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“When you tell people you work at National Geographic, you get incredible reactions. It’s revered, trusted, and stands for quality. And, they’ve been at the content game for close to 130 years,” she says. On the other hand, Cress says her role feels more like being at the helm of a one-year old company. “National Geographic Partners is a joint venture between 21st Century Fox and the National Geographic Society. We’re like a well funded startup, working on reinventing and reinvigorating the brand,” she says. But with so much history to rely upon, however, the brand is hardly resting on its laurels. Instead, it’s continuing to push the boundaries of innovation and technology, just like it did back when Alexander Graham Bell was the president of the National Geographic Society. He was the one to make the then-controversial decision to start including photography in the magazine, something that was considered to be a lowbrow, tabloid way to sell magazines....
For many brands, the substance that’s all the rage with tweens is a recipe for revenue, with the likes of Michaels, Elmer’s and McCormick & Co. all benefiting from the trend.It started quietly last summer, when social media watchers began buzzing about it. Tweens had struck on a recipe for a mucilaginous, stomach-turning substance and were posting videos of themselves playing with it. The slime trend had hit.In fact, slime’s now bigger than ever. Devotees of the glutinous gunk—easy to make by combining glue, water and borax—have posted some 2.8 million images and videos of the stuff on Instagram. Search “slime” on YouTube, and you’ll get 11.9 million results. Which is (mostly) good fun for kids who, to many parents’ delight, have actually found something analog to do. But slime’s biggest impact isn’t on kids at all: It’s on the bottom lines of brands that sell or make the ingredients for it....
YouTube—the cause of … and solution to … all of content creators’ problems. If Homer Simpson would permit us to repurpose his infamous toast, it evokes a familiar sentiment with YouTubers when they think about the mother ship. There’s no doubt that YouTube’s platform provided an essential foundation to launching the creative revolution we’re currently experiencing. And it is undeniable that through initiatives like its YouTube Spaces program, it has sought to democratize the production resources that large studios and agencies have leveraged to achieve their creative vision since the advent of television. However, despite all of its incredible contributions to digital content creators, its history will at least in part be defined by its substantial failures. Many of these can be traced back to Google’s obsession with driving all of its properties back to the AdWords platform....
Facebook is constantly evolving and changing. In 2017, one of the most exciting new features has been Facebook Stories! Catching headlines for being a “copycat,” it has certainly been newsworthy…. and much awaited by many. But it makes sense. Everyone is there. And those not there, Facebook feels they should be. So they woo their users, and hopeful users, with delicious digital candy. What’s In It For YouFor most people, Stories will be purely fun. Business owners, however, have a new tool to leverage in nurturing relationships and optimizing their know/like/trust factor. This article will provide insight on: - Quickly integrating Facebook Stories into your Facebook marketing strategy - Determining how to best use the features to amplify your personal and business brand - Finding your comfort zone with the new Facebook Camera...
Via janlgordon
From virtual reality to live video, business owners shouldn't chase every new marketing trend that comes along. In fact, often reexamining what has worked in the past and thinking about how to apply those successes on new platforms is the first place to start.
Look, for example, at Mastercard. The payments technology company has been globally recognized brand for a very long time. Mastercard's chief marketing and communications officer, Raja Rajamannar, says that his biggest task when hired in 2013 was to optimize a pre-digital brand for the present-day.
Rather than ditch a mature campaign to make his mark, he looked at the long game. Here are four lessons we can learn from it about optimizing your marketing in the digital age...
I only really started caring about marketing (and the intersection of advertising, technology, and media) a couple years ago when I started at Contently as an intern. It’s been a never-ending crash course ever since. Digital marketing changes rapidly, and it’s only getting more complex. As soon as you think you understand the space, you realize a minute later that you’re not even close. This year in particular, with its many shocking pieces of news and trends, has upended many assumptions I’ve held about marketing. Here are four of the most important trends that have changed the way I think about my job....
Our content marketing infographic series covers three challenges that most marketers face today: scaling content production, creating a distribution strategy, and earning your audience.
This infographic, “Earn Your Audience,” details how to reach your target audience through engaging content. Marketers understand that they need to provide tangible value in their customers’ lives, and content is one of the last mediums left to effectively do this. Instead of allocating a large portion of marketing budget to traditional advertising, successful marketers are opting to think like consumers and deliver engaging content that creates a two-way conversation with their audiences.
Take a look at the infographic below for more on how to build and retain meaningful relationships with your audience
Hey, remember the good old days before smartphones? That golden age where you actually had to use a landline to contact friends, use paper maps and log on to a whirring desktop computer to access the Internet? Well, guess what, many of today’s young influencers and consumers of the future don’t.
In fact, even if your earliest memories of a mobile phone are a chunky Motorola, you could probably take a tip or two from the younger generation to inform your content marketing efforts. Why? Because they are the connected generation, brought up on social media and smartphone use. They will see your snake game and raise you a Pokemon or three and this is all from the age of 11.
Of course, your target audience might not fall into the teenage or early twenty-something bracket. But in a world where Eric Lassard, a boy of 12, has (amongst other ventures) launched an app, social platform and is publishing his second book, ‘From Dublin to Silicon Valley’, perhaps your business might pick up a tip or two straight out of the mouths of babes. For connecting with millennials and those that come after is the future of your business…
Howdy all and welcome to a special edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Rand Fishkin. I'm the founder of Moz, and today I want to talk with you about how to craft the best damn ecommerce page on the web. I'm actually going to be using the example of one of my very favorite ecommerce pages. That is the Bellroy Slim Wallet page. Now, Bellroy, actually, all of their pages, Bellroy makes wallets and they market them online primarily. They make some fantastic products. I've been an owner of one for a long time, and it was this very page that convinced me to buy it. So what better example to use?
So what I want to do today is walk us through the elements of a fantastic ecommerce page, talk about some things where I think perhaps even Bellroy could improve, and then walk through, at the very end, the process for improving your own ecommerce page....
The online retail ecosystem is fast evolving, and increasingly, shoppers no longer simply go to the nearest store. Rather, they grab the nearest digital device. And with the world at our fingertips, why only shop domestically? In fact, digital analytics firm eMarketer projects that online retail sales will more than double between 2015 and 2019 and account for more than 12% of global sales by 2019. Retail therapy is giving way to e-tail therapy.
To gain a better understanding of how consumers are navigating the connected commerce landscape, the Nielsen Global Connected Commerce Survey polled respondents in 26 countries. We looked at how consumers are using the Internet to make shopping decisions both in stores and online, and we examined what they’re buying, where they’re purchasing and how they’re paying for goods and services.
While connected commerce is still largely a domestic affair, with consumers primarily ordering from retailers in their own country, cross-border ecommerce is a growing phenomenon. Shoppers are increasingly looking outside their country’s borders, as more than half of online respondents in the study who made an online purchase in the past six months say they bought from an overseas retailer (57%).
Nearly three-quarters of Indian respondents* who purchased online in the past six months say they bought items from an overseas retailer (74%). But this isn’t just a developing-market trend. Roughly two-thirds of respondents in the Western European countries in the survey say they purchased from an overseas retailer, including 79% in Italy—the highest percentage in the online study—and 73% in Germany....
Product returns are a costly problem for retailers. It has been estimated that U.S. customers return a hefty $264 billion worth of products annually—almost 9% of total sales. In online retailing, return rates are an even bigger problem. A 2013Wall Street Journal article indicated that as much as a third of internet purchases are returned, and studies have found that handling these returns can cost between $6 and $18 per item. In online retailing, most products are returned because customers aren’t satisfied with what they get—but this isn’t necessarily due to product defects. Because customers can’t physically evaluate and test products before purchasing them, it’s harder for them to set the right expectations, and easier to be disappointed by a product. This is why retailers provide information—product descriptions, pictures, and videos—to help customers make more informed purchase decisions. This is also why online customer reviews have become such an important source of product information. These are typically characterized by the average star rating (“valence”), the number of reviews (“volume”), and the variance in star ratings (“variance”). Since online reviews affect people’s likelihood to buysomething, we wanted to test whether reviews also influence their likelihood to return it....
The Interactive Advertising Bureau and Edison Research today are releasing new stats on how consumers listen to podcasts and respond to audio-based advertisements. The new report gives marketers a peek at sentiment about podcast advertising from a poll of roughly 1,000 listeners. More brands and media companies than ever are investing in podcasts, but they're not getting the same types of metrics about audio advertising that other types of digital ads provide—like clickthrough or view rates. While advertisers can see how many people download a podcast, they don't know how long people spend listening or whether they skip over the ads. Per the report, 65 percent of listeners said podcast ads increase purchase intent while another 45 percent said that they're likely to visit an advertiser's website after hearing an audio promo. Another 42 percent of listeners said they would consider a new product or service after hearing a plug for a brand, while 37 percent use podcast ads to help research brands. When it comes to how consumers listen to audio programs, 70 percent said that being able to listen to them on-demand is "very important," and 58 percent said they like being able to listen to exclusive content they can't get elsewhere....
Twilio, the developer-centric communications platform that successfully IPOed earlier this year, published a new study today about how consumers want to use tech to talk to businesses and brands. The study, which the market research firm Vanson Bourne performed for Twilio by surveying 6,000 consumers in Europe, Asia and North America, shows that nine out of ten consumers would like to be able to use messaging to talk to businesses. The majority of businesses, however, don’t yet have the infrastructure in place to do so right now. Given that it’s Twilio’s bread and butter to provide this kind of infrastructure to businesses, it’s worth taking the results with a grain of salt, of course. What they do highlight, though, is that while consumers overall prefer messaging over face-to-face interactions with businesses (and millennials even more so), businesses haven’t quite caught up to this new world yet....
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Think back to the best shopping experience you ever had. Chances are it involved a well-informed and upbeat salesperson who engaged with you, asked about your needs and guided you through the purchase. You left knowing you made the right decision. This kind of conversation-driven sale—high on empathy and knowledge, low on price and haggling—has long been a staple of successful retail loyalty. It focuses on understanding the needs of consumers and delivering an exceptional experience. But in today’s continually upended shopping environment, that conversation between seller and buyer is as likely to take place with an AI-driven bot as it is with a friendly associate. Welcome to the age of conversational commerce. Coined by Chris Messina, the inventor of the hashtag, the term “conversational commerce” refers to the ability of a digital tool to interact with a consumer using natural language. Combining rich interfaces and AI, retail brands are using tools like virtual assistants and chatbots to scale relevant, personal and helpful interactions with their customers. And the timing couldn’t be better for an industry that needs to tip the scale back to providing a great shopping experience....
Luckily, I have the privilege of working on a team of 150+ other marketers who specialize in different functions than I do. And because of that, I was able to curate this list of the top 58 tools every marketer should know about and being using in 2017. I'll make it easy for you. I broke up my list of recommended tools into different sections so you can get a better sense of what tools are available for different functions of the job. At the end, you'll see the whole list of 58 tools that you can skim and bookmark for later....
The following is made up of 3 “Monday Tips” articles, each of which talks about 4 helpful tools and resources around a specific area of your business. Today, the subjects are: - Tools to Improve Your Blog - Instagram Marketing Tools - CRM Tools for Leads and Sales...
Via janlgordon
Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) get almost 24 calls a month from marketing providers looking to sell them advertising or marketing products and services. Competition is fierce, and SMBs often have a difficult time choosing a provider.
Last month, I covered how the trend of fake online content leads to a general distrust of digital and online media. But the local digital marketing industry, especially in the area of SEO, suffers from its own share of issues that lead to a lack of trust by SMBs.
LSA (Local Search Association) conducted a survey to examine what challenges SMBs face when shopping for a digital marketing provider and what areas they feel are most important for marketers to address when trying to gain their business.
Below I discuss the results of the survey, data regarding client churn in the industry and ways in which marketers need to respond....
It seems like the platforms that have been around for a while get updates every other week, and new platforms emerge faster than you can count. One trend that binds these new and updated platforms together? Users and the convenience that social offers them. Honestly, people don't want to bounce around from site to site to get what they want, and social media platforms have been making some changes to accommodate them. Because giants like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram have made it easier than ever for businesses to leverage and users to engage with, social is a one-stop shop for audiences. Your audience is constantly online and in social media apps. To find out what that means for your brand, here are four of the biggest changes in social media you need to keep on your radar:...
Toronto's Spin Master has done it again. The toy company that brought kids to a fervour over Zoomer robotic pets has created the hottest toy of 2016: Hatchimals. But they're already sold out everywhere, leaving parents in a panic.
WTF is a Hatchimal? Good question.
Imagine a large, speckled egg that hatches as a result of touch and sound. Inside, your child will find a bright, fuzzy robotic creature. It could be a Draggle, Penguala, Owlicorn, Burtle or Bearakeet (don't worry if you can't tell the difference, they look pretty similar.) That's when the fun starts. Kids then teach it to walk, talk and play using specific phrases.
"Hatchimals incorporate the very best elements of nurturing play with the interactivity of robotics in a truly innovative and entertaining way," Ben Varadi, Spin Master's chief creative officer, said in a press release. "This is one of the most unique products Spin Master has ever launched and we're confident that the consumer response will be strong."
Well, that's putting it mildly. The toy retails between $60 and $90 and it has sold out online everywhere. Sears, Toys R Us, Mastermind, Chapters... no one has it....
One of the most important questions for retailers on platforms with high amounts of competition is: "What makes shoppers choose one vendor over another?" There are, of course, obvious considerations like price. But on sites like Amazon or eBay, there are often many retailers with similar prices. Feedvisor recently a study which identifies factors consumers use to determine which Amazon seller they will use buy from. According to Feedvisor's new Amazon User Study 2016, ratings are they key. From product rating to seller ratings, these scores play a huge role in determining which sellers consumers trust. The study found that nearly nine out of 10 (87 percent) shoppers on Amazon 'always/sometimes' check seller ratings before buying. The rating of the product is even more important. With so many sellers with poorly made or knock-off merchandise on the web, it's important for consumers to feel secure that the items they buy will meet their expectations. According to the study, also found that most (92 percent) won't make a purchase for a product with fewer than 3 stars....
With everyone claiming to be an expert should you listen to? This list of 103 marketing thought leaders is made to help answer that question. It's also incorporated into Twitter lists so you can easily follow everyone with a single click.
Adobe Digital Insights predicts 2016 online sales will be up 11% and shoppers will be out earlier than ever. 55% of US and UK retailers say Amazon will drive the majority of their holiday sales this year according to research by ChannelAdvisor and Morar Consulting. The National Retail Federation expects US consumers to spend an average of $935.58 with overall holiday sales to rise 3.6% and online sales up 7% to 10%.
What’s Walmart’s holiday sales strategy? Value, price rollbacks and features, along with Santa’s helpers at checkout. UPS expects to be busy as well, shipping more than 700 million packages during the holidays, up 16.7% from 2015. Bestblackfriday.com, says Friday’s Black Friday sales may drop by 10% in-store to$9.2 billion though online sales may reach $3 billion, up 13%....
Have you ever wanted an out of body experience, sans meditation or drugs? You may find it with the Carolina Reaper Madness chip, Paqui chips' latest deadly creation. It's literally the hottest chip in the world, and only one chip comes in a package – the package being a coffin-shaped box. The chip gets its kick (and then some more kick, and then some more) from the Carolina Reaper Pepper, the Guinness Book of World Records holder for Hottest Chili Pepper on Earth. Mashable recently spoke with Jeff Day, Brand Manager for Paqui Chips."We're always looking to push the limits to find fun ways for our fans and consumers to engage with us," Day said. "When we decided that we wanted to make the world's hottest chip, we first said, well, we need to find the world's hottest pepper." ...
Riddle me this: Why do people buy quarter-inch drill bits? While there are a million possible answers to this question, Leo McGinneva offers perhaps the most interesting explanation. "They don’t want quarter-inch bits. They want quarter-inch holes," he explains. This notion suggests that as consumers, we aren't after all the bells and whistles as much as the solutions they provide. In other words, we don't want to know what brands are selling, we want to know what's in it for us....
The major digital media platforms—full of big gains, big hype and often a lack of transparency—have made the advertising universe a complicated, fragmented place. And with eMarketer predicting digital ad spending to swell to $77.4 billion in 2017, up 16 percent versus this year, it's a domain that's poised to evolve even more rapidly. We asked seven ad buyers—from three consumer brands and three agencies, plus one independent—to talk about what's right and what's wrong with a dozen platforms with which they do business.
"The definitions are different for YouTube, for Facebook, for Twitter, and that is really not user-friendly for any agency or for any brand to work across all of them for proper reporting," says Liya Sharif, Qualcomm's senior director, marketing. Adds Bruce Kiernan, practice lead for performance marketing at MEC North America: "I would say from an agency perspective, we are frustrated. Facebook and Google are not going to give up their data and open up the gates to their walled gardens anytime soon."
Meanwhile, others are more positive about the process. "[Facebook] allows you to basically upload any type of custom audience and not just create a look-alike audience, but you can scale that according to your needs and play with different sizes of audiences," notes Tim Villanueva, head of media partnerships at Fetch....
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At #ThinkContent 2017, National Geographic's CMO, Jill Cress, spoke about how the storied brand uses content and technology to innovate and reach an incredible 760 million consumers every month.