Brands need to be authentic and put the customer at the heart of the story
For more than a century, Sacramento was defined by its history as a Gold Rush town. The mystique of rugged, enterprising gold miners drew tourists from around the country hoping to catch a glimpse of the Wild West.
This was great for tourism, but it didn’t hold much appeal for locals. They certainly weren’t ashamed of their city’s past, but they had heard the same stories of rags turned riches so many times that they could repeat them in their sleep. Grizzled prospectors mining for gold isn’t the sexiest or most exciting imagery in today’s tech-focused world.
When Visit Sacramento CMO Sonya Bradley and her team were tasked with updating the city’s branding, they built their messaging around a different kind of Sacramento gold: its thriving culinary scene. Her team highlighted the history of Sacramento’s vineyards — many…
Social media thrives on interaction; are you doing all you can to engage your audience?
Did you know that Playbuzz.com gained more than 50 million unique monthly visitors within just 10 months of launching the site? How did they do it? Two words: Interactive content! Social networks have been around for quite a few years now, and they are buzzing with activity more than ever. Making it in the unforgiving environment of virtual social hoops and loops continually inspire action and engagement.
Since your e-survival depends on it, we have put together a list of seven creative ways to improve your social media engagement.
1. Ask Questions (Creatively)
The best and most straightforward way to strike a conversation is to ask questions. However (it being so obvious) you need to be creative. The secret to success is not in the question but in the way you deliver it to your audience!
For instance, if…
How to Combine Precision and Empathy for an Effective Effort
To successfully engage potential customers during the sweet spot of their buying journey, marketing leaders and teams need precision and empathy more than automation tools and available media.
Programmatic creative — technology that uses data (precision) to automate and accelerate routine, repetitive components of developing an ad — garners plenty of attention these days. The concept enables marketers to quickly create multiple online ads in different formats for different devices targeted to different audiences.
It hasn’t, however, automatically triggered effective customer connections and results. That feat requires a little effort, creativity, and lots of empathy on the part of marketers, with that last component being a possible springboard to turn accumulated data into a story that resonates with customers.
Mix Insights and Emotions to Tell a More Compelling Story
Programmatic creative technology is a vital resource in taking the guesswork out of digital advertising.…
How you can stand out in a world dominated by Facebook and Google
Just because you believe something to be true doesn’t make it so. It’s one of my favorite adages, and it has some correlation to what’s going on with our friends over at Facebook and Google regarding digital advertising. I fervently believe this duopoly, as it’s now called, will be impenetrable by other paid media platforms.
But is this true?
These two powerhouses, according to some reports, account for nearly 85 percent of all digital media spend. All other platforms are collectively scrambling for the table scraps. Take Twitter, for example. As far as mobile goes, it controls just 2 percent of the total ad spend — down from 2.6 percent in 2016.
The good news is that brand marketers can find efficiencies by focusing on just two platforms with…
Neuroscience reveals how you can nudge your customers into converting
Dr. David Lewis, neuroscientist and author of The Brain Sell, delivered a fascinating keynote speech about customers’ brains when they buy at Ecommerce Conversion World 2017 in March. Here are 3 fascinating insights about your customers and suggestions on how to apply them to your website to increase conversion rates.
Fact 1: People Notice What's Different (or the Same!)
While this may sound contradictory, Dr. Lewis suggests that there are actually 4 factors that make a person stand out in a crowd.
There’s something inherently different about the person, such as exceptional beauty or a striking feature
The person has made themselves look different, such as with tattoos or colored hair
The person looks familiar to you, like someone you know in real-life or from a film
It’s someone you’re specifically looking for
…
How your users' content can boost your results
The best things in life are free. And user-generated content (or UGC) — which costs nothing — is one of the best marketing strategies available to brands, especially on Instagram. While its user base isn’t as large as that of its parent company, Instagram is crushing Facebook in terms of brand engagement.
How would you react if someone you feel a genuine connection with posted about how great his experience with a brand was? You’d likely believe it.
That’s why UGC is more trustworthy, influential, memorable, and, ultimately, effective for brand promotion than many traditional advertising techniques.
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What Is UGC?
While the name is fairly self-explanatory, here’s a quick primer: If a customer or fan posts a photo…
Re-targeting is crucial to closing sales. Here is how to do it right.
There is only one difference between using Facebook to promote your services, and having a marketing system that gets consistent, reliable and better results (almost) on autopilot.
Marketers and business owners know how important it is to have a comprehensive marketing plan, one that pushes people into your funnel and transform them into customers.
The problem is that most marketers are NOT using retargeting, or they don’t use it with the aim of creating Custom Audiences in order to reach specific people and gain different marketing objectives.
In this article you will discover why having a comprehensive retargeting strategy on Facebook can cover EVERY single step of your funnel, empowering all your marketing efforts.
Let’s start immediately.
1. Raise brand awareness
An effective marketing funnel should include a brand awareness stage. Here, retargeting can help you reach and engage more people interested in your…
3 lesser-known LinkedIn features you should be using
There is no doubt LinkedIn has become one of, if not the most powerful marketing tools of the 21st Century. With over 300+ million members and 49% of them being key decision makers, it’s never been faster, easier and more cost effective to get your message in front of potential clients, journalist, partners and even future employees.
Whilst it’s a powerful marketing tool, in our experience of training thousands of business owners, we’ve realized that very few are using it to its full potential.
In this post, I'll look at some practical features that also help towards getting more leads and in using LinkedIn more generally to build your contacts contact.
For more details on how to use the latest features on LinkedIn, download our guide.
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Follow these 10 strategies to reduce cart abandonment and 1 strategy to recover lost sales post cart abandonment
Your customers add items to their carts, they may even start the checkout process, but then they leave the site and abandon the items.
Sounds familiar?
This is the cart abandonment phenomenon.
Cart abandonment is a common phenomenon in e-commerce, with an average cart abandonment rate of 68.63% for 2016 (see chart below).
Online shopping cart abandonment rate worldwide from 2006 to 2017, Statista.
There are many reasons for customers to abandon their carts. Some of the most common reasons can be seen in the chart below.
Primary Reasons for Cart Abandonment in the U.S. in Q4 2016, Statista
So why is cart abandonment a major issue for ecommerce sites?
Think of the amount of resources that…
How to use strategic targeting to boost your results from Facebook video ads
In March, I wrote about some of the most effective ways to ensure you create strong, brand-building creative for your Facebook video campaigns. With competition for attention at an all-time high, it’s never been more important to create content that is interesting, relevant and clearly branded to make consumers stop and take notice.
The quality of the creative is absolutely essential and an area in which we should continually strive to optimise and improve. However for Facebook the importance of developing brand-building creative is closely followed by the level of rigour you dedicate to how and whom you target:
In the second of our short series on how to make an effective Facebook video campaign, I’m going to take a look at some of the best practices for developing…
