mobile marketing

Mobile Marketing Trends to Keep Track of in 2019

/in , , , /by

Mobile marketing has taken its place over the past few years as one of the most important marketing strategies that you can implement. This should be no surprise, considering the fact that mobile devices accounted for almost 50 percent of the world’s web page views last year. Because of this, it’s important that you keep your eye on mobile marketing trends that could potentially improve the success of your mobile marketing strategy. The following are a number of mobile marketing trends that have caught on that are worth taking note of:

1) Playable Ads

Playable ads help improve engagement since they allow users to interact with the ad. According to a recent survey, some 71 percent of advertisers who experimented with playable ads found them to be effective.video marketing trends

2) Live Streaming

Live streams, such as through Facebook Live or Periscope, give viewers a sense that they are part of something exclusive since they are viewing content that can’t be accessed if it’s missed. Many people will view live streams from their mobile phones because it allows them to partake no matter where they are.

3) Progressive Web Apps

Offering a progressive web app makes it easier for consumers to access your website, will make your website load quicker, and will greatly improve the user experience.

4) Mobile First Indexing

Mobile first indexing refers to your website’s mobile ranking. This is based on how mobile-friendly your website is and requires that your site load quickly, be displayed properly, and be user-friendly on mobile devices.

5) Augmented Reality

AR can help consumers interact with products or ads in real time using their smartphones. For example, using an app, you can take a picture of a food product. The app can then pull up a recipe that you can use that product in.

6) Ephemeral Content

Ephemeral content is content that lasts a short period of time before disappearing. SnapChat is a platform focused on ephemeral content. Ephemeral content can be effective because your audience won’t put off watching or reading it knowing that they could potentially miss out.

7) Voice

Voice is going to become more and more important as it replaces typing, especially on mobile devices and with the growing popularity of virtual assistants. As a result, voice search is something to keep in mind while implementing your SEO strategy.

 

8) Quick Load Times

Mobile users are often looking for specific things while on the move, which means that if your site doesn’t load quickly on mobile, your bounce rate is likely to be high. Quick load times are a must in the age of mobile use.

9) Micro Moments

Micro moments refer to the brief moments that consumers pull their phones out to look something up. Identifying your target audience’s micro moments will make it easier to target them effectively.

5 Mobile Marketing Techniques To Build Your Ecommerce Brand

Keeping track of mobile marketing trends can help you discover new mobile marketing tactics that could benefit your marketing campaign. These are some of the mobile marketing strategies that are gaining steam that are worth looking into.

A GUIDE TO EFFECTIVE MOBILE MARKETING TECHNIQUES

The Benefits of Using Behavioral Segmentation

/in , /by

Engaging your leads and building relationships with them is one of the most important aspects of successful inbound marketing. This becomes a lot easier when you have information about your leads that you can use to your advantage. Many marketers will take the information they gather from opt-in forms and surveys to segment their user lists using marketing automation so that they can target specific groups of their audience using more personalized content. However, segmentation doesn’t end here–you can also implement something called behavioral segmentation for even more insight into who your audience is. The following is a rundown that explains “what is behavioral segmentation?” and the benefits of implementing it.

What is Behavioral Segmentation?

While the information that you gather directly from your leads via opt-in forms and surveys (which can include things like gender, age, location, and other demographic information) is very helpful and can tell you a lot about them, knowing how they behave will give you insight into their needs that many of them can’t even provide.

The information that you collect in order to segment your users based on their behavior is exactly that–data on how they behave on your website. Different types of people will behave differently while exploring your website and engaging. By being able to identify how they are behaving (and taking into account their historical behavior on your site), you can tailor more personal content that targets them more effectively.

Check out our article: How To Use Buyer Personas For Senior Living Marketing

Benefits of Behavioral Segmentation

The following are 3 reasons why you should be using behavioral segmentation as part of your inbound marketing efforts:

marketing automation software1. Personalize your interactions more

The more you’re able to personalize your interactions (for example, sending an article that has tips on what kind of food you should feed your cat to a lead that actually owns a cat) is going to make it much easier to nurture your leads through the sales funnel. Personalization also includes knowing when to reach your leads and what channels to reach them on.

2. Predict and influence user behaviour

Tracking how your leads behave on your website or on social media gives you insight into how they are likely to behave in the future, thereby making it easier for you to influence how they behave and what the outcome will be. For example, if you notice that they watch a lot of videos, you can notify them when new video content is being published because you know that there’s a good chance they will watch it.

3. Prioritize your strongest leadsattraction marketing

Not all leads are equal. Their behavioural history will give you insight into which leads are more likely to become customers, or which customers are more likely to become repeat customers. For example, a lead that has spent a lot of time on certain product pages is more likely to take action than someone who only briefly looked at one of your blog posts before leaving your site. You can then, for example, target that first lead by sending a special offer for the product they were looking at to encourage them to make the purchase or an article detailing the benefits of that product.

Your business website and social channels offer a treasure trove of data that will reveal valuable information about the behavior of your leads. You should use this information to segment your leads so that you can more effectively target them and engage with them. If you aren’t using behavioral segmentation yet, you should be.

30 Greatest Lead Generation Tips
Security

Advertising Trends That Will Catch On In 2019

/in , , /by

A lot of new–and effective–advertising trends caught on this year, many of which you should consider looking into. However, it’s always important to keep track of the latest advertising trends even if some of them come and go. Advertising trends that pop up could end up being perfect for your specific marketing needs, and they are a good way to judge which direction marketing is going in general. Keeping that in mind, the following are a few advertising trends we expect to see in 2019:

A Bigger Emphasis On Voice Search

Personal assistants, such as Alexa and Siri, are growing in popularity because they are making life much more convenient for people. The technology of voice search has also grown exponentially over the past few years. This has led to almost a third of the 3.5 billion searches being performed on Google every day being voice searches. Because of this, it’s important that you begin building your SEO strategy with voice search in mind this upcoming year.

A Return To Print Marketing

Despite what some believe, digital marketing hasn’t completely killed off print marketing. In fact, it turns out print marketing still has an important place in the marketing world. As consumer email inboxes overflow with unopened emails, savvy businesses are using print marketing (such as flyers and newsletters) to reach their audience. Using print marketing to compliment your digital marketing is the smartest way to go.

Does Direct Marketing Have A Role In Inbound Marketing?

video marketing trendsInternet Watching Will Catch Up To TV Watching

Recent studies have predicted that the number of hours of video watched per day online will catch up to TV in 2019. This means that looking for ways to reach those audiences (such as on streaming sites) should be a part of your marketing strategy.

 

Micro-Moments Will Become More Important

Micro-moments are those small moments in which a person quickly looks something up online but doesn’t spend a whole lot of time doing so. For example, looking up an actor in a movie whose name they can’t remember during a discussion, or trying to find the nearest burger joint. On average, users experience roughly 150 micro-moments a day. Businesses will be paying more attention to these micro-moments in order to fulfill the needs of their target audience.

Visual Search Will Advance

At the moment, search queries are limited to text. However, this will soon change. It won’t be long until people will be able to perform visual searches by taking pictures of things with their phones. In fact, Google presented the work its done on visual search so far just this year in the form of Google Lens. Once visual search is implemented (the technology is still being developed), consumers will be able to take a photograph of a piece of furniture in order to find something similar on sale via visual search.

These are a few of the advertising trends that we predict will catch on this upcoming year. Be sure to keep these in mind as you begin developing your 2019 marketing strategies.

MAXIMIZING YOUR MARKETING BUDGET

5 Ways to Align Sales and Marketing in 2019

/in , , /by

One of the biggest challenges when running a business is making sure that you align sales and marketing with one another. It’s surprising how many companies have marketing and sales departments that never interact, leading to all kinds of inefficiencies within the marketing and sales processes due to a lack of communication. To help prevent this from happening, the following are a few ways that you can align sales and marketing this year:

1. Make Sure The Same Terminology Is Being Used

In order for your sales team to be able to take advantage of all the documents and data that your marketing team shares with them, they will need to be familiar with the terminology being used. A lack of familiarity with common terms used by marketing personnel can cause some serious misunderstandings.

For example, your marketing team may have different terms used for leads at different stages of the buyer’s journey. If your sales team doesn’t know this, they may waste resources on leads that weren’t ready to engage or miss out on leads that were. For instance, if your marketing personnel considers leads to be different than prospects but your sales team thinks they’re the same thing, you’re going to have a problem.

2. Force Marketing And Sales Personnel To Meet Regularly

In many companies, marketing and sales personnel are barely aware of one another. They might as well be foreign concepts. If you want to align marketing and sales, then you need them to be more familiar with one another. Hold weekly meetings where they can get to know each other. Discuss some of the challenges that each department has in respect to one another to try and do a little problem solving while everyone is there. If you have these meetings regularly, your sales and marketing personnel will get to know each other better and be more comfortable around each other.

This is important because it means that not only will someone from sales or marketing feel more comfortable about reaching out to someone on the opposite side for help or to provide advice, but they’ll actually know who to reach out to. Such clear lines of communication are going to benefit both your marketing and sales departments and will greatly reduce instances of miscommunication.

6 Effective Call To Action Examples

3. Align Your Marketing And Sales Goals

The most effective way to make sure your marketing goals and sales goals are aligned is by creating an SLA (sales level agreement). The SLA should outline what the goals are for each department so that everyone is aware of what everyone else is attempting to achieve. An SLA also clearly defines the roles of each department in the lead generation process.

4. Coordinate Content Strategy Between Marketing And Sales

Your content strategy is a big part of your marketing efforts. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to just leave the content strategy up to your marketing team without consulting your sales team. Encourage your marketing team to get together with sales in order to discuss your content strategy. There are two reasons you should do this:

  1. Your sales team can inform them about certain promotional events or products/services they’re going to push, which allows your marketers to create content that’s more aligned with that strategy.
  2. Your sales team can inform marketing what kind of content they tend to use in order to nurture leads. In cases where marketing and sales don’t work together, marketing often develops content that’s never used by sales, which is a waste of resources.

5. Use Effective Marketing Solutions That Improve Collaboration And Communication

There are a number of tools you should integrate into your marketing strategy that will help align sales and marketing. For example, a CRM solution, such as HubSpot CRM, provides a centralized location where both marketing and sales personnel can monitor customer data and interactions. Additionally, automation tools such as lead scoring can be very helpful in bridging gaps in communication. Lead scoring allows marketers to automatically assign scores to leads based on their actions. Sales personnel can then use these scores to identify high quality leads to engage with.

By using these methods to align sales and marketing, you’ll help to reduce the miscommunication and inefficiencies that often plague the lead nurturing and sales processes. If your sales and marketing departments are isolated from each other, make sure that you implement a strategy to align your sales and marketing this year.

Inbound marketing will help you grow your business by attracting website visitors, converting them into leads and closing leads into customers

Preparing Your Marketing Strategy for 2019

/in , , /by

Successful marketing is based on your ability to continuously improve your efforts on a year by year basis. This means that now that 2018 has come to an end, you’ll want to take into account the previous year’s marketing successes and failures as well as new trends and needs when preparing your marketing strategy for 2019. The following are the steps that you should take to do just that:

1. Review your 2018 marketing strategy and tactics

Start by looking back at what your marketing goals were for 2018 and whether or not you were able to achieve them. Take a careful look at the various tactics that you implemented to determine which ones had a positive effect on the achievement of your goals and which ones fell short. You should use what you’ve learned to craft your new marketing strategy.

2. Review who your target audience iscompetitive advantage

Odds are you already have a good idea of who your target audience is, especially if you believe that your marketing efforts in 2018 were successful overall. However, audiences change over time. Make sure that you review your target audience and your buyer personas. You’ll want to make sure that you know exactly who you’re trying to reach as this will help to drive the different tactics that you implement this year (such as your content strategy and your social strategy).

3. Create new SMART goals for the year

You can’t have a marketing strategy without marketing goals or else you’ll have no idea whether your strategy is performing successfully or not. To make sure that you can judge the performance of your goals, make sure that they are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely). You can use what you’ve learned about the previous year’s goals (whether you achieved them or not and how realistic they were) to create this year’s.

5 Examples for Great Social Media Branding

4. Determine how you will achieve those goals

Once you’ve set your goals, begin coming up with ideas for how you can achieve them. You may want to reuse some of the same tactics you used last year, especially if they were effective. Those that did not work need to be replaced by new tactics. A good way to brainstorm new tactics is by looking at some of the recent marketing trends as well as marketing tactics suggestions made by industry professionals for this year.

5. Establish your marketing budgetmarketing strategy

Make sure that you establish your budget and take note of your resources before you begin creating your marketing plan. You may not be able to implement all of the tactics you’ve thought of–at least not right away, which means you’ll need to prioritize your strategy.

6. Create your marketing plan

Once you’ve taken into account your budget, begin crafting your marketing plan. One of the best ways to do this is by dividing the year into months and listing what new tactics you want to implement on a month by month basis and which ones you want to continue throughout the year. This gives you a visual representation of all of the marketing activities you’re committing to every month that will give you an idea of whether it’s realistic or not.

7. Execute your marketing strategy

There’s no point in having a marketing plan if you don’t execute it. Schedule the different marketing activities that you’ve planned out so that you can follow your plan throughout the year.marketing strategy

8. Continually review your marketing strategy throughout the year

Don’t just blindly follow your marketing plan if it’s obviously failing. One of the huge benefits of inbound marketing is that you can make use of analytics to track the performance of various tactics, using your goals as benchmarks. If something’s not working, find a way to adjust your efforts or replace it with a different tactic so that you’re not wasting valuable resources. This ensures that your plan is not only effective, but efficiently executed as well.

Use these steps to learn from the success and failures of the previous year’s marketing efforts to put into place an effective marketing strategy that will achieve your goals in 2019.

Free Marketing Consultation

What’s Trending for January 2019

/in , , /by

Staying up to date with all the latest marketing trends is a great way to keep your marketing efforts fresh and to find new tactics that can help improve your overall marketing strategy. That’s why every month we like to share some of the latest marketing trends so that you can see what’s new. The following are some of the marketing trends that have been catching on lately.

Noteworthy Marketing News

YouTube Ad Campaigns Begin Targeting TV Screens

Although mobile is the dominant platform for YouTube views, more and more people are watching YouTube on their TVs. YouTube is extending their ad campaigns onto TV devices to provide advertisers with greater reach. AdWords API capabilities for TV targeting will be accessible to advertisers beginning on January 8. For more information about these new TV screen targeting capabilities, read Marketing Land’s recent article on the subject.

YouTube Phasing Out CTA Overlays In Favor Of New Ad Extensions

YouTube will begin offering their new ad extension for TrueView in-stream ads and will eventually offer them for bumper ads as well as TrueView video discover ads. Although a minor change, the CTA ad extensions will be able to be applied to new and existing overlays, whereas overlays are created as part of the ad. For more detail, read Ginny Marvin’s write-up on YouTube’s switch to CTA ad extensions at Marketing Land.

HubSpot Reorienting Itself As Platform Vendor

HubSpot has long been known as a product suite, but that’s changing soon as it realigns itself as a platform vendor. Following HubSpot’s recent partnership with AWS, HubSpot is planning to become a platform that will support an increasing population of apps that support interactions with HubSpot. Read more about HubSpot’s shift at Martech Today.

Improving Your Marketing Program

We recently published a blog post reviewing some of the most effective marketing trends of 2018, including a focus on brand, authenticity, social change, and omnichannel marketing. Learn more about these 2018 marketing trends and how you can implement them into your marketing efforts in 2019 by reading Terry Becker’s post.

Clutch.co! Names Stevens and Tate Top Ad Agency in 2018

Here at Stevens and Tate, we have earned recognition for our marketing expertise for almost three decades. In 2018, we were named the top ad agency by Clutch, a third-party company that ranks B2B service providers on a yearly basis. Find out what Clutch had to say about our services by checking out the announcement on our blog.

Top 5 Marketing Tactics You Should Use in 2019

As you review your marketing strategy and prepare for the new year, you’ll want to make sure that you’re getting the most out of your efforts. In this article, we go over five marketing tactics that you should make sure to implement into your marketing campaign if you haven’t done so already, including adding chatbots, producing video content, creating user-generated content, and more.

Why TV Advertising Remains Effective

Recent Marketing Reports, Updates, and Trends

Three View Behaviors Common On YouTube in 2018

If you’re using YouTube as part of your marketing efforts, then tracking how your users behave is an important part of figuring out how to best engage them. Three of the most common YouTube user behaviors of 2018 include viewing content exploring alternative and minimalist lifestyles, searching for inspiration, and searching for a way to connect. For more details into the behavior of YouTube users in 2018, read Gina Shalavi’s article on the subject.

The Return Of Trust In Media

Trust in media has been on the downslope since the late 1970s, reaching an all-time low in 2016. However, new studies show that the media is regaining the trust of the general public, in part due to a focus on transparency that includes attempts by journalists to defend their work, better fact-checking partnerships, and more. Learn more about how the media has become more transparent and has regained the public’s trust by checking out Sara Fischer’s article on Axios.

10 Agency Pros Explain How Their Workflow Was Improved By AIartificial intelligence

Artificial Intelligence continues to develop at a rapid pace to the point where it’s starting to become commonplace. Businesses across the world are using AI to help improve the efficiency of their workflow. Find out how by reading the Forbes article in which ten agency pros describe in detail how AI has helped them to improve their workflows.

 

MAXIMIZING YOUR MARKETING BUDGET