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Long before the Internet and direct-to-consumer advertising, the medical profession tried to reassure people about their health concerns. Remember “take two aspirins and call me in the morning?” Flash forward to today’s online “symptom checkers.” They are quizzes to see if someone has a certain disease and exhortations to see their doctor even if they feel fine. Once drug makers discovered that health fears and even hypochondria sell drugs, there seems to be no end to the new diseases, symptoms and risks people need to worry about. In fact, since drug ads began on TV, Americans take so many drugs it inspires satirical T-shirts like the one that says: “I take aspirin for the headache caused by the Zyrtec I take for the hay fever I got from Relenza for the uneasy stomach from the Ritalin I take for the short attention span caused by the Scopoderm I take for the motion sickness I got from the Lomotil I take for the diarrhea caused by the Xenical for the uncontrolled weight gain from the Paxil I take for the anxiety from Zocor I take for my high cholesterol because exercise, a good diet and regular chiropractic care are just too much trouble.” Here are some of the ways ads use fear to keep the public buying drugs....
If you’ve been in marketing for more than a hot second, you’ve no doubt heard of the Buyer’s Journey. What you might not know is that this journey has dramatically changed in the last decade. 67% of the buyer’s journey is now digital. Today’s buyer is up to 90% of the way through their buying journey before they reach out to the vendor.Interactive content is front and center in this digital shift in the Buyer’s Journey. As companies produce more and more content in order to satisfy today’s self-guided buyer, only the most engaging content will stand out and get noticed. Why does interactive content stand out in the sea of content online today? Because it doesn’t talk at buyers – it talks with them. There are interactive content types for every stage in the Buyer’s Journey: Awareness, Evaluation, and Decision-making. However, it plays an especially important role for both the buyer and the business in the Awareness stage....
Both current and former customers of the outdoor-clothing company Patagonia, for example, are more likely to consider themselves quite knowledgeable when compared to other shoppers, yet less equipped with social skills than the Lord & Taylor crowd. People who shop at Hot Topic, which caters to a younger, more alternative demographic, see themselves as highly imaginative, while patrons of Jos. A. Bank, which sells men's suits and business casual attire, see themselves as leaders.
Overall, these distinct personality types reveal the power of marketing, if done right.
One report anticipates that the retail industry alone will spend $15.09 billion on digital ads in 2016, followed by $16.95 billion in 2017 — a 12% increase. While it's important to know the best location to place an ad, knowing the personality of your intended audience is just as crucial....
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....
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....
Two years ago, for the first time, the Direct Marketing Association put a number—$156 billion—on what it called the data-driven marketing economy (DDME) in the United States. Yesterday it released a follow-up report showing that data isn't just driving, it's speeding. It clocked in at $202 billion in 2014, a two-year increase of 35%, and it employed nearly a million people—650,000 more than it did in 2012.“
All of marketing, we estimate, is about $1.3 trillion a year in the U.S., so that makes data-driven marketing a little under 20% of the total," said Harvard Business School professor John Deighton, who directed the study for DMA with Peter Johnson, principal of mLightenment Economic Impact Research....
Marketers are constantly looking to better understand consumers and ultimately deliver an engaging experience. According to Q4 2015 research, many executives are using revenue metrics to quantify the success of customer efforts.
CMO Council looked at how marketing executives in North America quantify customer engagement success. More than a third of respondents said that revenue metrics, like customer lifetime value, revenues per customer and overall revenue increases, were the primary type of metric they used to measure consumer engagement.
Additionally, 30% of respondents said that campaign metrics, such as clicks, conversions, shares, traffic and web analytics, were the primary type of metrics they used. Fewer marketing executives said they relied on sales enablement metrics, service metrics and finance metrics to measure overall customer engagement success....
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....
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.
Today more than ever, food has become one of the most important—and discussed—choices among U.S. consumers. Since food purchases are heavily influenced by trust, Boston-based consultancy C Space released a study exploring customers' perceptions. "In today's marketplace, consumers are more actively engaged than ever in choosing what foods to buy and what brands to buy them from," said Alan Moskowitz, director at C Space.
"Given the speed that information travels, brand trust can increase or erode very quickly in consumers' minds. For brands, staying close to their customers can help them stay in touch with evolving attitudes and help them collaborate with consumers on new products, packaging and marketing that earns or maintains trust."...
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...
What do a newly married couple, a recent college graduate, and an expectant mom all have in common? Yes, this sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but in actuality, each of these consumers are experiencing life event changes. And when consumers make important life decisions or are in a state of change, these milestones tend to define spending habits.
A newly married couple may be ready to furnish their new home. Or a recent college graduate may be in market for a new vehicle. Whatever the circumstance, marketers can take advantage by sending offers to coincide with these moments.
Life event marketing isn’t new, but if you aren’t implementing this strategy into your marketing plans, it is time to reconsider. Historically, businesses understood the value of marketing based on life events but the most common challenge tended to be finding the data and acting on it while it was still fresh.
After all, if you learn about a newly married couple 3 months after the fact, many of the opportunities will have long passed you by. The world is now faster and data is created and collected instantly. Just as important, data solution providers have become more sophisticated in how they source these life defining moments, allowing marketers to target consumers before the opportunity is lost.
Take a look at some of the ways marketers use life event data to target consumers based on life-changing events....
To win the hearts and minds (and dollars) of consumers in their micro-moments, you have to do more than just be there. You have to be useful too. That means connecting people to what they’re looking for in real-time and providing relevant information when they need it.
Mobile adds a rich layer of context on top of intent that lets marketers create even more relevant messages in micro-moments. For example, when someone searches for digital cameras, are they at home, on the street, or actually in your store? Is it 6 p.m. Friday or 6 a.m. Monday? The answers to questions like these play a role in determining what problem consumers are trying to solve, what creative they'll respond to, and what marketers need to think about when trying to engage them.
And being useful in those moments matters. Take the fact that 51% of smartphone users have purchased from a company/brand other than the one they intended to because the information provided was useful.
Seventy-three percent of consumers say that regularly giving useful information in their advertising is the most important attribute when selecting a brand....
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“It is not about doing ‘digital marketing’, it is about marketing effectively in a digital world.”
I really like this quote from Diageo CEO Ivan Menezes. It keeps the technology in perspective, relative to the consumer. It puts the onus on everyone, not just those with digital in their job title.
In contrast, many organizations treat it as “doing digital.” Some have even created a new C-level role called the Chief Digital Officer. Floating somewhere between a CMO and a CIO, McKinsey describes the CDO role as “Transformer in Chief.”
Giving “Digital” C-level focus appears to give “Digital” a high level of strategic priority, but it also treats it as a silo, distinct from the rest of the business. It can be heavy on hype and light on substance. It can obviate the responsibility of everyone in an organization to figure out how to do what they do better with digital technology....
Princeton psychologists learned that first impressions form in less than a second. Sounds crazy but it’s not. Even though we consider ourselves logical and modern human beings, the majority of our decisions are made by the ancient, instinctive subconscious part of our brains, sometimes referred to as our “reptilian brain.” That doesn’t mean that the quality of our decisions is lowered; some, like Malcolm Gladwell in Blink, argue that quick, gut-level decisions are actually better and save us time and agony. Let’s explore how emotions play into modern-day marketing and why....
Marketers spend a lot of time trying to nail down abstract concepts. They're tasked with turning brainstorming sessions and comments sourced during focus groups into campaigns that sum up everything about a brand's identity in a neat, tidy, and most importantly, interesting way.
But what if a consumer could walk into a room and fully experience your brand with all their senses? Pop-up events offer just that -- the chance for consumers to get up close and personal with their favorite companies in a truly immersive setting.
In their simplest form, pop-up events are temporary retail spaces that give companies the opportunity to sell their products in an environment completely designed and controlled by them. Since they're temporary, they offer a relatively low-cost and low-commitment way for companies to take creative risks, generate buzz, and introduce their brands to new audiences.
Consumers love the lure of exclusivity, and brands love the unmatched opportunity for experimentation. To inspire your next branded experience, we've curated a list of 15 innovative and visually stunning pop-up events....
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....
In this post, I’m going to show you 5 marketing tactics that are effective for most businesses.
The only catch is they can be difficult or scary to do.
I’m going to break them down as much as possible so that you can determine why they might scare you and what you could do to overcome that fear.
This is going to take a lot of honesty on your part, but if you’re willing to give me that, it could have a huge impact on the success of your marketing....
To help define your strategy and execute a social media plan, we’ve put together the following 10 questions that you should ask yourself so that you can dive in, rather than abandon ship.
So in general, we want to find a way to decrease our costs to acquire customers, and for the customers that we do acquire, we want to make sure they stick around and aren’t too expensive to keep. So how do we do this?
The best way to cut down costs of a process that requires employee time is to identify where you can replace that time with content and tools. Doing this allows your teams to operate more efficiently and lets your customers learn and engage at their own pace. To understand this further, we’ll break down each step of the customer success journey and identify where we can swap employee resources for content....
While psychology and marketing are two very different fields, that doesn’t mean that learning psychology can’t help you.
In fact, I think it’s one of the most important things a marketer can study.
In this post, I’m going to show you eight different psychological principles and the ways they can affect your sales.
To take it even further, I’m going to show you how you can apply each principle to your business....
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...
Much has been written about “millennials” and much of it makes sweeping assumptions, often representing this vast group as “the yoof,” a homogenous bunch of bright young things with idealistic worldviews and a love for over-sharing on social media. However, since the term was first coined, sections of this group have become proper grown-ups, albeit of a slightly different sort than the generation before. They aren’t the buyers of tomorrow; they are the buyers of today. Some are running proper, functioning companies and not just aspirational start-ups with their friends. Some are even doing both of these things and succeeding. Some are already political leaders, parents and professors.
“By 2017, the “millennial” generation is expected to outspend the baby boomers, according to a study by Berglass + Associates recruiting firm.” - CNBC
All this means that when it comes to luxury or premium brands, the millennial mindset and lifestyle isn’t something to consider for “future-proofing” workshop exercises; it’s something to act upon now. Those who don’t technically fit within the demographic are being influenced by the “millennial way,” either as their parents or as colleagues. Therefore, any brand looking to maintain or move into a premium or luxury space needs to take note and act fast. Let’s look at some of the key characteristics of this group and then explore the implications when it comes to brand design, experience and communications....
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?...
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....
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Be cautious when you see an ad for a new drug. Exploring how pharmaceutical marketing works.