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Perhaps most reflective of this has been the award-winning juggernaut of REI's #OptOutside campaign, which won the Titanium Grand Prix on Saturday. If for some reason you weren't one of its 6.7 billion media impressions, essentially the company closed its doors on Black Friday, encouraging its employees and everyone else to get out into the outdoors. Beyond the ad, starring REI chief exec Jerry Stritzke introducing the idea from a wide-open office, the brand also created a helpful online guide to hiking trails and other outdoor activities around the U.S.
By encouraging us to drop out of the annual shopping day, the outdoor retailer aims for more sales and brand loyalty. The company said the brand's social media impressions went up 7,000%, with 2.7 billion media impressions in 24 hours, while overall the campaign attracted 6.7 billion media impressions, 1.2 billion social impressions, and got more than 1.4 million people to spend the day outdoors. Meanwhile, more than 150 other companies joined REI to close their doors on Black Friday, and hundreds of state parks opened up for free.
If Cannes is the ad and marketing industry's Oscars, than this is arguably Best Picture. The Titanium category is meant to honor work that breaks new ground, crosses boundaries, and pushes the industry forward. The win adds to the campaign's Media and Promotions Grand Prix, picked up earlier in the week, and its run of wins at other industry awards like the D&ADs, and Best of Show at the One Show awards in May....
Social strategy. Digital strategy. Mobile strategy. Content strategy. Everyday we’re being urged to create a new strategy. But with all the chatter about new channels, it seems we may have lost sight of the concept of an overall Marketing Strategy. And this gap has huge implications for marketing effectiveness. The tactical programs we create need to rest on a single foundation, otherwise we’re just sending dollars out the door. Case in point, the biannual CMO Survey just released by Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, the American Marketing Association and Deloitte revealed that “marketers are expected to nearly double their social media spending in the next five years even though most can't show the impact of social on their business.”
Ya’ll as we say here in Texas, social media, direct marketing, public relations, advertising, etc., are not strategies -- these are tactics, and each of these tactics can potentially be deployed to support any number of strategic options. Marketers, I issue you a call to arms, it’s time to get serious about marketing strategy.
Marketing strategy, not a channel or touchpoint or tactic, is how your organization will achieve its mission. It is the critical link between marketing objectives and marketing programs and tactics. Your strategy selection (and just as importantly what is not selected) provides focus and enables your organization to concentrate limited resources on building core competencies that in turn create the sustainable competitive advantage needed to pursue and secure the best revenue opportunities....
Complacency is not an option in today's marketplace. Changeable buying behavior, channel and technology proliferation, data profusion—these are just a few of the realities marketers face today that necessitate transformation. Whether it's improving on marketing strategies that work or taking an entirely new approach, marketers must shake up their practices in 2016.
Knowing where to start or what's most essential to improve on can seem overwhelming with so many possibilities. So, DMN asked 15 marketing leaders to provide insight into what they think should marketers do differently in 2016 to attract, convert, and retain more customers. Here, their advice....
To say native content has grown since last year would be an understatement. In 2014, Pressboard combed through 1,500 pieces of content for our "best of" list -- this year it was closer to 7,000. To give you an idea of how far the space has come, we had to buy VR headsets just to review a couple of the entries.
2015 was the year that native content moved from experimental to fundamental and nearly every major publisher and brand discovered the power of stories, instead of ads. Here are some of the best from the last 12 months...
The holiday season is once again upon us and this year marketers have an unprecedented opportunity to blow their sales out of the water. For the first time in history, consumers over 50 make up the majority — 51 percent — of all of consumer spending according to just-released data from the U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey.
While marketers are preoccupied with Millennials — who became the biggest adult age demo this year — consumers over 50 control 70 percent of our country’s wealth, making them a significantly greater holiday sales opportunity than their kids.
One might expect that 50+ would account for the majority of health (63%) and insurance (68%) expenditures. However, when it comes to buying for everyone on their holiday lists, consider that people 50+ are now responsible for 51 percent of all entertainment spending as well as 57 percent of big ticket items such as new cars and trucks....
Some 58% of respondents said they were more likely to engage with brands online only if “it’s really easy and asks nothing of me.” In addition, 48% of respondents said they’d prefer brands to simply entertain them rather than ask them to do anything at all.
More disturbingly still for attention-hungry brand managers, the report also found that respondents “resent doing anything that appears to benefit the brand more than it benefits them.”
So what’s a lonely brand to do? And how did expectations get so high?...
An idea doesn't have to be unique to be great. In fact, there are some really awesome examples of great marketing out there that you can lean on to inspire your next project. (Austin Kleon calls this concept "stealing like an artist.")
But finding these examples isn't always easy. That's where we come in. We've collected 12 places on the web where you can browse and search for examples of great marketing -- including website design, design in general, email marketing, and social media pages. Check them out, bookmark them, and use them to inspire your own marketing strategy.
Get 50 brilliant examples of website design now by downloading our free flipbook....
It’s well documented that companies with a defined strategy are the ones that experience the most success on social. For others, the challenge is knowing where to start.
According to Gretchen Fox, cofounder of the social strategy and training agency Made To Order, the social media marketing industry is operating under the guise of nascence, but that’s not the reality anymore: "The industry has been around long enough that we need some procedures; we need some standards. This is our attempt at starting to create some standards"....
As history has taught us about media and technology in the past, with the introduction of any new technology, we’ll always have the initial hype and scare that life, as we know it will never be the same.
What does this mean for the future of e-commerce? The desktop is not obsolete; rather it’s going to have to change its mechanisms to make room for the new powerhouse in the commerce arena. Growing at a steep rate, mobile currently accounts for 29% of eCommerce transactions in the US and 34% globally. The end of 2015 forecasts mobile share to reach 33% in the US, and 40% globally.
There are two main avenues behind this growth; 1. Virtual Engagement 2. Faster Transactions
Two channels are available via mCommerce where there’s only one with eCommerce because the mobility allows you to actually purchase goods in store with your mobile device where you wouldn’t carry around your laptop to checkout. According to the VP of Marketing at AppsFlyer Ran Avrahamy, “when thinking about omnichannel efforts and point of sale purchases, mobile is the connecting link. Retailers who begin to deploy in-store beacons for their marketing teams are beginning to see attribution from mobile campaigns and are optimizing their in-store consumer shopping experience.”...
Influencers and brand advocates have become a serious area of study for marketers. In fact, reviews from customers and influential social media users can sway purchase decisions, and generate a lot of trust in your product and brand. A new report fromBazaarvoice, based on data from more than 57 million online reviews, demonstrates how impactful consumer-generated content is for your brand.
A well run user-generated content campaign can boost a brand profile, but reviews from genuine buyers are almost universally more trustworthy when posted organically. Historically, the majority of product reviews online are positive, so your brand is missing out if it’s part of the shrinking minority that doesn’t provide space for reviews.Bazaarvoice’s data indicates that reviews have a substantial impact on consumers, whether they are buying online, or if they are “research online, buy offline” customers.
Approximately 50 percent of consumers surveyed who made their purchases in stores said online reviews impacted their decision to purchase. Even 40 percent of consumers aged 55-64 are researching online reviews prior to purchase....
The omnichannel experience isn’t just a marketing strategy — it represents a fundamental shift of the consumer’s position in the traditional purchasing process. Omnichannel enables the customer or the client to choose how they want to interact with a company or product line without having to compromise the quality of their interaction.
A successful omnichannel retailer is less concerned with a broad, multi-channel marketing campaign and focuses instead on creating a seamless media experience for customers engaging with their brand.The key here lies in an ability to allow your brand to proliferate across every channel.
According toMarketo, one of the leaders in automated marketing software, “Each piece of the consumer’s experience should be consistent and complementary.”
Whether a customer is visiting the store, making a purchase through a mobile app, or liking a photo on Instagram, they must be able to engage your brand in a way that is both seamless and effortless, regardless of the device or channel....
Getting customers to develop affinity with a company turns them into the “fully engaged” customer. Gallup recommends companies shoot for this in the customer-centric economy.
Our data reveal that a customer who is fully engaged represents an average 23% premium in terms of share of wallet, profitability, revenue, and relationship growth compared with the average customer. In stark contrast, an actively disengaged customer represents a 13% discount in those same measures....
Michael Burgess, President of HBC Digital, Hudson’s Bay, who operates retail stores throughout the US and Canada including Saks Fifth Avenue, comments that “the majority of consumers are crossing channels and using multiple devices, whether they start by opening something on mobile and then concluding the purchase either on a tablet, desktop or in the store, or just researching online and transacting in the store”.
The total impact of digital is having a hefty and growing impact on business revenue. A recent PwC report indicates that the majority of respondents surveyed purchased online via PC at least every month and 24% of respondents purchase online via mobile monthly. This doesn’t take into account the research consumers do online before transacting in a brick-and-mortar location, but attribution is another story we’ll touch on later in this article....
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You want to be writing the right content, right?
I mean, if you're not getting anything out of your blog, why are you (or your content creators) spending hours researching, writing and formatting?
This article will break down the 10 most important pieces of content and how they can be used in combination to attract readers, generate leads, nurture those leads into signups and those signups into upgrades....
It was recently brought to The Drum’s attention that we are longing for long-form. The age of bite sized media is seeing a resurgence of its comfortable long form component, despite our attention spans shrinking into oblivion with a quick fix of 140 characters.
Facebook Instant Articles, the Guardian’s ‘The Long Read’, Snapchat Discover suggests that people are craving more insight into the things they are interested in rather than just flashes of information. The Drum Network asked its members what they thought about the resurgence of longform, and if they thought it was here to stay....
Marketers are ramping up their technology investments to better understand consumer needs and behaviors. Technologies to power social marketing, digital commerce and marketing analytics are the highest priorities, per July 2015 research.
Gartner surveyed more than 330 organizations in the UK and North America on their 2015 marketing budgets and 2016 expectations. Almost two-thirds of respondents said that social marketing and digital commerce were leading technology investment priorities.
Additionally, 61% of marketers said that marketing analytics were a priority and more than half of respondents were prioritizing tech for customer experience and advertising operations.
The research found that retail therapy is an emotional rollercoaster for consumers, with a high proportion of shoppers worrying about making a mistake when buying a product, despite the endless opportunities to compare and contrast online.
When it comes to bigger purchases, two-thirds of shoppers often choose between just two brands from the outset. For consumers who have only one brand in mind before shopping, seven in 10 do not even try another brand.
The research shows that shoppers with brands in mind before they start looking to buy are less likely to worry about the choice they’ve made after buying (27%)....
According to Gartner, in just a few years, 89% of businesses will compete mainly on customer experience. And by 2020, the customer will manage 85% of its relationship with an enterprise without interacting with a human. This means that the customer experience will quickly overtake price and product as the key competitive differentiator among brands.
These statistics may be alarming for some. After all, the status quo for so long has been about marketing a great product or service at the right price, and you will have a constant flow of new customers. Businesses must quickly come to terms that this is no longer the case, or won’t be for much longer. Consumers demand a great experience across multiple channels, and are willing to pay more for it.
What Do Consumers See as the Ideal Customer Experience?
Research by Economist Intelligence Unit revealed that the top five areas consumers identified as leading to a positive experience included:
47% – Fast response to enquiries or complaints
46% – Simple purchasing process
34% – Ability to track orders in real time
25% – Clarity and simplicity of product information across channels
22% – Ability to interact with the company over multiple channels...
The number of UK consumers using social media to research what products are "best" has rocketed from 25% to 43% in the last year, according to the Adobe Digital Index (ADI) 2015 Holiday Shopping Prediction report. The study examined more than 1trn visits to 4,500 retail websites since 2008, with a separate survey of over 400 consumers per country in the UK, USA, Germany, France, Australia, China and Singapore.
"We’re seeing the rise of social media as a source of product reviews," says Ryan Dietzen, senior market insights analyst at ADI. "It’s a key part of the customer journey."
The story is the same across Europe, with the percentage of respondents in France using social media to research products jumping from 28% in 2014 to 35% this year. Almost half of respondents in the UK said product reviews are one of the top two influencers on them when making major purchases, while the number influenced by reviews was even greater in Germany at 64 percent....
The future is exciting, with new technologies opening up ways to understand your customer better than ever before. The ability to stretch the picture of your customer from how they transact to how they interact with you through hundreds of touch-points; the complete journey of seeing, thinking and doing that leads to that final purchase - and repurchase - and where they might abandon is critical to understand, according to a white paper from loyalty specialist Ikano Insight.
In this context the paper, entitled 'The future: Omni-channel or overwhelming?', defines 'omni-channel' as a focus on a seamless approach to the customer experience, using all available customer-facing channels, and argues that how a customer engages with a brand is equally as important as the channel interactions they make - and this is the challenge that omni-channel presents for marketers. 64.180.55.243 This article is copyright 2014 TheWiseMarketer.com.
New technology creates new ways of serving targeted offers to specific points in the customer journey; in-store micro-location offers, and HTML5 dynamic banners serving personalised messages across all devices and browsers mean that the Place and Promotion elements of your marketing mix are more advanced and exciting than ever before....
Why are customers more excited about uncertainty than they are about clear incentives? Let's see why mysteries motivate them.
You’re a 21st Century business-owner, which means you know you need to have a presence on social media, but do you know the effectiveness of your social channels to your business? If you want to scale and sell online, you better have your brand out there for the world to see and interact with. Being social really does matter but it is important that you take the time to calculate your ROI for each network you’re business is on.
To determine the value of social media accounts to businesses Shopify analyzed 37 million social media visits that led to 529,000 orders. Facebook is the largest of the social networks, it also had the most traffic and sales for companies, with 85% of social media sales for those on Shopify coming from Facebook. Surprisingly the high order values came from fashion aggregator Polyvore. Along with the information Shopify collected on its merchants, they also analyzed the profitably of social media accounts for various industries....
Retailer sites, printable coupons, and retailer emails are the most commonly used digital tools by online shoppers, though they’re not the ones wielding the greatest impact on shoppers’ journeys, details Epsilon in a recent study.
The report – based on an online survey of more than 2,800 respondents – determined an impact score for each tool by averaging the percent of its users saying it has influenced them across 10 areas.Those areas range from influencing choices (e.g. “it influences my choice of stores,” “it influences my choice of brands”) to impulse buying (“I make more unplanned purchases,” “I spend more than initially planned”) and utility (e.g. “it makes shopping easier,” “it makes shopping faster”).
Interestingly, the digital tools with the highest overall impact score were retailers’ social media activity and price comparison sites, although they had relatively low penetration rates. Shopping applications, brands’ social media activity and product reviews were also among the most highly rated by their users. The influence of product reviews has also been noted in a separate recent study of e-commerce behavior, in which online shoppers cited them as important content on retailer websites and in retailers’ shopping apps....
Marketers are trained to put their best foot forward and ignore the downsides of their products. This is about doing the exact opposite: finding your weakest points and showcasing them for all to see.
There are plenty of online tools for creating multimedia quizzes and flipped lessons. I am frequently asked for recommendations for "the best" one. I'm partial to using Google Forms to create multimedia quizzes, but there are others worth trying too. The chart embedded below provides an overview of the key features of five popular tools for creating multimedia quizzes and flipped lessons....
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Good story. Great campaign. Exceptional content marketing results!