marketing trends 1

What’s Trending In Marketing For March 2020

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With the Coronavirus halting many events, knowing about current and recent marketing trends, is essential. Now more than ever, it’s important to know how to reach out to your customers, in creative ways that were previously not thought of . As a result, the following articles come from popular marketing blogs and highlight current marketing trends that we think are worth paying attention to:

Noteworthy Marketing News

Four Tips to Guaranteeing B2B Buyer Loyalty in 2020

Brandon Spear, President at MSTS, shows how retailers and brands can ensure B2B buyer loyalty by creating efficient payment options, removing friction from the purchasing process, and fostering an omnichannel buying experience.  

Coronavirus Creating Disruption, Uncertainty for Digital Marketing Ecosystem

The news cycle has been dominated by discussion and speculation about the Coronavirus or COVID-19. That’s also true in the tech press, as major events cancel, and companies such as Apple, Facebook, and Uber say revenues will likely take a hit because of supply chain issues or declining customer demand.

How Coronavirus (Covid-19) is Impacting Small Business and What You Can Do About It

The spread of the coronavirus (Covid-19) is developing rapidly, leaving many small business owners uncertain about their future. Many expect the coronavirus to have a significant impact on their revenue, and these concerns are proven to be justified. Fortunately, there are some actions that you can take to protect your small business while at the same time, protecting yourself, your employees, and your customers.

Google My Business Temporarily Removes Features Due to COVID-19

As a result of limitations caused by the COVID-19 situation, Google is temporarily removing some features from Google My Business. For instance, Google My Business will not be publishing any new reviews, review replies, or new Q&A until further notice. While at the same time they prioritize reviewing new listings, claims, and verification’s for critical health related business.

Marketing in the Face of COVID-19: Senior Living Teams Get Creative

The COVID-19 pandemic is disrupting the senior care industry in unimagined ways, and likely will for the foreseeable future. In spite of lockdowns and precautionary measures taken by operator and owners across the country, however senior living communities remain open for business-and sales and marketing teams are remaining busy but working in drastically different ways than usual.

 Similar Article: What’s Trending in Marketing For February 2020

Improving Your Marketing Program

5 Reasons Why You Need a Mobile Marketing Strategy

Has your marketing campaign lost it’s edge? Maybe it’s because you haven’t introduced mobile. Mobile Marketing is proving to be the fastest, easiest, and most accessible form of marketing today. Seniors, adults, and even teenagers, have had experience dealing with mobile marketing in some shape or form. As a result, nearly every company can benefit from a mobile marketing strategy.

The Importance of Having a Professional Web Design 

It doesn’t matter how big or small your company is, you need a website. If you don’t have a website, you’re without a doubt going to lose out on a lot of potential customers. This is because simply having a website, is one of the most effective ways to generate awareness of your business. However, you will want to have a professionally designed website to ensure that it’s technically sound, visually appealing, and user friendly.

Email Marketing Metrics You Should Keep In Mind & What They Mean 

Email marketing was one of the earliest forms of inbound marketing- and it’s continued to be one of the most widely used due to how cost cost-efficient and effective the strategy is. If you’re implementing an email marketing campaign, then it’s important that you keep track of certain email marketing metrics. That way you can judge how your campaign is performing and identify what is and isn’t working.

5 Mobile Marketing Techniques To Build Your Ecommerce Brand Marketing Trends 2

Whether your company is just starting up or has reached or has reached the point of maintaining a well-established customer-base, it’s important to stay up to date with the most current marketing trends and techniques for your ecommerce business. Therefore, structuring structuring and launching an ecommerce website, is a milestone achievement for any brand.

5 Reasons to Use Hubspot

 There are a lot of marketing platforms out there that can be incredibly helpful when it comes to creating, managing, and tracking your marketing and sales efforts. Out of these platforms, Hubspot is one of the very best. The following article contains five reasons to consider using Hubspot as one of your main inbound marketing tools.

Recent Marketing Reports, Updates, and Trends

Coronavirus and E-Commerce: It’s Complicated

The assumption that Coronavirus, social distancing, and staying home will boost e-commerce is widely held among digital marketing experts. However, early findings suggest that the reality of the situation will be somewhat more complicated.

Coronavirus: Emarketer lowers Global Ad Spend Projections for 2020

Worldwide ad spending is still expected to grow compared to last year, says research firm eMarketers, but it has lowered its growth expectations by 3%. Worldwide media ad spend will increase by 7.0% to $6.91.7 billion in 2020 over the prior year, down from the earlier growth estimate of 7.4% to $712.02 billion. The updated spend projections, include digital, directories as well as print, out-of-home, TV and radio advertising.

YouTube Analytics Now Lets Creators Compare Metrics Side by Side

YouTube is upgrading its analytics capabilities, allowing creators to compare multiple metrics side-by-side for the first time. This update specifically pertains to data in the ‘deep dive’ section of the YouTube analytics dashboard. The ‘deep dive’ section appears after clicking on “see more” next to any of the metrics on the overview screen.

Real-time Digital Insights & Automation: Powering Digital Marketer’s Performance

Last year digital marketers wasted an average of 26% of their budgets on ineffective channels and strategies. While there are many different reasons and ways in which these marketing strategies have underperformed, the most common belief is the inability to keep up with modern consumer behavior. In this article, we’ll take a good look at two areas of great opportunity: real-time insights and real-time automation, and how they help you tackle these challenges head on.

10 Top Digital Marketing Trends For 2020

The digital marketing landscape is constantly changing. To help you stay ahead of the curve, this article will help you outline the bet digital marketing trends of 2020. For instance, video marketing is and always has been a reliable way of staying in touch with those who are far away. With hosting videos becoming easier and easier, each year sees more successful and ambitious branded videos online.

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Digital Marketing Changed By Visual Search

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Search marketing is constantly evolving, requiring businesses to adapt their digital marketing tactics accordingly or risk falling behind. Not only is Google known for continually adjusting and improving their search engine algorithm (often requiring SEO strategies to be adjusted to keep up), but new forms of search are emerging. Over the past few years, we are all becoming accustomed to the rise of voice search; however, visual search is advancing in leaps and bounds as well.

Visual search has been around for a few years now. According to a report published in 2017, 27 percent of all searches across ten major online platforms (including Google Images, Google, Amazon, and YouTube) were visual searches. With that in mind, visual search should be implemented into your digital marketing tactics.

Visual search is exactly what it sounds like — performing a search on the web using a visual. While this might not seem very convenient when done on a desktop or laptop, it makes a lot of sense when done on smartphones. Essentially, a consumer can take a picture using their phone’s camera of a product in-store to perform a search on that product. If the company producing the product has optimized for visual search, then that customer should be able to pull up valuable information on their phone. This isn’t the only way visual search can be accomplished. For example, someone could take a picture of a tree to find out what type of tree it is.

30 Greatest Lead Generation Tips

What are the Benefits of Visual Search?

Brands that sell products that are more visual have the most to gain from implementing visual search. For example, some of the most common products that users perform visual searches on include fashion, home decor, art, food, animals, and vehicles. One great example of visual search in action is Pinterest. They allow users to take pictures of objects in the real world, which will then pull up results of similar-looking objects featured on Pinterest. The following are a few of the benefits of implementing visual search into your digital marketing tactics:

Enjoy the Article: 10 Best Digital Marketing Podcasts in 2020

Improve the shopping experience

There are several ways that visual search can improve the shopping experience. For example, a customer that sees a product that they want to buy can use visual search to find similar products and compare prices. Retailers can also make product recommendations based on the visual attributes of the products the customers have been searching for using visual search. This allows for a more personalized shopping experience.

While many businesses monitor social media for mentions of their brand, few employ visual search. Using visual search, allows you to look for your brand logo across social media. This can be very helpful, especially on social channels that are more visually-based, such as Instagram. Take for example, Starbucks. They used visual search to discover that customers were filling their Starbucks cups with whipped cream and giving them to their dogs. Such a trend can be taken advantage of as a marketing opportunity — and they would have never known about it without a visual search.

Identify influencers Digital_Marketing2

Building relationships with brand influencers is an effective way to gain access to large target audiences. However, finding those influencers can sometimes be a challenge. Many influencers do their “influencing” with visual content. For example, it’s well known that there are many influencers on Instagram. Performing a visual search can help you find influencers that are posting visual content related to your company’s products. It’s a more effective way of finding relevant influencers than through text-based searches.

Engage users more effectively

Simply optimizing for visual search can help you engage with your users more successfully. This is because people are visual beings. They engage with and relate to visual content much more than they do with text. This type of digital marketing can also improve your conversion rates. The ability to take photographs and obtain information or recommendations based on those photographs will go a long way toward keeping your brand on the top of their minds.

Attract more mobile users

Considering how important the mobile market is, visual search is an excellent way to attract more mobile users. Visual search is a very mobile-centric feature, after all. Few people are going to use visual search on their desktops or laptops due to their static or bulky shape. Smartphones and tablets make it easy to snap photographs whenever users want.

Visual search grows more prominent by the day. The ability to perform searches using images can help to greatly improve your user experience in many different ways. If you have a visual product, then you should begin thinking about how you can employ visual search into your digital marketing tactics.

Mobile Marketing 1

5 Reasons Why You Need A Mobile Marketing Strategy

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Has your marketing campaign lost its edge? Maybe it’s because you haven’t introduced mobile. Mobile Marketing is proving to be the fastest, easiest, and most accessible form of marketing today. Seniors, adults, and even teenagers have had experience dealing with mobile marketing in some shape or form. As a result, nearly every company can benefit from a mobile marketing strategy—here are just five reasons why.

1) Text Messages See Results

When you have a call to action that needs to drive results and drive them fast, text messages are a great option to have. That’s because 99% of text messages are read and responded to within 90 seconds of receiving them. This puts text messaging at a higher end of the spectrum in regards to reading and response rates.

Time was a crucial element when the Sierra Club wished to inform supporters of last-minute rallies. With less than a day to act, Sierra Club used text messaging to organize its supporters. Over 2,500 people texted in within a matter of hours! These kinds of instantaneous results are a hallmark of mobile marketing. Text messaging’s high open rates help ensure that your mobile campaign will be a more efficient communication channel.

2) Shoppers Rely on Mobile-Based Searches

These days, 40% of consumers utilize their mobile devices in order to make decisions about who to buy from. Most look at a cluster of review websites before making final choices about which supplier to purchase goods or services from. Reviews are so easy to find online and they help consumers decide between a plethora of suppliers and providers.

The smartest way to put your best foot forward is to register your business website with an array of consumer promotion websites. Also, encourage your loyal clients to leave reviews of your business on these websites. The more positive the online review, the more likely you are to get sales from customers. Specifically, those who shop around online via their smartphones, tablets, notebooks and iPads.

Related Articles to Read: The Benefits of Mobile Marketing Automation

3) Virtual and Augmented Reality Offers New PossibilitiesMobile Marketing 2

Virtual and augmented reality are two of the newest opportunities in digital marketing, and in some cases, all a user needs is a smartphone to enjoy it. Besides emerging as a key resource for both mobile ads and shopping on social platforms, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are a preserve of native apps in terms of performance and functionality.

According to statistics, virtual and augmented reality will be an $83 billion dollar industry by 2021. Whereas virtual reality simulates entire environments through a smartphone; augmented reality literally “augments” the appearance of what’s in front of a user when they look through their mobile screen. Numerous companies have already taken advantage of this technology to offer branded experiences to their customers and even help them make better purchase decisions.

4) Apps Are Incredibly Popular

Statistics demonstrate that adults in America spend an average of 91 hours a month using apps on their mobile devices. So creating your own app will be a great way to connect with new and loyal customers. With just a few engineering resources, you can attract your audience through app marketplaces native to various smartphones. You can also customize the app, depending on the goals your company is trying to achieve.

Apps can be informative, entertaining, or both. There are app creation software packages available, which are pretty affordable and easy to use. While you spend more on custom app design, doing so should be an option as an app has the power to strengthen your brand in a powerful and long-lasting way.

5) Mobile-Friendly Email Gets Results

While texting offers the fastest and the best response times, it’s safe to say that email still gets results. This is why sending out promotional emails that are mobile-friendly will add tons of value to mobile marketing campaigns.

Effective and responsive email design is all about creating messages with shorter line lengths, pre-header text, concise copy, few or no images, and calls-to-action, which appear early on in emails. Something to keep in mind is that mobile is responsible for at least 50 % of all email open rates. So, make sure the email newsletters you deliver to your subscribers are on most mobile email platforms.

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Email Marketing Metrics You Should Keep In Mind & What They Mean

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Email marketing was one of the earliest forms of inbound marketing — and it’s continued to be one of the most widely used due to how cost-efficient and effective the strategy is. If you’re implementing an email marketing campaign, then it’s important that you keep track of certain email marketing metrics so that you can judge how your campaign is performing and identify what is and isn’t working so that you can make strategic adjustments as necessary. The following are some of the most important email marketing metrics that you should be following:

Click Through Rate

Click throughs refer to how many recipients are clicking the links in your email. The higher your click-through rate is, the more enticing your content was to your recipients. A poor click-through rate means that you’re not connecting with your readers. A/B tests, which help find new ways to get more clicks in your emails, also make use of CTR’s.

Unique Opens

Unique opens refers to how many people open your emails. If you don’t have many unique opens, it means that your subject lines need work — or you may not be timing your emails properly and they’re getting buried in the inboxes of your recipients so that they don’t see them.Email Marketing Metrics 2

Forward Rate

Forward rates weigh the percentages of recipients who share your posts. A high forward rate is a good sign that you’re doing something right. It means you’re providing content that recipients believe is helpful and informative. As a result they then forward it to friends, family members, or coworkers.

Bounce Rate 

The bounce rate measures how many subscriber email addresses didn’t receive your email. A soft bounce means that the email address is valid; but the inbox was full or the server was down. A hard bounce means that the email wasn’t valid. To avoid a high bounce rate, periodically update your email list and remove old addresses.

Similar Article:Exploring The Differences Between B2C and B2B Email Marketing

Deliverability Rate

The deliverability rate refers to the percentage of emails that reach your recipients’ inboxes.  Factors that may prevent your emails from being sent include email addresses that don’t exist or no longer exist or emails that are spam.

Click-through-rates only refers to how many times your links were clicked. However, Clicks per link is a more detailed metric. It shows which links get more clicks on your campaign; not counting how many times each recipient has clicked on the link .

Conversion Rate

Your conversion rate, will assess how many people click on the link and then complete a specific action. A low conversion rate means that your content isn’t connecting or your calls-to-action aren’t effective. Similarly, conversion rates give unique insight into your return investment. When you know how much you have spent, and how many subscribers have converted, it easier to determine whether or not the money you put in has paid off.

Unsubscribes

The higher your unsubscribe rate is, the more likely it is that there’s something wrong with your email campaign. There are two potential causes for this — you may be sending out too many emails to the point where your recipients are unsubscribing because you’re filling up their inbox or the content of your emails isn’t relevant to your recipients.

Once you’ve launched your email campaign, it’s important that you track how it does. You can make adjustments to your email marketing efforts throughout the campaign, after all. If things aren’t working, you won’t want to just let it fail — you’ll want to right the ship. To track how your campaign is going, be sure to keep these email marketing metrics in mind.

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5 mobile marketing techniques to build your ecommerce brand

5 Mobile Marketing Techniques To Build Your Ecommerce Brand

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It should come as no surprise that a strong mobile presence is indispensable in today’s market. After all, the average user spends most of their Internet time on their smartphone as opposed to their desktop.

Whether your company is just starting up or has reached the point of maintaining a well-established customer base, it’s important to stay up to date with the most current marketing trends and techniques for your ecommerce business. Structuring and launching an ecommerce website is a milestone achievement for your brand. Therefore, it’s crucial to invest in effective mobile marketing techniques, and here are five tips on how to do so:

1. Website Design

A website is your most important marketing and communication tool, as it connects you with your user. In a world so dominated by mobile devices, most brands cannot afford to miss the mark with a website that is NOT optimized for users on smartphones, tablets, or whatever their device of choice may be. If you’re an ecommerce brand, you want to make sure that your website is ready for their devices.

Some brands quickly jump to a mobile app when it’s time to make “mobile decisions”. However, it’s not always the most efficient choice for each and every brand. Ultimately, they should be developed once you already have a mobile-friendly website as well. 9 times out of 10, an app should not be created in place of a mobile-friendly site, but instead in addition to it. Apps can be costly endeavors, and to be successful they must offer some sort of value that the mobile site doesn’t, otherwise there is no real incentive for the user to download the app and use it on a regular basis.

Particularly with ecommerce brands, a responsive design is incredibly important. The size of a mobile screen is significantly smaller than that of a desktop. As a result, the website should appear a bit differently. However, you want to ensure that your customers do not face any issues. This can range from viewing product images, scrolling through pages, clicking on buttons, finding a certain product, or typing in billing information into form fields. Websites that aren’t responsive in their design typically contain flaws with these key elements. These can act as a major deterrence in the mobile user completing the purchase. If you’re implementing mobile marketing techniques to drive mobile traffic, you want to make sure your website is ready to perform. Preferably before you begin marketing to your mobile users and driving traffic to your website.

2. Referral Marketing

We are all social creatures, and we love sharing our experiences with our families and friends. If we have a good experience, we’ll want everyone to know about it. It is for that reason that referral marketing (also known as word-of-mouth marketing) is one of the most powerful, yet underrated ecommerce mobile marketing techniques available. Referral marketing  is when you deliberately influence the process of word-of-mouth. Whether it is encouraging more sharing, or positioning the sharing to be positive. Referral marketing is a secret weapon that many ecommerce companies embrace. It benefits advertisers too-we help each other avoid bad experiences, and encourage each other to support places that provide an excellent experience.

The fastest and easiest way to kick-start  referral marketing is to set up a referral program. If you have the resources, you can hire a developer to custom design a referral program for your store. This allows you to have full control over your referral program, but the work may be tedious and resource-intensive. An alternative is to install a referral program app. A referral app allows you to get started quickly, as everything is (almost) done-for-you. However, if you do not promote your referral program, nobody will know of it. So do all you can to promote it, and let people know about it.  Share it on your social media and send it on your email list. Invite all of your past customers to join your referral program. You will be sure to notice results.

3. Mobile Friendly Email MarketingMobile Marketing Techniques 3

Most ecommerce customers check their inbox from their smartphone, not from a desktop. Emails that get opened on mobile devices yet aren’t optimized for those devices typically get sent to trash. It’s a waste of time and budget to produce emails that are too difficult to read on mobile, or do not render correctly on mobile devices.

To ensure that your efforts are not wasted, it is worth checking to make sure your email marketing is mobile-friendly. Use a responsive design for all of your emails so that the content renders well regardless of device. This is one of many options that can help create an optimal experience for your email recipients. As a result they can actually see your perceived value and subsequently visit your mobile-friendly site after receiving the message.

Some visual tips to include are fonts that are easy-to-read, stick to one column of text, use compelling imagery, and always include clickable icons and calls-to-action (CTAs). Think about subject line, and how character count is more limited on mobile inboxes than desktop. Best of all, these guidelines help offer a greater experience on mobile devices, and are beneficial to those on desktop.

Similar Article: How To Outshine Your Competition With Effective Ecommrce Marketing

4. Proper Mobile Friendly Content Marketing

Mobile optimization refers to the elements found on your site infrastructure. As such, consuming content on mobile devices is different than on desktop. Proper content marketing can attract more positive attention, interaction, and sustainable conversions in a way no other marketing method can. That’s because the Internet is content. By creating and promoting original content you are ensuring that your audience is receiving new information that matters to them on a continual basis.

Brainstorm with your team to imagine a list of the different types of content you wish to create. This can be blog posts, videos, and newsletters. Also, make sure you are utilizing your marketing budget by consulting with experts, outsourcing work when necessary. Invest in high-quality software, subscriptions, employees, and training for your team.

You will also find that if you work with the right people, many of the things you’ve paid for in the past can be done internally. Create diversity within your team and listen to everyone’s ideas. It is also a good idea to create content based on Pareto’s 80/20 rule, which means that your promotions should comprise of 80% informational content, and 20% promotional content. All of the content you publish should be relevant, interesting, and unique.

5. Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is one of the most powerful mobile marketing techniques available. It allows you to communicate with your industry, customers, and market in a personal way. You can utilize social media to generate engagement and interaction, boost traffic to your website, and develop a larger base of customers.

Utilizing different social media platforms for different purposes also creates a rich presence for your company that diversifies your abilities and efforts. This will ultimately help you cater to your customers’ needs in a way that grows your business over time.

Maintaining a solid tone and personality of your company through social media is very important because consistency is what will create trust within your audience. In order to develop and maintain brand recognition and authority, make sure your outreach efforts are unified; by ensuring your team is on the same page with your company’s communication style.

 A GUIDE TO EFFECTIVE MOBILE MARKETING TECHNIQUES

5 Reasons to Use HubSpot

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There are a lot of marketing platforms out there that can be incredibly helpful when it comes to creating, managing, and tracking your marketing and sales efforts. Out of these platforms, HubSpot is one of the very best. The following are five reasons to consider using HubSpot as one of your main inbound marketing tools:

1. HubSpot Functions As An All-In-One Marketing Platform

One of the biggest advantages of HubSpot is that it’s much easier to build a holistic marketing strategy because it allows you to do so many things. With it, you can monitor your contacts, nurture your leads, or track your performance. Not to mention that you can do all of this for the majority of your marketing strategies. This includes SEO, email marketing, CRM, content marketing, marketing automation, database management, and more.

Few marketing platforms are this comprehensive. Typically, businesses have to use multiple marketing tools to oversee their campaigns. Using HubSpot makes things easier, more efficient, and often less costly.

2. Use HubSpot To Create And Manage Your Contact Listwebsite redesign checklist

One of the big challenges facing many businesses is managing an unorganized database that’s not directly connected to their sales or marketing strategy. You can segment your contact list with HubSpot, ensuring that your contacts receive information that they want to engage with.

Because you’ll be able to manage all of your marketing efforts from the HubSpot platform, you’ll be able to segment your contacts based on where they are in the sales funnel. This makes it easier to nurture leads and identify which leads your sales team can engage with.

3. Provides Excellent Reporting Features

The more control you have over being able to track the ins and outs of your campaign, the more accurately you’ll be able to judge your marketing strategies. This in turn will allow you to make more effective adjustments on the fly. HubSpot allows you to track and measure every aspect of your inbound marketing campaign by providing clear breakdowns of your social media strategies, blogging efforts, landing page success, email engagement, and much more.

In fact, their Reports Dashboard makes it easy to view these metrics at a glance. The dashboard offers the ability to see your overall performance data. You can even build custom reports that meet your company’s unique needs.

Similar Article: Choosing Hubspot CRM As Your CRM Solution

4. An Effective Long-Term Solution

HubSpot understands that most inbound marketing campaigns are long-term campaigns. As such, the marketing platform is built to oversee your campaigns over the long term. It’s scalable as well, so no matter how big your company’s marketing needs grow, HubSpot can handle them.

5. HubSpot Allows You To Obtain A Clear ROIartificial intelligence

It used to be a real challenge to determine what your ROI (return on investment) was for your inbound marketing campaign, especially if it was spread over multiple marketing platforms.  HubSpot makes it easy to obtain a clear ROI for your entire inbound strategy due to it’s ability to track and measure every aspect of your campaign. This will allow you to make more financially motivated adjustments based on your marketing budget as well.

As you can see, HubSpot addresses a number of different aspects of creating and managing an inbound marketing campaign in an efficient manner. With all its features and general ease-of-use, there are few marketing tools that can offer what HubSpot offers.

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

Senior Living Advertising Ideas That Avoid Stereotyping

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One of the main reasons why marketing a senior living community is so challenging is because it’s easy to fall into the trap of advertising to seniors in a stereotypical way. In fact, a recent survey of 400 seniors aged 70 or over revealed that 60 percent of respondents felt that most advertisements used stereotypes to represent seniors. Keeping that in mind, the following are a few advertising ideas to help you avoid senior living stereotypes:

Don’t Be Pushy Or Preachy

A lot of ads that target seniors tend to be on the condescending side. You’ll want to try and position yourself as an authority on the subject, but you won’t want to do so in a way that you’re telling your audience you know better than they do. This will come off as pushy or preachy, which is a tone you should avoid. Be factual and informative in an honest and respectful manner.

Focus On The Individual, Not The Demographic

One of the biggest offenses in senior stereotyping is to use actors that fit the general demographic of your audience and have them do something mundane, like smiling while they drink a glass of wine and stare out into the distance. How is your audience supposed to relate to an image like this? On the other hand, you also don’t want to deceive a senior struggling to live on their own; such as someone being helped into bed because they are too feeble to function by themselves.

Instead of trying to represent an entire demographic by the extreme ends of the spectrum, focus on the individual. What does your target audience actually want and need out of a senior living community? Highlight purposeful activities, such as actively participating in the world and continuing to pursue their passions.

Check out this article for tips on how to market senior living communities

Show Don’t Tell

Having someone speaking to the audience about the benefits of moving into your living community is a tired trope. It’s something that most seniors expect from a pamphlet. Showing is much more effective than telling. A great example of a senior living community that did this focused on showing the day-to-day lives of its residents as they dined, exercised, played pool, painted, and more — all without any dialogue whatsoever. Like they always say, an image is worth a thousand words.

Entertain Your Audience

It seems like many advertisers forget that seniors still like to be entertained and that they have a great sense of humor. You don’t need to be deadly serious when marketing towards seniors. Try to entertain them and appeal to their sense of humor — you’ll find that they’ll be much more engaged as a result.

Many senior living communities fail to market to a senior audience effectively. This is because they fall into the trap of using advertising ideas that rely on senior stereotypes. Seniors recognize these stereotypes and do not appreciate them. As a result,  you will have difficulty generating interest in your community. Use these advertising ideas to help avoid stereotyping seniors in your marketing efforts.

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Marketing Trends 1

Whats Trending in Marketing For February 2020

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Being informed about current and recent marketing trends, is an excellent tool for advertisers to have. That way, you can evaluate past strategies and find new ways to stay ahead of the competition. We’re aware that keeping up with these trends can often be difficult. As a result, the following articles come from popular marketing blogs and highlight current marketing trends that we think are worth paying attention to:

Noteworthy Marketing News

Top 10 Marketing Trends to Watch for in 2020

Right now, voice searches are used for simple queries like an address, calendar reminders, or song title. But as user needs expand and grow more complex, so must voice search features, and so must optimization. Exceptional customer experience is leading the way in marketing, shifting focus onto inbound strategies for serving and retaining existing customers. When customers share their enjoyable experience or outstanding service, their reviews are more likely than ads to impact new buyer behavior and marketing trends.

Google Ads enable bids simulator for target ROAS, budget simulator for Maximize clicks, conversions

Google is extending the availability of bid and budget simulators to more smart bidding strategies. The bid simulator has only been available for manual and Target CPA bidding. It’s now available for Target ROAS campaign. The simulators can be helpful directional indicators of the potential performance impact from making bid or budget adjustments. As always, keep in mind the projections are based on historical data and actual future performance can (and often does) vary from these projections.

Facebook Introduces 3 New Ad Reporting Tools

Facebook is making it easier for advertisers to measure ad performance across accounts, channels, and publishers. With this data, advertisers can better understand how ads are performing, which demographics they’re reaching, and where the most conversions are coming from. Cross-Account Reporting, Custom Metrics, and Conversion Path Reporting are all viable options that are explored in depth as Facebook continues to evolve its measurement solutions to address the priorities of potential marketers.

Similar Article: What’s Trending in Marketing For April 2019

Improving Your Marketing Program

6 Social Media Trends To Follow in 2020

At this point in time, every business with an inbound marketing strategy should have a social media presence of some sort. Social media is one of the most effective ways to build relationships with your target audience. You can engage directly with them and learn more about what their wants and needs are. However, social media is constantly evolving. Which means that you need to keep up with all the latest social media trends, so that you don’t fall behind the competition.

6 Reasons Why Your Business Needs B2B Inbound Marketing

There are many B2B companies that continue to advertise using more traditional methods, such as TV commercials, magazine ads, cold calls, and more. While traditional marketing can be effective, it’s a good idea to implement a variety of different marketing strategies. This includes inbound marketing.

The Advantages of Using Public Relations in Your Marketing Strategy 

As most know, when it comes to marketing strategy, public relations plays a key role in getting the word out.PR helps maintain your reputation through winning audience approval. It can educate all possible consumers and sway them to your point of view. It even helps to provide the target market with more detailed information than they would normally receive from other forms of marketing. Simply put, these public relations advantages should be on the forefront of every marketer’s agenda

Recent Marketing Reports, Updates, and Trends Marketing Trends 2

Vast majority of Amazon advertisers plan to spend more on ads again this year

According to a Marketing Land survey of digital advertisers, 81% of current advertisers plan to increase their ad spend on the platform in the coming year. Of those planning to increase their Amazon ad budgets 41% said they plan to spend as much as 25% more than the previous six to 12 months. 22% plan increases of 25 to 50%, and 10% expect Amazon budgets to increase by 50% or more.

B2B buyers consume an average of 13 content pieces before deciding on a vendor

We know that content is incredibly important for ranking in search. It’s also critical for sales support. But this report makes clear there are broad ranges of first and third party content types that are highly influential to B2B buyers. It also shows how critical the vendor website is in the buying process. Indeed, the report basically outlines a content strategy for the entire B2B buyer’s journey.

Marketers struggle to stay ahead of technology advancements

When asked how difficult it will be over the coming year to stay ahead of new technological advancements, remain competent across multiple programs and avoid long-term experience debt, 88% of CMO consultants surveyed by executive service firm Chief Outsiders said it would be difficult — with 10% claiming it will be “very” difficult.

The survey included a relatively small pool of CMO consultants. However it underscores a primary challenge faced by marketing leaders; CMOs are taking on more responsibilities while playing catch-up with the technology available to propel growth.

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Facebook Housing Ads1

Facebook Housing Ads: What’s Changed and What You Need to Know

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Social media has left a great impact on the way we as a community engage with one another and live our lives. Perhaps, one of the greatest contributors to this new age of social media influence would be Facebook. For years, Facebook has kept friends and family connected, helped businesses grow, and entertained the population. All of which, is thanks to the consistent updates to the platforms on their webpage. As a result, Facebook housing ads have also changed their policies. These new rules affect marketers and advertisers, while impacting their clients such as home builders as well.

How it Happened

Unlike with most updates on Facebook, this one came as the direct result of a lawsuit. In March of 2019, The Department of Housing and Urban development sued Facebook for engaging in housing discrimination. On the grounds that Facebook was allowing advertisers to restrict who is able to see ads on the platform. Primarily based on characteristics such as race, religion, and national origin. Additionally, the housing department, known as HUD, claims that the company uses its data-mining practices to determine which of its users are able to view housing-related ads. This would put Facebook in violation of the federal Fair Housing Act.

As a result of the lawsuit, Facebook has partnered with several national organizations, to help counter these allegations against them. The National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA), American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and the Communication Workers of America (CWA) have all helped establish changes that would better prevent housing discrimination from taking place on their website.

Special Ad Category

One of the first noticeable changes is the Special Ad Category. If you are in or want to reach people in the United States with ads that offer housing, employment, or credit opportunities, you must select the corresponding Special Ad Category. These ads will not go by by age, gender, ZIP code, multicultural affinity. It excludes any detailed options describing or appearing to relate to protected characteristics.

Advertisers using Special Ad Categories will no longer be able to access Lookalike Audiences; which help advertisers reach new users who closely resemble their existing set of users. Instead, advertisers will have to be able to create a Special Ad audience. Special Ad audiences are based on similarities in online behavior, without considering things like age, gender, and ZIP Code.

Similar Article: Real Estate Marketing Resources For Home Builders

Requirements & Restrictions

If any advertiser wishes to use Facebook housing ads, then there are rules that must be followed . As stated above, advertisements will not target by age. Instead, they have to operate in the standard 18-65+age range.

Zip Codes, are no longer in use in this form of advertisement. However, this is only a sample of the geographic target changes that await home builders. Before, home builders could target regions up to the nearest one-mile radius. Now they have to work with a maximum radius of 15 miles.

Similarly, The Special Ad Category comes with detailed limitations users must follow. These limitations include:

  • Developers and advertisers located in the U.S. or targeting users in the U.S and running ads with housing, employment and credit opportunities must specify their respective category.
  • Developers and advertisers located in the U.S. or targeting users in the U.S and whose ads do not fall under one of the categories must specify NONE. Otherwise the campaign creation requests will fail.
  • Developers and advertisers that are located outside the U.S. whose ads target users outside of the U.S. regardless of the category, should specify NONE as well.

Also, starting in 2020, advertisers and developers must modify any ongoing campaigns that began prior to December 4th 2019; in order to comply with these new requirements.

How to Navigate It

Going forward, it’s important to remember that there are still ways to be successful with Facebook ad campaigns. The use of visuals, words and messaging can be a great asset. You’ll want to be as clear and precise as you can. Make sure your readers understand that the home you are selling is something they would be interested in. That way you can get closer to the goal you are trying to reach. Make sure ad messages add up with the type of audience you are trying to attract.Facebook Housing Ads 2

Leveraging your re-marketing audience is another way to navigate the shift in Facebook housing ads. Your re-marketing audience will consist of a group of users you want to re-engage because of their likelihood to convert. We know that the process of buying a new home will be a lengthy one, so add in as many funnels as you can to the buyer’s journey. It’s a cost-effective way to mitigate the loss of relevance caused by these targeting changes.

Facebook employs the uses of many different campaigns in order to make the advertising successful. One such campaign that can be a great benefit is the use of conversion campaigns. This campaign type utilizes specific website events as the key performance indicator. They often rely on user signals to help Facebook prioritize who is going to see what ads. This tactic can be effective, if open communication is maintained. Always ensure that you are still engaging these leads and moving them along the funnel and buyer’s journey.

The changes made to Facebook housing ads have left an impact on the way advertisers are able to market. With that said, the most important thing for advertisers to remember is to be mindful of their client, and their boundaries.

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Real Estate Marketing Strategies1

5 Easy & Efficient Real Estate Marketing Strategies

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People are constantly looking to build their own homes, which justifies the constant need for home builders. However, as a home builder, you can’t afford to just wait for potential clients to come to you. There are many home builders out there all competing with each other in an attempt to attract new clients. Attracting new clients is especially important in the home construction industry. After all, for the most part, you cannot depend on repeat customers. With that in mind, the following are five real estate marketing strategies that will help you increase awareness of your home construction company and help attract more buyers to work with.

1. Create A Website

It can’t be overstated just how important a website is. By setting up a website, you create a presence online that allows people to find you. Without a website, potential clients will be more likely to stumble upon the websites of your competitors. By setting up a website, you’ll have the opportunity to educate clients about their needs. Additionally, you can help offer the solutions to their needs. You’ll also be able to provide information about the area you serve and the home building industry in general. Not to mention that a website gives you a place to provide your contact information. Which makes it easier for potential clients to find your phone number and email address.

2. Begin A Blog Real Estate Marketing Strategies2

Once you’ve set up a website, you’ll want to create a blog. A blog allows you to publish content to your website on a regular basis that’s relevant to the needs of your target audience and that’s informative or helpful in some way. There are several reasons why it’s well worth the time and effort to begin and maintain a blog. First of all, if properly optimized, your blog can help to boost organic traffic from Google. Secondly, your blog will help keep visitors to your website engaged. Finally, a blog can help build your brand authority, which helps improve your reputation and increase trust amongst your audience.

3. Establish A Social Presence

Setting up a page on various social channels, such as Facebook, will help to expand your presence on the web. Social media also happens to be a great way to engage directly with your audience, which means that you can answer questions, address concerns, and much more. You can use social media to post content, which followers can then share with their social circles (which means they’re basically advertising on your behalf). Being on social media also makes it easier for past customers to recommend you to friends and family who may be looking for home builders in the area.

Similar Article: Creative Real Estate Marketing Ideas for Homebuilders

4. Optimize For Local SEO

Because many people will be looking for a home builder to build a new house in a specific area, you will want to optimize your content for local SEO. This helps increase the chances that you’re found when potential clients perform local searches in your area. In order to improve your local SEO, you should do the following:

  • Submit NAP – Besides posting your NAP (name, address, and phone number) on every webpage and social media page you have, you should also submit it to local directories, such as Yelp or Angie’s List.
  • Use local keywords – Whenever it’s appropriate, optimize your content using local keywords (such as the names of towns or neighborhoods).
  • Create local content – Posting content to your blog that focuses on specific neighborhoods or events happening in your city can help bolster your local presence.
  • Create a Google My Business account – Claim or create your My Business account on Google to improve the odds of being listed on Google’s SERP for relevant queries.
  • Optimize for mobile use – People use their mobile devices, such as smartphones or tablets, to perform local searches on a regular basis. Make sure that your website is optimized for mobile use to ensure that it will be displayed properly on all screen sizes.

5. Use PPC Ads

PPC (pay-per-click) ads are incredibly effective real estate marketing strategies.  They increase exposure and attract prospects who are ready to engage with a home builder. What makes them particularly effective is that you can choose local keywords to ensure that they are displayed for local searches that are relevant to your business. Additionally, not only will your advertisements be more targeted, but you’ll only pay for the actual click-throughs that your ad gets, not for the impressions it gets.

These are five real estate marketing strategies that have been proven to be effective if properly implemented. Marketing your home construction business is critical to your ability to attract new clients and to your ability to compete with other home builders in your area.

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