Mediaboss Marketing

Simon Boyd, Sales Director at SmoothSkin

The container ship laden with consumer goods on its way from China to a port somewhere in Europe or the U.S. has become one of the iconic images of the twenty-first century, but Simon Boyd is anxious to stress that the traffic is two way.

We are a British manufacturing company and we are exporting successfully to China, he asserts.

Boyd is Sales Director at Swansea-based company, SmoothSkin. Born out of research into lasers at the local university, the business makes and sells hair removal products that uses high energy light beams directed at the skin. The company, which was already exporting to more than 30 countries, entered the Chinese market in 2017. Since then, Boyd says sales in China have grown 35 fold.

Attractive But Difficult

Now everyone knows that China is a massive consumer market, second only to - and constantly on the point of surpassing - the U.S. and, therefore, a honeypot for export-hungry businesses from all over the world. But its also true that China is often considered a difficult market in terms of trading regulations and the expectations, culture and behaviour of its consumers. So how did a company from South Wales, selling a relatively niche set of products, succeed in capturing the attention of Chinas buyers.

Well, according to Boyd, understanding the culture has been crucial and the company's embrace of the Chinese way of doing things has included participation in the local internet phenomenon of "live streaming."

Going Live

Live streaming via the web is, of course, not unique to China. Anyone can live stream on Youtube and perhaps even monetise the event by asking people to contribute via a payment system such as Paypal.

But live streaming in China is of a different order. Here in Britain or in the U.S., influencers tend to use Instagram or Youtube to build a following and monetise that - transparently or not - through brand endorsement and/or advertising. In China, Live Streaming is carried out from dedicated studios where a new generation of web celebrities broadcast to their fans. But crucially, streaming events are integrated with payment and e-commerce opportunities. Perhaps not surprisingly, the ubiquitous Alibaba runs a live streaming platform as part of its TMall e-commerce hub. It has provided SmoothSkin with a lucrative channel to consumers.

Reaching China's Consumers

When SmoothSkin began making plans to enter China, the first step was to take advice from a local unit of KPMG on the best way to address consumers. The second stage was to find a partner. The company launched as a vendor on TMall. Crucially, it went on to forge a much closer partnership.

The big thing about Alibaba is that they offer an open and transparent relationship, says Boyd. And once they have identified that you have a differentiated product and that you are finding a market, they give you a lot of support.

Much of that support, he says, takes the form of data that has allowed Smoothskin to identify customers and market directly to them. But live streaming has thrown an interesting curve into the mix.

As Boyd explains, SmoothSkin has worked with live streamer, Viya, an online personality who can command an audience of millions. The beauty market is Viyas particular sweet spot and she has been known to rack up sales of close to $50 million to her followers in single twenty four hour period.

Boyd has sat in with Viya and while he wont quote numbers on the record, he was clearly impressed with her ability to generate product sales.

There is perhaps a bigger point here. China has developed its own unique internet culture and any business seeking to sell successfully must take account of that culture and hone its marketing accordingly. SmoothSkin has taken the time to do that.

And as Boyd points out, every market is different. "In Europe, our customers tend to be older women. In China, our buyers are very young. In Japan, they appeal to males. You have to treat each market separately," says Boyd.

The question is, will live streaming-enabled commerce find its way to the U.S. and Europe. Will our armies of influencers become live streamers. That remains to be seen. But for the moment, consumer brands entering China might want to take note of this very particular internet trend.

Read more:
Want To Tune In To The Chinese Consumer?- Maybe Live Streaming Is The Answer - Forbes

When it comes to promoting yourself online, lots of companies are looking for the next big "growth hack," often with the expectation that it will provide quick results. Marketing trends continuously change, and search engine optimization (SEO) is no exception. Recently, some have claimed that SEO is unnecessary in the modern search engine, with some going so far as to say that SEO is dead.

Granted, SEO has always had its critics. To those who dont understand it or dont believe in its potential, SEO is often portrayed negatively as an attempt to game the system. The reality is that it takes hard work to generate great online content, and having that content recognized requires effort. Thats what SEO is meant to do help individuals searching for a service to discover the best one possible.

Not every digital marketing technique will stand the test of time, but a mindset of avoiding what you dont understand can be dangerous and detrimental to your business. Dont ax SEO from your marketing strategy.

While SEO isnt a perfect fit for every business, it can be a reliable way to improve your customer leads and conversions, if youre willing to put in the work it requires (or pay someone to do so). Like any major campaign, it should be approached with caution; using outdated SEO tactics can wreak havoc on your websites ranking, which is why understanding how SEO works has never been more relevant.

Heres what you should know about SEO in todays realm of digital marketing, and how you can make the most of it:

SEO Is More Relevant Than Ever

SEO isnt resistant to change. What works to improve search placement today could become a ranking penalty in the future. Skeptics usually point out SEOs fluctuating nature to assert their point about SEO becoming useless. But its important to consider this fluctuation with a bit of context.

How and where each website appears in the list of search results is controlled by a series of algorithms that Google does not share with the public. These algorithms undergo small updates each week (possibly more) and major updates several times each year. Search engines now see a record amount of user activity, with billions of searches made each day. Google uses over 200 ranking factors to determine which results to serve up first, and there are over 1.5 billion websites on the internet. In such a dynamic and changeable environment, its silly to think that any website can achieve and maintain search dominance without conscious effort.

SEO is arguably more important than it was in the past. The idea that a good product or service will speak for itself doesnt hold water when the competition is downright massive. With so many people relying on search engines to discover businesses before visiting them, its crucial that your business appears in these searches and has a noticeable presence.

If youre still skeptical, remember that a growing number of users now perform their searches using digital voice assistants, which bring up the first result rather than the first page. Abandon SEO, and your business may quickly sink into search engine obscurity.

Using SEO To Its Fullest

Given how essential SEO is now, knowing how to use it to its fullest is crucial. Critics of SEO usually point to how quickly searches have changed in recent years. Paid promotions and "local packs" have become the norm, leading some to believe that any attempt to keep up with the constantly shifting field of SEO is futile.

However, ongoing significant change is the very thing that makes SEO a staple of any successful online presence. The belief that SEO is useless often originates from marketers or business owners who set up SEO and then forget about it. Neglect is never a suitable method of promotion, and if its what youve been doing, youre missing out.

Instead, be prepared to invest some time into cultivating an SEO stronghold. Many of the most important ranking factors, such as trust and authority, take time to build, and anyone who promises overnight results is selling you snake oil. Your SEO strategy should also be flexible enough to reflect current search trends and popular keywords. SEO isnt meant to be static; if something isnt working, find a different way.

Keep Up To Date On Recent Developments

As SEO methodology changes, you dont have to reconstruct your current strategy over and over. It just requires a bit of occasional tweaking.

For instance, experts suggest that voice searches will substantially increase in the next few years due to the rising popularity of voice assistants. More voice searches mean that SEO will need to adapt to different phrases and keyword searches to better fit user behavior. This has led some SEO professionals to begin focusing on long-tail keywords, those that feature more than three words. For example, a consumer searching for pizza might type, "Chicago pizza restaurants," while someone performing a vocal search will speak a more natural-sounding phrase, often a question such as, "Where can I get pizza in Chicago?"

Older content is still helpful for text-based searches, which havent become obsolete just yet. When adding new content, keep these new strands of words in mind, and work to incorporate them naturally. Try reading your webpages or blogs out loud to test what a searcher using a voice assistant might experience if they visit your site.

SEO Needs Some Time And Attention

Its fair to suggest that SEO isnt infallible; it needs attention and a significant investment of time to work as intended. If left to its own devices, your SEO wont do the job you expect. Luckily, maintenance is pretty straightforward and can easily be outsourced, as long as you put some research into choosing the right SEO service provider.

In the end, SEO is what you make of it. Dont let your SEO gather cobwebs; its here to stay. Keep it in mind as you continue to develop your businesss online presence.

The rest is here:
Why SEO Is Here To Stay And How To Make The Most Of It - Forbes

There will be an average 6.1% increase in media prices in 2020, as the commercial audiences supplied by media owners shrinks by approximately 1.6%.

The Global Advertising Expenditure report from Zenith paints a bleak picture for advertisers for the year ahead, saying after the sustained decline in commercial print audiences, the industry is now seeing the same with TV amid the rise of ad-free streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, HBO, and Disney+.

Price inflation will counterbalance the decline in global audiences for TV, leading Zenith to predict that there will be zero growth in the medium over the next three years.

However, the newspaper and magazine industry will not be able to counter the effect as easily. Prices are rising for printed newspapers and magazines but not quickly enough to compensate for the persistent and rapid decline in readership. This means newspaper ad spend will shrink by 4.5% a year to 2022, and magazines will shrink by 8.1% a year.

Overall it said that the supply of commercial audiences has shrunk by 1.3% a year on average since 2010 while media inflation has averaged 6.5% a year.

"This is a continuation of a trend that has shaped the ad market for the whole decade, but what were now seeing is that TV inflation has reached high enough levels that its forcing brands to shift spend to other channels, even though they are generally less effective at generating rapid mass reach," said Jonathan Barnard, head of forecasting at Zenith.

"Overall brands have been faced with a choice: continue to rely on TV, spending more to get less, or invest in data and technology that allows them to aggregate digital audiences cost effectively. The latter is a more sustainable strategy in the long term."

Internet ad spend will continue to grow though, the pace at which it's rising will slowly decline. In 2019 it was up 11% and this will fall in 2020 to 10% growth and average 9% growth by 2022, when Zenith expects internet advertising to account for 54% of global ad spend (it currently stands at 47%).

However, inflation for online advertising is even higher than TV with Zenith estimating it will hit 9.1% in 2020.

"Demand is running well ahead of supply, because of this need to make up for falling mass audiences through television channels, and the influx of small-business advertisers on Facebook and Google," added Barnard. "Also, the quality of digital environments is improving, allowing advertisers to use the likes of Instagram or long-form video platforms for proper brand-building campaigns."

Display is winning the majority of this ongoing spend, which includes everything from banner ads to online video and social media, while paid search and classified are now both lagging behind display, growing at an average of 7% and 1% a year to 2022 respectively.

Tim Irwin, chief executive for EMEA at WPP media agency Essence said clients are already shifting spend accordingly.

"When there is competition and a scarcity of inventory, brands must continually evolve and divest their spend in other channels - for our clients that means keeping up to date with media price inflation across the ecosystem, and assessing whether that change justifies spending and adjusting accordingly. Our clients are always exploring new channels, but when it comes to top budget winning channels they will always be the ones which provide transparency, measurement and ease of working," he said.

"Offsetting these kinds of changes are one of the many reasons we continue to invest significantly in machine learning-driven optimisation of planning and buying."

Despite the worlds eyes set to be on events like the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics, Uefa Euros and US Presidential elections 2020 is a so-called quadrennial year there has been no upgrade to growth in advertising expenditure.

In 2019, total ad spend grew 4.2% but in 2020 it will rise by just 0.1% more to reach $666bn (507bn).

Zenith said it would normally expect a comfortable year-on-year growth of ad spend but laid blame for the non-existent movement on the US-China trade war which is "interrupting supply chains and rerouting trade and investment". Overall, the tense relations between the two superpowers has led to uncertainty among advertisers and resulted in strict budgeting.

Zenith estimates this economic headwind will cost the global ad market 1.1 percentage points of growth in 2020. Without it, the market would be up by 5.4%.

Yet despite the trade dispute, the US and China are still leading global ad spend growth. The US ad market is forecast to grow by $39.1bn between 2019 and 2022, while China grows by US$10.3bn, and together will account for 56% of all growth in ad expenditure over the next three years.

Spend in North America has largely been boosted by the flood of new small and medium-sized companies using Facebook and Google to advertise for the first time, Zenith said.

However, India will take over as second-biggest contributor to ad growth in mid-2020s. Its expenditure will grow by $4.3bn between 2019 and 2022 with Zenith saying it has great potential for long-term growth.

Meanwhile, though political uncertainty continues to plague the UK ad market it will grow by 4.9% in 2020, up from 3.2% in 2019. This has been driven primarily by very strong digital spending, which will be up 6.9% next year.

We expect strong growth from UK advertising next year, despite the political and economic uncertainty, because it is embracing the digital transformation of marketing wholeheartedly, said David Mulrenan, Zenith UKs head of investment.

In 2022, the share of UK ad spend devoted to digital media will reach 71%, making the UK the first market in the world to exceed 70% digital ad spend.

Follow this link:
Ad land braces for 6.1% inflation in media prices - The Drum

LOS ANGELES, CA / ACCESSWIRE / December 7, 2019 / Compare-autoinsurance.org has launched a new blog post that explains what you have to do after the car got stolen and how a car insurance company can help.

For more info and free car insurance quotes online, visit https://compare-autoinsurance.org/important-steps-that-you-need-to-follow-if-your-car-got-stolen/.

The perfect day of any driver will be ruined if his car is missing. He remembers exactly where the vehicle was parked, but now it's not there anymore. Suddenly, the driver realizes that the car got stolen.

Drivers that got their cars stolen should follow the next steps:

For additional info, money-saving tips and free car insurance quotes, visit https://compare-autoinsurance.org/.

Compare-autoinsurance.org is an online provider of life, home, health, and auto insurance quotes. This website is unique because it does not simply stick to one kind of insurance provider, but brings the clients the best deals from many different online insurance carriers. In this way, clients have access to offers from multiple carriers all in one place: this website. On this site, customers have access to quotes for insurance plans from various agencies, such as local or nationwide agencies, brand names insurance companies, etc.

"Having your car stolen can put you in a delicate situation. Knowing what steps to take after you realize that your car got stolen can help remedy this situation," said Russell Rabichev, Marketing Director of Internet Marketing Company.

CONTACT:

Company Name: Internet Marketing CompanyPerson for contact Name: Gurgu CPhone Number: (818) 359-3898Email: cgurgu@internetmarketingcompany.bizWebsite: https://compare-autoinsurance.org/

SOURCE: Internet Marketing Company

View source version on accesswire.com: https://www.accesswire.com/569473/Important-Steps-to-Follow-After-Discovering-That-the-Car-Was-Stolen

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Important Steps to Follow After Discovering That the Car Was Stolen - Yahoo Finance

The first revolution of Internet, in 1995, involved connecting personal computers across the globe onto one giant web and make information available at the click of a button. The second revolution, around 2010, saw the emergence of social networks and enabled the human race to become one large family with everyone having the ability to connect with everyone else on issues of common interest. Now the third Internet revolution, led by voice, humanitys most used communication channel, is going to result in a screen-less omnipresent Internet.

Presently more than 20 percent of search queries in India are already done by voice. And by 2020, 50 percent of all global searches will be voice searches. In fact, India is seeing 270 percent year on year growth in voice searches, as revealed by Google. One of the reasons for the humongous growth is because voice is faster than typing. Also in rural areas, where people cant read or write in English, this technology comes handy. Since the Indian market is one of the biggest and fastest growing markets, big players like Amazons Alexa, Google Home etc, are now focusing and placing bets on Indian languages and the Indian market.

Some of the major players in the voice Internet market are:

There are fundamentally three ways in which consumers will engage with Internet using voices.

Our device of engagement remains the same, our existing laptop or phone. However instead of using a keyboard to input information, we use voice to input information. And the response (output) can either be displayed on the screen or the response can get called out by the machine.

This has an immediate impact on SEO. Google is the gateway to the Internet for any consumer and thus it is important for brands and businesses that they show up in a Google search. However search using voice is more conversational compared to search using a keyboard.

Eg : Keyboard search: Italian restaurant Mumbai

Eg : Voice search: Can you recommend a good Italian restaurant in Mumbai in my neighbourhood

Thus SEO strategy will need to be tweaked to include phrases rather than just key words.

Similarly website content will need to be more nuanced and conversational, akin to a chatbot engagement. Traditional websites are organised in the form of About Us - Our Services - Contact Us kind of linear structure. In a voice internet world, we need to envisage a consumer conversation with a brand website and create an interface that responds to a conversational question, assuming multiple possible paths in which the conversation can go.

The second and perhaps more revolutionary use of voice internet is the use of devices for interaction.

In the simplest form, these devices will be the likes of a Google Home or an Alexa. The market for these devices is now growing by leaps and bounds. Currently, these devices are being used to find answers to simple questions like What is the weather, Play some instrumental music and Which movies are playing in town. As these devices grow smarter, very soon they will replace the family dog. I envisage a voice device at some point becoming a part of the family, and actually engaging in conversations and providing inputs during a discussion.

As per Alexa, every day in the morning, thousands of people get up and say Good morning to their device showing not only how people are making an effort to be polite to a piece of technology, but also the fact that these devices are becoming a part of our lives.

From a brand perspective these devices pose a major challenge. Unlike screen-based internet, where a Google query could list a whole bunch of responses on the first page of the search result, a voice device wont call out so many results. It will call out a very limited number of results. In such a situation, how does a brand ensure that it figures in the results that get called out. Also brands will be forced to define a voice personality for their brand. When a brand responds via the Internet of voice should it be a male voice or a female voice. What should be the tonality of the voice? Should it be preachy, or should it be funny?

Additionally, how would SEM work in case of a voice device? How do ads get activated in a voice search? I am already seeing some initial examples of ads where before providing response to my query, the voice assistant runs a 15 second brand ad. While opportunity for putting out multiple search results and multiple ads may decrease substantially in a voice search, I think the number of queries (and thus opportunities) to engage with consumers will increase dramatically.

Voice devices are allowing brands to create the equivalent of apps that can be fired on the voice assistant. Just like we can create a brand app, and host it on various phone operating systems (like Android or IoS, etc), similarly, we can create brand apps and host it on voice assistant platforms. The next media war will be for brands to find space on the consumers voice assistant.

Perhaps the most significant impact of voice will be seen in IoT devices. With embedded chips in pretty much every device or gadget, which can be then linked to the Internet, one could actually talk to any device. So you could ask a light bulb to switch itself on or off; or you can ask your fridge to order supplies via your preferred e-grocery store; or you can ask you washing machine to place a service request with the manufacturer. And then of course, you could have a driverless car that not only ferries you from one place to another based on your voice command, but can actually have a conversation with you based on your mood, play music of your choice or book a spa for you on your way back from the office if you sound too tired. More and more companies are jumping on this bandwagon.Already, Ford lets you talk to your car, Huawei and LG let you talk to your phone and fridge and ADT lets you talk to your burglar alarm!

KidsMD, a voice-based application that runs on Alexa, helps provide parents answers to questions about childrens illness and also gets real-time information about drugs, procedures and how to treat their child. Parents find it more reassuring to hear the responses then seeing the responses displayed on a screen! Boston Hospital is attempting to use voice-based communication in the operation theatre. Doctors in the operation theatre take pictures of body parts during a surgery but labelling these pictures later becomes a challenge since the pictures look fairly similar. Using a voice assistant, the doctor keeps calling out the body parts as he keeps photographing them and the voice assistant does the image tagging. Or imagine pilots in the cockpit no longer referring to physical manuals or even their IPads. They can simply call out, and a voice assistant can provide the relevant answer in real time.

The Internet of Voice is truly the next big revolution, with some incredible possibilities.

(Edited by Suruchi Kapur- Gomes)

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)

See the original post here:
How Internet of Voice is changing the rules of digital marketing - YourStory