence

Adopt advanced conversion tactics and push your organization to improve your baseline goal. Routinely examine bounce rates, exit rates, click-through rates, and average session durations. It is also wise to invest in e-commerce tools that can help analyze your current conversion rate issues. Some other strategies for boosting conversion rates include using high-quality images and videos on your product pages, providing limited-time coupon codes, and tweaking your store checkout process.

Develop Strategic Shipping Policies and Options

Offer your consumers free shipping on orders over a specific amount and offer expedited delivery options like three-day shipping or two-hour delivery windows for customers who need their items immediately. An effective product delivery strategy will help to differentiate your business from competitors.

Include Customer Reviews on Product Pages

Without a storefront, customers can’t physically experience an item before purchasing it. Give them the confidence they need to make informed decisions about products by providing them with easy access to online product reviews. By helping them navigate your business’s digital space, you maintain a positive reputation and a strong brand name, leading to happy customers and returning business.

Create Social Media Profiles for Your Brand

Having a social media presence allows you to connect with existing customers and reach out to potential new ones. Statista data indicates that users spend an average of a whopping 147 minutes per day on social media. Using social media to market your e-commerce store allows you to reach shoppers directly, advertise new products, or engage them with attractive promotions. According to BigCommerce statistics, businesses with an active and unique social media presence have at least 32% more sales than those without one.

Integrate your Point of Sale and Inventory Management Systems for Best Results

Consumers prefer a seamless shopping and purchasing experience, with expectations that their products will arrive at their doorstep as fast as possible. Backend integration can help streamline e-commerce operations like inventory management, so that your customers remain satisfied and get what they want, when they want it. Integrating inventory management allows your organization to track its stock so you can balance the quantity of products on hand while meeting customer demands. By being able to analyze trends and sales patterns, you can also successfully maximize sales margins.

Make your Site Mobile Friendly

Making sure your e-commerce site is mobile-friendly is the key to driving more sales and ensuring a smooth customer journey. A mobile-friendly design leads to more page views, stronger customer loyalty, increased online purchases, and many more benefits.

Site Speed Matters

The last thing you want is a slow-loading website that will irritate your visitors. If your site can’t move fast enough for your customers it will negatively impact the user's perception of your brand, increase bounce rates, and encourage buyers to look elsewhere. In fact, studies prove that if a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, 40% of users will quickly give up and leave.

Conclusion

Not only is centralizing your business to an e-commerce website cost-effective, it’s also been the preferred way for customers to shop for several years now. To stay competitive, it's essential that you get your website running like a well-oiled machine.

Not sure where to start? MarinOne can help by streamlining your advertising efforts and give your website a jumpstart in sales and traffic. This will buy your team time to get the web backend exactly how you want it while we build your front-end brand through advertising on marketplaces, paid search, and social. With MarinOne, you can gain an edge over your competition, maximize performance across all channels, and utilize impactful retail marketplace advertising features to set your e-commerce site up for success.

Learn more about how MarinOne can help. Get in touch and speak to one of our team experts or schedule a free demo today.

Marin Software

Protecting yourself and your company in a world of remote work

This is a story about people doing bad things on the internet. It’s not the first and certainly won’t be the last. We decided to tell our story to help prevent others from becoming victims. Of course we don’t want people misusing our brand, but the people who have spent their precious time and lost money in this are the real victims and are the ones we are looking to protect.

It started with a DM

We started getting strange messages to our social media accounts and various company email addresses asking “is this project real?” The project: Translation work from somebody who is using a name very similar to ours and our company logo.

This has nothing to do with our company (if you look closely, you can see the misspelled name). We responded to these inquiries letting the email senders know the project was not real and that they should not communicate with these Scammers (I’d really prefer to use a stronger term here, but my editor would not allow it). We also let the platforms where these conversations originated know what was happening.

As we received more messages, some of them became more urgent. Some of these new Victims were panicked because they had done the work and then sent money to the Scammers. One of them had sent $1,500.

How does this work?

We believe that these scams start with a job posting on sites like Freelancer.com and Upwork. The Scammer then asks the Victim to move their communications off the original platform and to communicate directly through Telegram or another messaging platform, including email.

The Victim is given work that seems legitimate, and completes the task. When the Victim seeks payment, the Scammer then requires the Victim to establish an account for payment, which requires the Victim to send an “account registration fee” to the Scammer. This advance-fee scam is not new. Similar scams have been around in various forms for decades or longer, including the Spanish Prisoner and Nigerian Prince scams.

The Scammer promises that the account registration fee will be refunded upon the Scammer’s payment for the Victim’s work. At this point, many of the Victims realize that they have fallen for a scam. But some Victims, having already done some work and not wanting to walk away from a potential payment, go ahead and pay the account registration fee. A behavioral psychologist might refer to this as an escalation of commitment or sunk-cost fallacy.

In a few cases, the Scammer further escalates the commitment by asking the Victim to make an additional payment to link their account.

How can freelancers protect themselves?

According to HR statistics, freelance work in the US has been on the rise, with 53 million registered freelancers in 2014 versus 59 million in 2020. So how can these freelancers protect themselves? The first thing that people can do when working on freelance projects is to always work through the platforms. They have established policies in place to ensure that payment happens once the job is completed and that payment should happen directly through the platform. Being asked to move communication to email or another platform should be a red flag.

Secondly, there is absolutely no reason that we can think of where a legitimate company would ask you to provide payment in order to get paid. If it sounds like it doesn't make sense, it probably doesn't.

Third: watch out for projects that look too good to be true. The pay for the projects that we've seen were quite generous and this of course gets people more interested. If it seems like you are being overpaid for the amount of work involved, keep your guard up.

There are many articles and videos with additional advice on what to watch for.

What are you doing to stop this? What can other companies do?

We aim to work with the freelance platforms and relevant law enforcement to try to prevent these types of scams from happening. Below are some contacts and links that we used so you can use them if needed. If you become aware of a scam online posting, please report the posting and/or the user to the relevant platform.

US Agencies

Online Platforms

Also, provide a way for people to contact you. People who have lost money are very resourceful about getting in touch with someone who can help. We have seen direct messages on social networks, emails to every alias listed on our website, and well as personal telephone outreach to team members and their families. By posting a link on our Contact Us page, we have made it easier for people to connect with our legal team and get additional information.

Open request to freelancing platforms

As we discussed how to handle this internally, one of the things that we think could provide a significant Improvement in the freelance ecosystem would be to allow companies to become certified. This would be similar to the blue check on Twitter. This way, a freelancer would know that the job is legitimate and coming from the official company account. It seems like a step in the right direction. It appears there is something similar for individuals, but we couldn’t find anything for companies.

We are not experts in this area, so there may be other things in place or better ways to solve this problem. We'd love to start a discussion about how we can do that. For now, know that Marin's cyber security practices are strong. If we need any freelance assistance, we will not be contacting anyone through Telegram or Whatsapp.

As we live in a world with increasingly remote employees, we expect that we will all face more of these types of threats. We all should keep our guards up.