Sunday, May 28, 2017

Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence | Marketing, Technology

Virtual reality: A New Technology Revolution

Customers have made their preference for online and mobile commerce clear, and as companies continue to adapt to this and propel towards providing advanced self service, Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence are stepping into the limelight. Sylvia Jensen, Director of Marketing EMEA at Oracle Marketing Cloud, discusses this technology revolution and what it means for the future.

The dynamic between brands and customers has reached a tipping point, and all signs point to a technology revolution that will yet again reshape the customer experience. People have made clear their preference for online and mobile commerce and in response, companies are moving further away from real-life, human interactions in favour of advanced self service. So it is no surprise that large proportions of sales and marketing leaders are citing Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence as the biggest game-changers in communication for 2017 and beyond.

Self Service Gets an Upgrade

From VR dressing rooms on a retailer’s website to intelligent chatbots on a telecoms company’s service portal, merchants are already finding ways to make the customer experience more convenient and familiar to consumers whose primary communication platforms have become messaging apps and social networks.

AI and VR have the potential to greatly enhance the customer experience but brands must ensure they are set up to succeed. Unless these technologies are underpinned by an overarching data strategy that unifies and organises customer and prospect data, they will only deliver a fraction of their potential. Brands will always look to experiment with new technologies as they try to find ways of delivering innovative and memorable experiences for their customers, but they need to ensure that they are able to truly understand their customers first. Having the right data will enable organisations to deliver a better, more personalised experience to their customers and deliver the right message to the right person at the right time on the right channel – through VR, AI, on social or otherwise.

Influencer Marketing - Generation Z | Millennials

3 Ways To Pick The Right Influencers When Marketing To Generation Z

What does it take to reach Generation Z? It’s pretty simple, actually: Don’t make it look like an advertisement!

Generation Z is the generation currently between high school and college, born in the late 1990s through the mid-2010s. It is the first generation to be born into the mature digital age. While Millennials (their slightly older counterparts) have memories of life before AOL Instant Messenger, Gen Z’s childhood consisted of iPad games and smartphones.

You can’t expect old advertising tactics to work on these young, digital natives. It doesn’t matter how amazing the camera, how beautiful the shots, how clever the copy — if it sounds like an ad, Gen Z is gone and paying attention to something else until it’s over.

What many big brands and businesses don’t seem to understand is that Gen Z has grown up in an era of vulnerable YouTubers and confessional bloggers. They don’t just watch TV; they watch their favorite vloggers.

This is why influencer marketing has become so popular with younger consumers. Brands are beginning to realize that in order to reach these new viewers, they need to share their message where Gen Z is looking: on their smartphones and social media feeds.

But even though influencer marketing is still fairly new (five years ago, the thought of paying a social influencer 6-plus figures to mention your brand or wear your logo was unheard of), the landscape has already begun to change drastically.

Influencer marketing has been proven and scaled, which means it is becoming more refined. In fact, according to VentureBeat, 75% of marketers use influencer marketing in their overall strategy. Influencer marketing is no longer uncommon. The key is to utilize influencers the right way.

So, how do you use influencers when marketing to Gen Z? Here are three tips.

Saturday, May 20, 2017

Social Media | Social Media Marketing, SEO

8 Ways To Use Social Media To Promote Your Company

Modern society revolves around technology and mobile devices, so using social media to reach your audience is a great way to promote your business. However, there are still countless marketers and small business owners that are struggling to harness the power of social media.

Social media is an awesome, cost-effective way to market your company and build a relationship with your potential customers. It can (and should!) be used by virtually any business, regardless of its size or industry.

Although social media can bring a number of great benefits, using these platforms effectively can be a bit overwhelming. To help you, I’ve put together a list of 8 ways you can use social media to promote your company and build an enduring relationship with your audience.

Why Should You Use Social Media?

The emergence and widespread use of new technology have changed many aspects of modern culture, including our shopping habits. Consumers spend a huge amount of time on social media every day, and savvy companies are taking advantage of this. Aside from being cost-effective, promoting your company on social media has many advantages, some of which include:

Giving your company personality
Sharing your knowledge
Becoming a thought leader in your industry
Building brand awareness
Generating more traffic for your website
Improving SEO
Increasing loyalty levels

Another great reason to use social media is the emotional aspect. Because social media is a source of entertainment and interactive leisure, consumers are more open-minded and receptive to your marketing efforts, contrary to traditional marketing channels.

Ways to Use Social Media to Promote Your Business

You can promote your company through social media in many different ways. That being said, you have to pay a lot of attention to your audience and your industry. Creating buyer personas, or fictional depictions of your perfect client, will help you set the right tone for your posts and the content you share.

Social media marketing campaigns can be very effective, especially if they are used as a part of a bigger marketing scheme, like an inbound marketing strategy. Here are some of the most effective ways to use social media as a stand-alone strategy or as part of a bigger scheme.

Small Business Marketing | Internet Marketing Tips

10 Tips for Promoting Your Small Business from Online Entrepreneurs

How do you promote your small business? You can use content marketing. You can focus on social media. You can host some sales or other events. And that’s just the start.

For more ideas on how to give your small business a boost this spring, check out these tips from members of our small business community.

Use These Spring Promotion Ideas for Family Friendly Businesses

Spring is a great time to try to appeal to families with your marketing. And there are some really great promotional ideas out there, including the ones listed in this post for family friendly recreation businesses by Jenny Hayward of Signpost.

Use a Blog to Boost Your Business

Blogging isn’t exactly a new promotional strategy for businesses. But it’s important that you have an actual plan for how you can use a blog to really boost your business. Marc Prosser elaborates in this post on the CorpNet blog.

Create High Converting Content

Whether you’re creating blog posts, social media or other types of content, you need to always keep in mind how that content is going to convert customers. In this Content Marketing Institute post, Shane Barker shares how you can create high converting content for your business.

Drive Traffic With LinkedIn Marketing

When you think of social media marketing, your mind probably goes right to Facebook or maybe Twitter. But there are some powerful tools on LinkedIn that you can use to promote your business, as Ravi Chahar outlines in this Inspire to Thrive post. You can also see commentary on the post over on BizSugar.

Use Customer Empowerment to Improve Retention Rates

Your small business’s promotions shouldn’t be all about gaining new customers. It can also be about improving retention rates. This Kissmetrics post by Nadav Dakner goes into more detail about how customer empowerment can improve retention rates for small businesses.

Digital Marketing Trends | AR, VR, Videos, Data, Apps

5 Digital Marketing Trends You Should Be Paying Attention to in 2017

When it comes to digital marketing, content is still king. Content marketing comprised 20.3% of the digital marketing techniques implemented so far in 2017, although big data (crunching numbers to reveal buying patterns, for instance) is quickly gaining a foothold in online commerce.

The point is, businesses that still do not see the significance of digital marketing to boost their presence and revenue will end up being left behind by the competition.

According to a report from Statista, digital ad spending in the U.S. is expected to grow to $118 billion in 2020 from just a shade under $60 billion in 2015. That's more than double in just five years. In the global scale, the amount is expected to reach over $250 billion by 2018.

Here are just five of the digital marketing trends to watch for this year:

1. AR & VR Technology

The potential of augmented reality and virtual reality in business applications has never been more promising. After the gaming industry latched on to the new technology to enhance the user experience for gamers, developers have released apps that can help boost businesses. For instance, architects can make use of AR to give clients a virtual tour of what the finished product would be like. In digital marketing, businesses can exploit VR to help customers get a better picture of their vision more than any other type of messaging could.

2. Live Videos

Facebook Live and Snapchat Videos are just some of the platforms that can be exploited by digital marketers. Video content will dominate the scene in the next few years with Cisco predicting that 80% of consumer internet traffic by 2020 will be cornered by videos. Meanwhile, Facebook Live is growing 94% each year in the U.S. with eight billion views daily.

Facebook was embroiled in a scandal when its video platform was used to broadcast several violent attacks, which prompted founder Mark Zuckerberg to announce the hiring of 3,000 more people to police the platform of any offensive content.

3. Apps for Data Visualization

Applications like Data Hero, Tableau, Dygraphs, and Visual.ly have been helping digital marketers package big data for easy consumption not just for businesses but the consumers as well. This is not exactly a new trend. However, for this year, it's projected that businesses will make sure to exert more effort in using these tools to interpret the facts and figures at their disposal.

SEO - Internet Marketing | Importance of META Tags

Why are META Tags Essential for SEO and Website Ranking?

How to rank better in the search engines? One good SEO technique includes HTML meta tags. Here are 6 types of meta tags and why you should use them.

If your business has a website, then it’s important to think beyond just writing keyword rich copy for the page. It’s also vital to utilize the catalog of meta tags available that can be associated with that page in order to get better traction in the search engines. One of the parts of good SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques includes HTML Meta tags. Thankfully, you don’t need to be a programmer to learn the basics of meta tag relevancy and how you can use them to draw your ideal client in to visit your site.

Unlike the early stages of search engines, adding relevant keyword meta tags won’t rank your website higher in the search results anymore. However, meta tags are a great way for business owners to provide search engines, and their users, with information about their website.

SEO - Optimize Website Images | ALT Tags

Why You Should Still Optimize Your Photos For SEO

Most SEOs will tell you that it’s important to optimize your images. It has long been considered an essential part of on-site optimization, especially if images are a central part of your content strategy.

But in recent years, website builders like WordPress have been able to offer more out-of-the-box on-site optimization, with automatically formatted images in many cases.

So just how important is it to optimize your images in 2017?

What Image Optimization Is For

First, let’s explore why you would want to “optimize” your images in the first place. This includes all images on your website, from header and “featured” images to embedded images in your blog posts.

Friday, May 5, 2017

Influencer Marketing | Influencers, Branding, Social Media

The Added Value of Influencers

From creative content to mass syndication, influencer marketing has its perks. It’s no wonder more and more brands are reserving marketing dollars to enlist in the support of niche talent with very engaged networks. And the more we launch influencer programs the more benefits we discover for our clients. There is added value of influencers around every turn.

Courting Sparks Awareness

Let’s face it, not every influencer you speak to is going to enlist in the project ahead. That’s perfectly okay. Most influencers hold their fan base and its interests very closely. This requires brands and agencies to brainstorm and collaborate alongside each influencer to truly determine if the campaign parameters and deliverables are in the right wheelhouse.

The plus side is that all the while, this courting and research phase informs top industry talent that your brand is committed to innovative projects that connect with modern audiences. It puts you on the radar and allows your brand to network with some of the most influential social media creators, bloggers, vloggers and beyond.

Front of mind leads to word of mouth and that’s a win any day.

Authentic Brand Advocacy

Marketing is fun. Especially when you work with a team of big thinkers, visual artists and captivating personalities. And when marketing is fun, influencers tend to gravitate to and support your brand long after the contract wraps up.

Check out some of your favorite Instagram accounts. Sure, individuals tag brands that pay for posts, but six, eight, ten months down the line, you may notice they’ll tag the jacket they’re wearing, the vehicle in the background, the camera lens they’re using and so on. Influencers tend to “pay it forward” and shine light back on the companies and projects that allow them to live their lifestyles.

If your project is brag worthy and progressive, heartfelt and inspiring, chances are everyone involved will continue to associate with your brand well after project launch. Every post is that much more relevance and exposure for your brand and its future.

SEO | Technical SEO | Content SEO

Machine learning & neural networks: The real future of SEO

TensorFlow & SEO

So what do machine learning and TensorFlow have to do with SEO, algorithms and reaching that coveted No. 1 spot in the SERPs?

As Google’s RankBrain gets smarter in understanding users and their intent, it’s also learning to better understand content, information and if that content will provide the right answer, not only to the query, but also to the individual user. With the algorithm now truly understanding the query intent on a linguistic level, it can deliver new kinds of results that are correlated and weighted in a way that a human brain can’t even begin to predict. This dramatically changes two aspects of SEO: technical SEO and content SEO.

Technical SEO

As many have said before, the role of technical SEO in the context of fixing links, optimizing title tags and ensuring correct markup is no longer a valid SEO role, meaning there should be no brands out there hiring a practitioner just for that purpose. This nuts-and-bolts work should be done from the beginning of the website build and audited by the web dev team on an ongoing basis.

Instead, the true technical SEOs of the future need to understand more than just HTML and XML; they need to understand how machine learning works, how TensorFlow handles data and weighs inputs, and how to understand and train models. There will always be crawling and discovery, but the main focus is now more analytical — truly data-driven, with the SEO practitioner more a mathematician and software developer than web designer.

Content SEO

The last few years have seen a convergence of SEO content and content marketing. We know we must now create contextually relevant content that is authoritative, not just keyword-stuffed. Now it’s time to look at more than minimum/maximum character counts and keyword density. We have to start using machine learning models and linguistic analysis to weigh and score our content to ensure it truly answers the consumer question, instead of just telling a brand story.

SEO | UX, AMP, Artificial Intelligence

3 predictions about the future of SEO

SEO is a constantly changing and growing industry. No longer is search engine optimization seen as internet “black magic,” but it is now regarded as an essential part of any serious digital marketing strategy. Last year, it was estimated that businesses invested more that $65 billion on SEO services, and that number is projected to climb to over $70 billion by 2018.

We’ve come a long way as an industry — and from the looks of it, our best days are still ahead of us. The hardest thing in the world of search is predicting what will come next. As the major engines continue to update and refine their algorithms and SERP displays, we in the field shouldn’t just wait around to react. I believe we should be proactive and look at past trends to help guide us.