Mediaboss Marketing

At the recent Code Conference, venture capitalist Mary Meeker published her 2017 internet trends deck. Its like Christmas for the tech community: Meekers 355-slide deck provides insights on everything from the rise of voice search to the growing saturation of the smartphone market. Its well worth a read, and this year marketers are paying extra attention to the insights that underscore key content trends, including the rise of user-generated content and the importance of images and enhanced content for search and engagement.

What are the key takeaways for content marketers to keep in mind?

Mary Meeker has been tracking the state of the Internetand really, the global connections to innovationfor a while. While some of these trends represent whats already happened, others showcase the catalysts for evolving activities, best practices, and psychology, says Ian Gertler. Ian is on the board of the Internet of Things Community, and has held marketing and strategy leadership roles at organizations ranging from large enterprise organizations to venture-funded startups.

One of those major catalysts is the plunging efficacy of advertising, paired with the growing popularity of ad blockers. As Skyword CEO Tom Gerace notes, there are a number of trends driving this years focus on content. The first is the massive growth of ad blocking and the fact that we are really seeing people reject the kind of core interruption that you see with advertising. Despite that, theres $73 billion spent a year on online advertising. What youre seeing is tens of billions of dollars in advertising shifting in that direction every year. And yet, those ads are less effective every day at reaching audiences, so theres a direct business tension between those two steps.

Gerace continues, That money is pouring into online advertising, and yet hundreds of millions of consumers are blocking them, and of course, theres some news out this year that Google is going to install ad blocking by default in their next major Chrome release that will affect both desktop and mobile devices. So I suspect that that tension is causing folks like Mary to recognize the size and the shift thats coming in advertisingthat advertising will not work like it has for the last two centuries. And so, naturally, the next question is what do you do in place of that?

Content, in its myriad forms, naturally comes to the forefront, and one of the interesting insights from Meekers report examines its new direction.

Image attribution: Gustavo Spindula

As brands continue to develop content, the ecosystem becomes more complex. Simply publishing an anonymous company blog or dozens of white papers isnt enough. Brands and companies are no longer the sole creators of content. It requires a connected community, set of interactions, and feedback loop. Similar to product and services road maps, listening and learning is how to determine where an investment of time, resources, and budget should be directed. Dont spend these things on features or functionalities that dont address the needs, wants, and pain points of your customers, partners, and team members. The same is true for content. Use social media, in-person discussions, events, and other sources of interaction to identify sources of value. Craft content around those priorities, and then engage with your constituents to include them in the process, says Gertler.

Whether brands are co-creating content with audiences by integrating deeper customer feedback or investing in user-generated content (UGC) and influencer marketing campaigns, a wider range of voices is shaping the digital experience.

As Gerace notes, partnerships with key industry influencers play an important role in the evolving content strategy. Brands need to differentiate that theyre creating outstanding experiences for their customers in a sustained way. They need to get the thought leaders that are in any domain space to help create their content and tell stories on their behalf. I think it is hard to do that consistently with UGC outside of a couple of fields. That said, there are influencers who are domain experts, who do that every day for brands.

Yet for the CMO or marketing strategist whos vetting Meekers report, there are no one-size-fits-all recommendations. With significant shifts in the process of content creation, Gerace advises not habitually defaulting to a single approach and instead evaluating whats best for your company. I wouldnt look quite so much at the source. Is it a user-generated copy of the content? Is it a freelancer piece of content? Is it an expert inside the company thats creating content? If I were the CMO, the question I would ask is, Who will create the most outstanding experience for my customers if I need to write on this topic? Once I understand the limited pool of creatives that will create a truly outstanding experience, Id say, Great. Will any of them bring audience?

The question of audience is nuanced. Its not about buying audience exposure, its about amplifying the right experiences. This is where we then layer in influencers. Brands that go out and buy influencers, that try to buy their reach of influencers for influences sake, end up amplifying mediocre experiences. The first focus has to be on understanding the experience your customers want or need, and then creating that experience that they want or need in a way that surpasses whats available to them otherwise in the market, says Gerace.

Image attribution: Matt Palmer

Meeker predicted that pictures will play an increasingly important role in search. Its clear, with the explosion of platforms like Instagram and Pinterest and emerging technology classes like virtual and augmented reality, that immersion and strong storytelling are winning.

Video today offers a terrific way to give a rich experience, and augmented reality and virtual reality will provide even richer experiences in the future. As for the medium, I think marketers need to focus first on the story. You can tell a great story in written form, in a photograph, in a video, in a game. You can hook, hold, and reward an audience regardless of the medium. But the more immersive the experience, the more effective you can be at giving a completely rich story experience to your customers, says Gerace.

It all begins with fluent storytelling and seamless immersion. The first things brands need to do is again master the art of storytelling. And the second thing they need to do is then pick the immersive experiences that leverage all of our senses: sound and the visual cortex. I believe that ten out of eleven of the neural impulses hitting our brain are visual. When you think about the opportunity with video or with virtual reality, you can really capture their attention when youre giving them some kind of visual stimulation.

The content opportunities have exciting potential. Skyword has begun to develop relationships with video producers and film companies to support its brand partners. The reason we created those relationships is because we believe brands will be producing television shows and distributing them through a variety of different channels in the next year or two. There is no reason that financial services companies should feed the content space in investing to CNBC and Wall Street Journal. They could be producing equally compelling content and building relationships with their customers and nurturing relationships with their customers every single morning. And we certainly believe thats what brands will be doing a couple years from now, and we are gearing up at Skyword to make sure that we can create good partners when theyre ready to do that.

Meekers report shows the shifts in the market, from a slowing down in internet adoption to the saturation of smartphones. Our digital connectedness and the way that we consume content is helping to create a new environment for brands, which makes it easierand more cost effectiveto deploy larger content campaigns.

The economics of content marketing has shifted radically when it moved from offline to online. And that is largely because the distribution and the amplification costswhich in the old world were printing and distributing your contenthave vanished. Brands used to spend most of their money not on the production of the content they were using in the content marketing, but on printing it or putting it on a DVD and distributing it, says Gerace.

Today we have a much greater opportunity for brands to be creative and to invest in extraordinary creatives because we have the discovery infrastructures of search and social. And if you tell a great story, that story will cascade across the social infrastructure. And if you tell a great story that people link into, of course it will rise and be discovered on search. With the natural-born discovery infrastructure of search and social and the global distribution infrastructure of the internet itself, brands can be far more effective and drive a far higher ROI on the content than ever before. This is another major business driver for why this moment in time makes a lot of sense to focus on content.

Ultimately, this shift in content economics opens up three key possibilities for marketers:

Image attribution: Tim Gouw

One takeaway that really underscores this message is the idea that with more channels than ever before, content creates opportunities to reach your ideal audience, on the channel they want, at exactly the right moment, with an experience that blows them away. Better analytics and personalization technologyalong with more channels than ever to choose fromare making this easier.

Content marketing used to be seen as promotional-based editorials, usually driven by a marketing-to mentality with a call-to-action for purchasing something. As content channels progressed and became accessible to mainstream audiences, these practices needed to change. Social media. Blogs. Video. Visuals. Mobile. Influencer marketing on both macro (celebrity) and micro (subject matter experts) levels. This is all about delivering the proverbial value, relevance, and experiences that your audiences expectincluding their participation in the content development process. Authenticity has been a hyped-up way of thinking, but most people want to understand, associate, find value, and gain positive experiences. Content marketing now reinforces those objectives and will continue to do so across channels, formats, and audiences, says Gertler.

Brands are increasingly finding that to maximize their investments in content, its crucial to ensure that they have the right systems in place under the hood. Some areas to consider include:

For content marketers, Meekers report signals three takeaways to keep in mind:

As Gertler sums up, Why did Mary Meeker include content marketing in the 2017 Internet Trends report? Simple: Its part of everything, whether youre visiting a brands site or social channels, attending an event, interacting with people about the products and services that create your experiences, or revealing why you select one offering over another. As Brian Solis notes, were in a state of Digital Darwinism, and that impacts every single organization. Traditional, older, start-up, and those that havent even been born yet. Exciting (and challenging) days ahead for all! From the Internet of Things (IoT) to AI (what I refer to as augmented versus artificial intelligence), we need to learn and improve each day to drive the customer experience and bottom-line results. Content is an integral part of the bigger puzzle.

For more stories like this, subscribe to the Content Standard newsletter.

Featured image attribution: Mikaela Shannon

Go here to read the rest:
5 Things Marketers Can Learn About Marketing Transformation from Mary Meekers 2017 Internet Trends Report - The Content Standard by Skyword

There are two aspects of business that are clearly receptive to new technology finance and marketing. Efficiency counts for a lot in every aspect of a business, but managers find it easier to justify investments in technology when it helps the business make more money or save more.

Thats what makes the oncoming wave of big data a perfect match for the still-nascent digital marketing sector. Big data tools can now be used to slice through the glut of customer data and find insights that can be used to drive marketing. A clever algorithm can scroll through a whole SEO movie to collect all the data, compartmentalize it, and apply it to improve sales within seconds. Tracking user sentiments, opinions, demographics, and behavior in real time is no longer science fiction.

Tracking user sentiments, opinions, demographics, and behavior in real time is no longer science fiction.

Executives understand that Big Data could be as revolutionary for marketing as the internet was just a few decades ago. Heres how its already changing the way businesses sell online:

Pricing services and products is a balancing act. Getting the price right in todays hyper-competitive economy is tricky for businesses without the right tools. Big data analytics can help businesses fine-tune their pricing and even offer customized pricing on the individual level for best results. McKinsey found that minor improvements in the pricing strategy could have a tremendous impact on the bottom line.

Knowing and understanding your customers better is the key to forming long-term relationships. Theres no doubt better online tracking and web statistics will help shape an online marketing campaign. Better, bigger data is helping businesses create better experiences for their loyal customers.

A study by Datameer found that one of the key areas of use for big data tools was product and service innovation. Businesses can now go beyond simply watching and learning more about their customers. CMOs can now dig deeper into customer data and figure out where the services can be augmented, where the pain points are, and which new products will perform best. A data-driven product development strategy could soon be the norm for all businesses.

Digital marketing has moved from search engines to social platforms. These social networking sites are thriving with key interactions, opinions and general consumer sentiment which makes them fertile ground for big data tools. Not only can businesses use these tools to target individuals based on their personal information, but they can also track down key influencers in certain markets, schedule automated content for their followers, and analyze triggers that determine customer satisfaction.

Gone are the days when CMOs would pick out the top ten keywords and formulate a strategy to target them. Now, with endless data at everyones disposal, creating marketing strategies is a lot less involved and a lot more meticulous. Managers can target thousands of niche keywords and automate the process of dynamically switching between them based on performance. Search engine optimization can go deeper with geolocation data and activity patterns within certain regions.

Most experts agree that this is just the tip of the iceberg. Marketing has always been deeply involved with verifiable data and consumer insights. Big data will fundamentally change the way businesses sell online.

Originally posted here:
Big data will change business marketing forever - Techaeris

Since the first introduction of Apples iPhone in 2007, the Internet superhighway has become more cluttered than an L.A. freeway. That might sound like a negative, but since Google became a verb and search engines became the smartest person in the room, internet clutter is a fantastic thing.

Why? It allows us to run hyper-specific searches. In the early days of the Internet, if you had trouble with a lawn tool, it was cutting edge to run an online search for small engine repair. Now youd cut straight to the chase by searching changing the filter in a 2014 Honda CR27 pressure washer. This is a trend that advisors can use to their advantage.

The best advisor content right now is hyper-specific.

When you narrow your focus, your content becomes more useful, more searchable and more likely to convert into new business. Weve ridden this wave since 1978. Back then, we gave away material (in print at the time), which helped us build relationships and, eventually, led to new business. Our focus has become more and more targeted every year; now focusing on one industry and covering only a handful of topicsbut going deeper into these topics than anyone else.

So how do you go about riding this wave of hyper-specific content? These steps should help:

The idea is not to bombard prospects every day with useless information disguised as content (junk), but to position yourself as a thoughtful professional who regularly gives away useful advice. Who will you target?

@StephenBoswellis President of The Oechsli Institute and author ofBest Practices of Elite Advisors.@KevinANicholsis the Chief Operating Officer for The Oechsli Institute and author ofThe Indispensable LinkedIn Sales Guide for Financial Advisors.

Continue reading here:
Hyper-Specific Content Marketing - WealthManagement.com

Before the internet took over the economy, "marketing" used to mean spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a creative team, communications staff, and messaging. And that's before the billboards, print ads, and TV spots necessary to get a brand in front consumer eye-balls.

Now all thats changedtheres been a major disruption, says Mike Heller, founder and CEO of Talent Resources , in an interview with Fortune senior editor Anne VanderMey. When you have an influencer that has 30 million followers, 20 million, five millionthats more powerful than any of the other traditional media outlets out there."

Talent Resources, a company with an inconspicuously understated name, is one of a number of new firms now transforming the advertising industry by championing the new, growing business of influencer marketing.

Influencer marketing capitalizes on social media's reach, by paying Internet celebrities of varied levels of fameincluding pets to tout products in their social media accounts to their followers. It's gaining popularity among brands who would rather not shell out for the relatively inefficient and hard-to-measure traditional advertising tactics. Even Internet behemoth Amazon is looking to recruit influencers with its recently launched social influencer program .

One key advantage, other than the relatively lower costs and ease of production, is that influencer posts dont get shut down by ad blockers and can be highly targeted. People trust and identify with the celebrities they follow, which often means they'll like the same brands favored by their favorite starsas long as the brand aligns with the influencers lifestyle. Weve turned down millions of dollars on products that just arent aligned with the talent and their lifestyle, says Heller. It has to be authentic.

Influencer advertising certainly raises some ethical concerns. While the consumer thinks theyre looking at the Instagram feed of people whose style and lifestyle they admire, they might in fact be looking at a feed of advertisements. One of the most recent examples is the lawsuit against the now-infamous Fyre Festival , where numerous celebrity influencers such as Kendall Jenner and other Instagram stars were paid to tout the ultra-exclusive and expensive music festival, which turned out to be less glam than advertised , and the celebrities paid were not even at the festival.

Of course, social media itself is not exactly authentic in the first place, and looking at someones social media posts is basically looking at a manufactured version of what they want to display of their lives, complete with image filters and other enhancements that show them in the best light. That's legal, of course, but when money changes hands it a different story. The FTC requires such advertising to be disclosed to the users, though the sheer number and speed of production of such posts can make it hard to oversee. In April, the FTC published a press release to remind influencers and brands to disclose their connections.

Legal technicalities aside, the influencer marketing trend seems to be here to stay and is expected to become a $5 to $10 billion market within the next five years, according to mediakix .

For the inside track on how the sausage gets made, watch our interview with Talent Resources founder and CEO Mike Heller above.

Link:
Brands Are Relying on 'Influencer' Marketing More Than Ever - Fortune

Segment has raised $64 million in Series C funding, with the Y Combinator Continuity Fund and GV leading the round.

The continuity fund is the $700 million fund led by former Twitter COO Ali Rowghani. It selectively writes checks for YC startups as they raise bigger rounds.

As part of the deal, Rowghani will be joining Segments board of directors. In the funding announcement, he said the startup is on a path to be among the most successful Y Combinator companies.

Three of Segments founders, including CEO Peter Reinhardt, dropped out of MIT to participate in YCs summer 2011 program. The companys products allow businesses to send their online data to different analytics and marketing tools, and to combine that data with customer information from services like Stripe, Salesforce, Mailchimp and Zendesk.

Reinhardt argued that the need for this kind of data infrastructure is only growing.

For the last five years, a lot of investors have been saying that at some point, this industry needs to consolidate you cant have more and more email marketing tools, he said. But instead, Companies are piecing together these best-in-class tools rather than these broad suites People like more and more specialized, niche tools for companies of their size or their geography or their industry.

And as companies employ a broader arsenal of marketing and analytics products, Reinhardt wants Segment to serve as their central customer data platform.

The product is already used by more than 15,000 customers, including Intuit, Atlassian and Gap. Reinhardt said that while Segment was initially adopted by startups, theres a big opportunity in selling the technology to large enterprises.

Hes also hoping to see Segment turn into a broader platform, where third parties can build products that tap into its data he said there are already more than 200 tools built on top of Segment, with 30 percent of them created by partners, rather than Segment itself.

The new round brings Segments total funding to $109 million. Previous investors Accel, Thrive Capital, SV Angel, and NEA also participated.

See the article here:
Marketing data startup Segment raises $64M - TechCrunch