video marketing

What We Can Learn from Viral Video Marketing & Examples of How It’s been Successful

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Viral video marketing entails creating and disseminating video content with the goal of broad online sharing. It is a subset of viral marketing that uses videos to generate excitement and raise interest in a specific product or service. When it comes to creating content, going viral is the ultimate goal. Unfortunately, there’s no blueprint for viral video marketing. You could spend tens of thousands of dollars on a 30-second video jam-packed with visual effects, hilarious dialogue, and well-known actors, and it still might not go viral; yet, some random person might upload a ten-second video of their cat and somehow it gets seen by a billion people within a day.

Although there’s no perfect formula for viral video marketing, there are certain things that you learn from successful viral videos from the past. Copying these videos won’t help make you go viral, but learning what made them successful can help you improve your video marketing in general. The following are a few things worth learning from some of the most successful viral videos in the past:

1. Know Who Your Audience Is

One of the most popular ads in recent years is the Dollar Shave Club video. In this video, the owner introduces viewers to the concept of the Dollar Shave Club by walking through his factory. The video is notable for its humor and extreme directness. It goes so far as to use swear words in the dialogue, and even the title of the video has a censored swear word in it. They know exactly who their audience is or else they wouldn’t have been so bold. It might turn some people off — but those aren’t the people they were trying to reach.

2. Invest In The Production

It is possible to make video content on a small budget these days, especially when considering how affordable video equipment has gotten. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put money into the production of your content. High-quality production does not go unnoticed. Just look at the Old Spice Man video. On the surface, it’s relatively simple — a man talks to the audience in a humorous tone to sell Old Spice deodorant. However, the backgrounds are constantly changing all within one shot. He starts in a bathroom, transitions onto a boat, and ends up on a horse at the end. It’s the high-quality production of the video that sells it.

The Power of First-Person Experience Videos

3. Get Their Attention

If your video isn’t interesting off the bat, the viewer isn’t going to stick around to watch the rest of it. This means that you need to grab their attention within the first 10 to 15 seconds of your video. The Poo-Pourri video is a good example of this. For most, the idea of a Poo-Pourri ad sounds kind of boring, yet it starts off with a hilarious line of dialogue that captures your attention right away. It then transitions into a music video, at which point the viewer has likely committed to watching the video all the way through.

Types Of Marketing Videos You Should Use

4. Evoke Emotions

You want your video content to stick with someone after they’ve seen it. To make sure it’s not instantly forgettable, you need to evoke emotions from your audience. This can be in the form of humor or even in the form of empathy. Take Budweiser’s ad Someone Waits For You At Home. Within one minute, it establishes a loving relationship with a dog and its owner that everyone can relate to. At the end, the dog is waiting for its owner, who may or may not return — a message against drinking and driving. It’s a heart-tugging cliffhanger that leaves an emotional impact on the viewer.

These are a few things that some of the most successful viral video marketing examples of the past have in common. While using these tips won’t ensure that your videos go viral, they will help to greatly improve their quality as well as their effectiveness. At the very least, they’ll put your video content in a much better position to go viral.

A GUIDE TO EFFECTIVE MOBILE MARKETING TECHNIQUES
marketing optimization

A Guide to Successful Marketing Optimization

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Trying to manage all of your marketing efforts can be a time-consuming process. There are only so many hours in a day and if you have a robust marketing strategy, then finding time to perform basic marketing tasks can be challenging. It’s why marketing optimization is so important. The idea of marketing optimization is to improve the efficiency of your marketing efforts and maximize your desired outcomes. Effective marketing optimization can help make your strategy easier to manage and more successful to boot. The following guide lists the steps you need to follow to begin utilizing marketing optimization.

Steps You Need to Follow for Marketing Optimization

1. Analyze Your Marketing Data

You’re not going to be able to optimize your marketing efforts if you’re unable to identify existing issues and challenges facing your marketing process. Collect and analyze data about your current campaign and website performances in order to identify various weaknesses and/or inefficiencies within your marketing strategy. For example, maybe your email list grows at a sufficient rate, but email open-rates seem to be going down. Or maybe your social media follower numbers are growing, but your web traffic isn’t.

2. Identify What Issues Need Addressing

After analyzing your data, determine what areas could benefit most from marketing optimization. There are a few common ones to consider.

  • Advertising

    Narrow down your audience by identifying your business’s buyer personas. When you have a detailed description of your ideal customer, you can focus your ad campaigns on the correct audience. When you’re reaching the right people, you no longer need to worry about wasting money on failed campaigns.

  • Landing Pages

    If your landing pages are not generating traffic or leads, you need to look into ways to optimize them. Your social media, SEO and paid advertising should all be leading back to your landing pages. Review each page’s copy and see if it relays the correct message you want your audience to see. If your copy does not align with your company goals and values, visitors will get the wrong message. Additionally, rethink your layout and design, including font, colors and images. You can use different CTAs to test what your audience responds most positively to.

  • Emails

    Your email audience is important because you already know they opted in to hear from you. You want to keep them engaged and interested in your business. You need to optimize all aspects of your email campaigns, including times sent, layout, copy and audience. Look into automation tools that will help.

Email Marketing Metrics You Should Keep in Mind and What They Mean

3. Determine Automation Opportunities

In addition to identifying issues that need to be addressed in your marketing strategy, marketing optimization also allows you to identify opportunities for marketing automation. Automating certain processes can help improve results by speeding up the completion of tasks and improve accuracy by minimizing errors. The use of automation also helps cut down on tedious, time-consuming manually done tasks, therefore giving you and your team a significant amount of time to dedicate to more important jobs.

Take the previous email marketing example. You likely have customer emails that no longer exist, are no longer being used, or the recipients haven’t engaged with your brand for a long time. To remove them, you can implement an email validation (also referred to as email verification) automation tool. Such a tool can comb through your email list and automatically find non-responsive email addresses to remove. This gives you more time to focus on the content of your emails and tailor them toward the active recipients. It also takes the inactive recipients out of your analytics, giving you a more accurate representation of your email performances.

You can also use automation to segment your email list using the personal information you have from your recipients. Segmenting your email list can improve your ability to email relevant content to different recipients. This boosts your email open rate and improves the overall effectiveness of your email marketing strategy. Making your content more relevant to recipients means they’re less likely to ignore emails or unsubscribe from your email list.

4. Execute Your Plan

Optimizing your marketing strategy isn’t as easy as simply doing it. You need to obtain organization alignment, which means working with your team to prioritize responsibilities and inform the proper stakeholders. Certain stakeholders can provide insight into the process, after all. This helps you highlight the goals that you want to achieve. You also need to make sure that you have the resources to execute your plan. Your team may already have a plate full of responsibilities. You will need to efficiently manage who is responsible for what task and how they need to prioritize their work.

5. Continue To Optimize Your Marketing Efforts

Optimizing your marketing strategy may take some time depending on the resources at your disposal. However, once you finally execute your plan, you still need to continue optimizing your marketing strategy. There’s no guarantee that the changes you’ve made will be effective, after all. You’ll want to keep collecting and analyzing data so that you can continually find ways to further optimize your marketing efforts. You may discover that you missed more ways to optimize your marketing strategy. Odds are you’ll be implementing new tactics that will need to be optimized as well.

Marketing optimization allows you to pinpoint problem areas in your marketing strategy and to address them. Optimizing your marketing strategy also gives you the opportunity to obtain a big-picture view of your marketing efforts. This makes it easier to prioritize your tasks and ensure that you’re focusing on the most important tasks at hand.

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Strategies and Trends for Effective Digital Advertising

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Every business, regardless of its niche or size, relies on marketing to build brand awareness, reach a target audience, foster customer relationships, and increase sales. But marketing is broad and relies on several networks, platforms, and systems. Digital advertising, for instance, is a form of marketing that is constantly evolving and proving to be quite effective when combined with other forms of digital marketing.

What is Digital Advertising?

Before a customer purchases a product or service, they often go through three critical stages, namely: the awareness stage, the consideration stage, and the decision stage. During these stages, they take their time to understand the business, the team behind it, and how that product or service stands out from the competition.

If a prospective customer doesn’t know of your product or service, you can bet they won’t consider you for business. Therefore, digital advertising plays a critical role in the awareness stage. It ensures that your product or service has a name in the market.

Digital or online advertising relies on various platforms such as social media, search engines, mobile apps, and websites to build brand awareness, engage audiences, and drive desired actions or conversions.

Digital Advertising vs. Digital Marketing 

Many people use the phrases digital advertising and digital marketing interchangeably. And while the two are related, they mean two different things. Simply put, digital marketing is an umbrella term that encompasses all marketing efforts using digital platforms or channels. It involves various strategies and activities to promote business, build awareness, and drive conversations.

Digital marketing may include offline and online tactics such as Search engine optimization, email marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, influencer marketing, etc.

Digital advertising, however, is a subset of digital marketing, specifically focused on promoting products or services using online advertising channels. It often involves paid placements or ads designed to reach a specific target demographic.

If you are keen enough, you have probably seen a steady change in how businesses advertise their products and services. These changes or trends are no accidents or coincidences. Rather, they are a result of careful adaptation to the evolving digital landscape and the ever-changing consumer behaviors.

Today, for instance, you will find personalized, five-seconds video ads instead of random 5-minutes videos. Ads are also becoming more dynamic, with some incorporating variables such as the current weather, location, or time of day to enhance the user experience and increase the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. Here are the other digital advertising trends to keep an eye on:

  • Interactive ad formats: This is a technique where you involve users or viewers in the ad experience. Standard procedures include incorporating polls, quizzes, interactive videos, or mini-games to encourage user engagement and participation. Another advantage of interactive ads is that you can collect critical data and insights into the audience’s behaviors and preferences.
  • Behavioral targeting: Random ads aren’t effective in engagement and conversion since they don’t speak to the interests and preferences of the target audience. By tracking online interactions and user actions, such as previous purchases, website visits, and search history, it’s possible to deliver personalized and more effective ads.
  • Mobile dominance: The number of mobile users in 2023 is estimated at 6.8 billion, representing an average annual increase of 4.2%. These figures are pushing marketers to rethink their ad campaigns with a specific focus on optimizing them for mobile screens and utilizing mobile apps.
  • Intelligent advertising: AI and automated algorithms are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in digital marketing. Today, AI in digital marketing enables cost-efficient ad placement across multiple channels and allows for precise user targeting.
  • AR and VR Integration: Several companies, such as IKEA, Adidas, and Volvo, increasingly embrace AR and VR technologies in their advertising campaigns to demonstrate products and provide virtual try-on experiences. These technologies increase engagement and boost conversion.

Ways of Advertising Online

Digital or online advertising comes in various forms. However, they are often categorized into two main groups: display ads and native ads. Display ads are the digital evolution of flyers and billboard ads. They feature an ad copy, images or graphics, and a CTA. Examples of display ads include:

  • Popup ads: These are often considered very annoying since they interrupt browsing and require the user to take the specified action or manually close them. Popup ads are still in use, but there are ways you can make them less disruptive.
  • Video ads: include video commercials, TV ads, and Facebook and YouTube ads. Modern video ads across social media channels are highly engaging, personalized, and interactive.
  • Banner ads: These are image-based ads often displayed to the side or above the web content.
  • Rich media ads: Rich media ads may feature text fields, scroll or swipe functionality, and even 360-degree rotatable images.

Native ads, on the other hand, are designed to blend seamlessly with the platform or content used. And as the name suggests, native ads should speak to the audience in a way that makes sense to them. Examples of native ads include:

  • Paid search ads: As a website owner, you pay Google to rank your web pages on the first pages of the Google Search Results Pages (SERPs).
  • Social media ads: You pay your favorite social media platforms, such as Facebook or Instagram, to get posts to rank higher in the platform’s algorithm and appear in the feeds of non-followers with similar browsing or shopping habits.
  • Promoted listings: You pay a listing site to rank your business at the top of the platform’s search results page.
  • Sponsored content: You sponsor a podcast or video, and the owner features your business or displays an ad letting the audience know about your business.
  • Influencer partnership: You pay or partner with a social media influencer who creates awareness for your brand. This technique is powerful, but you need a solid influencer marketing strategy to make this work for your business.

Bottom Line

Now that you know how online advertising works, its examples, and its benefits, it’s time to put everything into action. Typically, you want to have a plan or strategy for how you’ll drive your digital advertising campaign.

This involves understanding your goals and KPIs and knowing your target audience, distribution channels, content materials, and budget. If you are new to digital marketing and online advertising, seek expert help from an experienced and reputable digital marketing firm.

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blog vs vlog

Blog Vs. Vlog: Why Your Business Should Begin Vlogging

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The blog has long been one of the preferred tactics for content marketing strategies. Using a blog, you can easily publish a variety of different content, from written articles to infographics and more. However, blogging isn’t the only content marketing tactic that works. More and more businesses are beginning to vlog as well. The concept of a vlog is simple — it’s a blog in video form. The question is how do you decide which to choose between blog vs. vlog for which type of content?

The Benefits Of A Vlog

These days, vlogging can be done with nothing more than a smartphone, making it both affordable and easily accessible. It’s important to have content available for your prospects and clients that prefer video to text. The following are some of the major benefits of utilizing vlogs.

  • Vlog content is easy to produce

    With advancements in technology, the equipment you need to produce a vlog isn’t as expensive as you might think. Of course, you’ll want to spend some money to ensure that the quality of your video content stands out from the pack, but it’s more affordable to do so now than ever before. They also give you an easier way of explaining blog topics that you think would be better demonstrated visually. Words alone can not properly convey every idea.

  • Vlog are engaging

    Vlogs are incredibly engaging and there’s a simple reason for this. Not only do people more easily consume visual content, but vlogs also allow you to showcase your personality. They provide a person, whether it’s someone in your company, a customer, or an actor, to represent your brand. By having someone on screen, viewers will be able to engage on a personal level much more easily. This is difficult to do with written content since you can’t immediately convey a personality.

  • Vlogs are mobile-friendly

    It’s much easier for people to watch videos on their smartphones than it is to read blogs. Reading is more challenging on smaller screens, while videos can display in full HD and will run smoothly. It’s why half of all video content is viewed on mobile devices. Additionally, people who are watching videos on mobile are more likely to share. It’s estimated that 92 percent of people viewing videos on their mobile devices tend to share videos.

How Businesses Can Use a Blog To Strengthen Their Online Marketing Efforts

Choosing Blog Vs. Vlog

Many of the benefits of a vlog are advantages as well. Because of the fact that vlogs are video content, they are inherently more engaging, shareable, and mobile-friendly than blogs. However, you could argue that blogs are easier to produce — although some might not agree since blogging does require writing and editing skills. The thing is, there’s no necessity to choose between blog vs. vlog. Why not implement both? Both written content and video content have a place in your content marketing strategy. And when it comes to content, it’s good to have a variety. By providing your audience with content they can both read and watch, you cover all of your bases. Now the question becomes when do you blog and when do you vlog?

How to Have a Successful Blog (Expert Tips)

When to Blog or Vlog

Blogging is a great way to get a lot of information across to your audience. For example, if you have a lot of statistics that you want to share, then an infographic or a bullet list can be more effective than rattling them off on video. However, when it comes to things like tutorials or demonstrations, vlogging is going to be more effective since you can show your audience instead of having to tell them. It also depends on the message you want to convey. If you want to build a real connection with your audience, a vlog might be better suited as they can see and hear another human being. Even if you already have a strong connection with your blog audience, vlogging can only improve it.

Vlogs also work well for your social media posts. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are great places to share vlogs and get more people interested in your content due to easy sharing features. Since it’s a video sharing platform, YouTube is the best place to be uploading vlogs. Users receive video recommendations based on other content they have watched which makes the likelihood of the correct audience finding your videos greater. While links to blogs can be shared on social media, audiences are unable to view the entire content without going to another website. Vlogs can usually be viewed directly on the platform they’re shared on such as Facebook or YouTube, or a snippet of them can be shared on Instagram and Twitter, depending on the length.

There are advantages to both blogging and vlogging, but there’s no reason to limit yourself to one or the other. Both can be incredibly effective at informing and engaging audiences as well as attracting and converting more leads. In the end, it’s the quality of the content you create that matters most.

25 Website Must Haves

Market Segmentation

6 Types of Behavioral Data That Can Be Used For Segmentation

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Behavioral Data is the way that your users behave provides you with significant insight into your audience, your website, and even your products and services. You can use this information to segment your users so that you can more effectively target them using a variety of marketing techniques. This strategy is known as behavioral segmentation.

Behavioral Data Examples for Segmentation

You will need to use analytics in order to look at a variety of different metrics that will reveal behavioral data. The following are six metrics that can help you gather behavioral data to use for behavioral segmentation:

1. Page view history

Seeing what pages a user is visiting can give you a good idea of what they’re looking for. You can also identify pages that they are spending most of their time on. This reveals the content that interests them. Looking at their page view history (as well as the pages they’ve spent a lot of time on) will help you gather information on what subjects they’re most interested in. This will allow you to provide more custom cross-links for related content. It can also direct users to content that’s more likely to interest them.

2. Email opens

Just because a lead is on your email list does not mean that they are reading all of your emails. Identifying what emails they are opening will give you a good idea of how to follow up those emails with custom messaging and retargeting. You can also better understand what headlines and messaging times get the most open. This will allow you to adjust your email strategy so that it’s more effective.

3. Social engagement

Social engagement is identified by the content that users like, share, or comment on. You can track the social engagement of your users. This helps identify what types of content they engage in with most to tailor content that’s more to their liking. You can also share content with them directly to engage with them more personally. This will help build stronger relationships.

Read More Related Article – Improve Your Marketing Strategy By Asking These 4 Questions

4. Videos watched

More people are now watching videos on a daily basis due to how easy it is to access them via mobile devices. Keep track of your user’s video-watching history so that you can let them know when you publish similar video content in the future or so that you can send them more content (video or non-video) based on the subject matter of the videos they’ve watched.

5. Purchase history

Tracking what your customers have purchased will let you know their needs and wants. This will make it easier for you to send targeted offers and identify cross-selling opportunities. Remember, buying history isn’t just limited to what your customers are purchasing. It also includes when they are making those purchases. You can target them using offers on dates that they tend to make their purchases.

6. Product usage

Depending on the product or service you’re selling, you can gather data on its use. For example, if you sell software, then you can track how often it’s used. This allows you to upsell heavy users. This also allows you to send targeted content to users who aren’t using certain features about features. Lastly, it can re-engage users who aren’t using your software often.

These are 6 behavioral data examples for segmentation that you can use as well. By paying attention to your users’ behavior data and using that information to segment your users, you can greatly improve both the effectiveness and efficiency of your marketing efforts.

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The Ultimate Guide to Creating a Press Release

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In today’s dynamic media landscape, establishing brand trust has become increasingly critical. The 2021 Edelman report highlights the growing significance of consumer trust in making purchasing decisions. A well-crafted press release plays a vital role in conveying information to the public and building that crucial trust. It holds immense value for businesses, organizations, and individuals alike. By generating substantial media attention, a meticulously crafted press release not only amplifies brand presence but also expands outreach to a wider audience. However, creating an impactful press release necessitates thoughtful planning and flawless execution.

This guide aims to equip you with the essential elements, structure, and writing techniques necessary to create an effective press release that captures attention and delivers your message with impact.

Understanding the Purpose and Audience

Before embarking on creating a press release, it is vital to grasp its intended objective and target readership. A press release functions as a concise and informative announcement regarding noteworthy events, product launches, or organizational advancements. It encompasses customized content to captivate journalists, editors, and media establishments. Identify your specific target audience and contemplate the angles that would most effectively pique their interest. By doing so, you can craft a press release that is both engaging and pertinent, resonating with your intended readership.

Essential Elements of a Press Release

Attention-Grabbing Headline: Craft a compelling headline that concisely summarizes the main message of your press release and piques the interest of the reader.

Dateline: Incorporate the date and location of the press release’s origination, accompanied by a compelling lead sentence that succinctly captures the essence of the news.

Introduction Paragraph: Expand upon the lead sentence to provide a concise overview, addressing the who, what, when, where, why, and how aspects.

Body Paragraphs: Elaborate on the main points, offering supporting details, statistics, and quotes from relevant sources. Utilize clear and succinct language, avoiding technical terms or jargon that may confuse readers.

Boilerplate: Wrap up the press release by including a concise description of your company or organization, incorporating vital information such as contact details, website address, and links to social media platforms.

Media Contact Information: Share the name, job title, phone number, and email address of the designated contact person for additional inquiries or interview requests.

Structuring a Press Release

Inverted Pyramid Structure: Arrange the information in order of importance, with the most critical details at the beginning, followed by supporting details and background information.

Concise and Focused Writing: Keep the press release concise, typically between 400-600 words. Use clear, simple language and avoid excessive promotional language or industry jargon.

Use Quotes: Incorporate quotes from key individuals involved in the news, such as executives or experts. Quotes add credibility and provide a human element to the story.

Supporting Facts and Data: Include relevant facts, figures, and statistics to reinforce the significance and newsworthiness of the information presented.

Visual Elements: Incorporate high-resolution images, videos, or infographics to enhance the visual appeal and engagement of your press release.

Hyperlinks: Include hyperlinks to relevant websites, landing pages, or supporting documents to provide additional information or resources for the readers.
Writing Techniques for an Effective Press Release

Develop a Compelling Headline

The headline is the first impression your press release makes, so it must be attention-grabbing. It should succinctly summarize the key message of your release and entice readers to delve deeper. Aim for a concise, catchy headline that piques curiosity and highlights the newsworthy aspect of your story. Incorporating strong action verbs or posing thought-provoking questions can also increase its impact. Remember to keep it within 60-80 characters for optimal readability and easy distribution on digital platforms.

Craft a Strong Opening Paragraph

Following the headline, the opening paragraph is critical for hooking readers and capturing their attention. Within this segment, address the fundamental inquiries of journalism: who, what, when, where, why, and how. Employ precise and succinct language to effectively communicate the key details while ensuring the content remains engaging to captivate readers and encourage further exploration. Avoid overly promotional language and focus on presenting the news objectively. Journalists prefer to receive factual information that they can use to develop their own stories.

Provide Newsworthy and Relevant Information

The body of your press release should expand on the information introduced in the opening paragraph. Offer additional details, relevant facts, statistics, quotes, or testimonials that support the main message. Ensure the information provided is concise, pertinent, and tailored to resonate with your intended audience. Capture the attention of journalists by offering a distinctive perspective, connecting to ongoing trends, or providing valuable insights to their readers. Moreover, carefully consider the timing of your press release to maximize its impact. Additionally, consider the timing of your release. If possible, try to tie it to a larger event or news cycle to increase its relevance.

Use Quotes Effectively

Including quotes from key individuals involved in the story can add credibility and provide a human element to your press release. Quotes should be concise, impactful, and provide valuable insights or perspectives. Ensure the quotes enhance the narrative and are attributed to the appropriate individuals. If possible, obtain quotes from recognized experts or authorities within your industry, as this can increase the chances of media attention.

Include Relevant Contact Information

As you conclude your press release, incorporate a segment containing pertinent contact details for media inquiries. This section should encompass the name, role, email address, and telephone number of an appointed representative capable of furnishing additional information or coordinating interviews. By providing easily accessible contact details, journalists can reach out for additional information or clarifications, increasing the likelihood of coverage.

Bottom Line

Creating a press release effectively requires a strategic approach and attention to detail. Remember to craft a strong opening paragraph, utilize quotes effectively, and include relevant contact information to facilitate communication with journalists. It is advisable to meticulously review your press release to guarantee its flawlessness and effective communication of your intended message. By meticulously strategizing and implementing your press release, you can harness its potential as a powerful tool for generating awareness, bolstering your brand’s standing, and driving media attention.

Simple Ways that Small Businesses Can Use Data to Build Better Customer Relationships

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In this day and age, it’s pretty difficult for consumers to not be inundated with dozens of advertisements. As such, targeting your audience has become more important than ever, especially when it comes to running a smaller business. The most effective way to target your audience is to make use of the consumer data that you have access to. Knowing how to use the data you have can go a long way towards building customer relationships.

However, having consumer data is a lot different than knowing how to make it actionable, which can make the data you have very intimidating. The following are the three steps that you should take to so that you can leverage your data to build strong customer relationships:

1. Organize

Collecting data is the easy part. You can obtain valuable customer data from a variety of sources, including your opt-in forms, customer surveys, and even by simply asking direct questions on social media. Organizing this data is another matter. You’ll want to use the data you’ve collected to segment your audience based on shared traits. For example, you could organize your customers by their location, by their level of engagement, or by their purchase behaviors. This allows you to personalize your content much more and is especially helpful for strategies such as email marketing.Customer Relationships

2. Find Insights

When organizing the data you’ve collected, you can find insights into your customers that you may not have noticed before.  If you’re segmenting your audience by location, you may find that a significant part hails from one area you didn’t know about. For instance, say you’re based out of Chicago and you sell winter clothes. You may have been focusing mostly on marketing your products to the midwest. However, from the data you’ve collected, you may find out that you actually have a significant amount of customers located in the NYC area. You can use this information to your advantage to increase your reach. One way would be by sending content to these customers based on their time zone. You could create content that’s more relevant to them, or even consider opening a store in the area.

3. Use Visuals

When leveraging the insights you’ve gathered into your customers from the data that you’ve collected and organized, you should strongly consider creating more visual content. While written content can be effective as well, it’s worth noting that the human brain processes imagery 60 times faster than it’s capable of processing text. If you want to take advantage of those insights, you should create more visual content. Even adding pictures to your written content can be extremely helpful when it comes to engaging your audience.

One of your main marketing goals should be building better customer relationships. To do this, you need to make effective use of the customer data that you already have access to. Use the customer data that you’re constantly collecting by organizing it and gathering insights based on it. Then leverage it to your advantage by creating visually engaging content.

Integrating Social Media & SEO Efforts For Enhanced Search Engine Results
Omnichannel Personalization

Omnichannel Personalization: Creating a Seamless Customer Experience

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As customers become more connected, their expectations for a seamless and personalized experience continue to change. Nowadays, customers use multiple channels to research, compare, and purchase different products, creating a complex web of touchpoints that businesses must navigate. That’s where omnichannel personalization comes in to help businesses deliver unique experiences to each customer, regardless of where they are in their customer journeys.

In the sections below, you’ll learn more about omnichannel marketing and personalization, including tips for creating a seamless customer experience that drives loyalty and revenue.

Understanding Omnichannel Personalization 

Omnichannel personalization is a customer-centric marketing approach that uses data and technology to create a more personalized and relevant shopping experience for customers. It involves collecting and analyzing data from multiple channels, including online and offline interactions, to gain insights into customer behavior and preferences.

This marketing approach enables businesses to create a consistent customer journey that meets varied and unique customer expectations. By providing a more personalized experience, businesses can increase customer loyalty, reduce churn, and drive more revenue.

What Makes Up Omnichannel Marketing and Personalization 

Over the years, disruptive technologies such as Machine Learning, big data, and data science have given rise to hyper-personalization. Here, businesses are expected to deliver cross-channel experiences tailored to the customers’ needs, behaviors, and preferences. Below are the key factors you should implement if you are looking to provide the best possible customer experience.

1. Marketing Automation 

Marketing automation involves using software to automate repetitive tasks such as social media posting and email marketing. It saves time and helps provide a more personalized experience for customers. Benefits of marketing automation include increased sales productivity and a reduction in marketing overhead.

Companies using marketing automation to nurture prospects see a significant increase in qualified leads, which results in larger purchases. A survey by Annuitas Group found that businesses that use marketing automation see up to a 451% increase in qualified leads. These leads also make purchases that are 47% larger than the non-nurtured leads.

2. Customer Data Collection 

Collecting relevant customer data is crucial to refining your marketing strategy and improving the customer experience. This data can be quantitative, like website bounce rates, or qualitative, like customer reviews. With the right analytics tools, you can gather information about demographics, customer behavior, and brand sentiment.customer data collection

Customer data collection helps retailers better understand their customers and provide an omnichannel experience. To do this effectively, you need a robust customer data platform to gather, store, and analyze the available data.

3. Optimized Website Design

When optimizing your website design, you should create web pages that work well on mobile devices, tablets, and desktops. If your website isn’t responsive, it won’t display properly on smaller screens. Always ensure that your website provides a consistent experience to every customer, regardless of which device they use to view it. You should also prioritize website navigation design to ensure users can easily browse your website, find what they’re looking for, and easily make purchases.

4. Social Media Integration

As the name suggests, social media integration extends your marketing efforts by directing your social media followers to your website or app. It’s also a way of making your social platforms more accessible to your target audience and customers. Brands must integrate all their customers’ social media networks into their omnichannel setup.

Ecommerce brands, for instance, can use social media integration tools to import and display user-generated content on their ecommerce sites automatically. This can help build trust with potential customers and drive conversions.

5. Multichannel Analytics

Multichannel analytics is a process that merges data from different sources into a single location. This makes it easier for businesses to monitor sales across multiple channels. For instance, if a business owner owns three online stores, they can aggregate the data from each store into one location with the help of multichannel analytic tools.

By doing so, they can understand their customers and their behavior on the website, which can help them plan effective promotion campaigns that are more likely to convert. Multichannel analytics also allows businesses to track the effectiveness of their omnichannel marketing strategy, so they can optimize performance while reducing cost.

 

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Benefits of Omnichannel Personalization 

Personalizing customer experiences and prioritizing their needs and expectations can greatly impact your business. Below are some of the key benefits of embracing a customer-centric marketing approach.

1. Enhanced Customer Experience 

Omnichannel marketing enables businesses to offer customers personalized experiences tailored to their preferences and behaviors. By leveraging data from multiple touchpoints, brands can send customized messages, showcase relevant products, and provide exceptional customer service. A seamless and personalized experience boosts customer satisfaction and improves loyalty.

2. Increased Sales and Conversions  

Personalized customer experiences increase the likelihood of converting prospects by providing relevant and timely interactions. By catering to each customer’s unique preferences, businesses can improve the customer journey and encourage purchases. Omnichannel marketing and personalization have been shown to increase annual sales and customer lifetime value, directly boosting business growth.

3. Lower Customer Acquisition Costs

Creating a personalized omnichannel experience helps retain customers and reduces customer acquisition costs. By providing relevant interactions, businesses can increase customer loyalty and target their advertising spending more efficiently. This approach helps companies optimize their marketing budget and reduce the cost of acquiring new customers.

4. Cost Optimization

By analyzing customer behavior data, brands can identify the most effective channels to reach their target audience. With this knowledge, businesses can optimize their marketing stack, streamline processes, and reduce costs associated with operating multiple channels. Omnichannel personalization helps to optimize resources, reduce waste, and ensure efficient use of budgets while delivering a seamless customer experience.

Getting Started With Omnichannel Personalization 

Implementing an omnichannel marketing strategy is a complex process requiring technological and organizational alignment. To get started, you need to get buy-in from top management, set measurable goals, and build a strategy around those goals. You should also conduct a data inventory to understand the available data and how to use it to achieve your objectives. Additionally, it’s important to establish an internal governance model for executing your omnichannel strategy before creating a roadmap.

To simplify the implementation process, you can start small by focusing on the most valuable use cases and existing touchpoints. This approach is more practical and essential as the boundaries between the digital and physical worlds continue to merge. By taking small, manageable steps towards omnichannel personalization, you can gain a competitive edge and improve customer experience across all touchpoints.

 

 

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Six Steps To Better Use Of Marketing Analytics & Dashboard

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Using marketing analytics is essential to being able to judge the performance of your marketing efforts. They allow you to see what is and isn’t working in real time, thereby letting you adjust your strategy. Not only do marketing analytics improve your marketing efforts, but they also make you much more efficient. You don’t end up wasting a lot of time and money on tactics that aren’t working.

Considering what an essential part your marketing analytics dashboard plays in the effectiveness of your marketing strategy, it should come as no surprise that marketing analytics continue to grow in importance, with many companies devoting bigger and bigger portions of their budget to their analytics capabilities. To ensure you’re making the most out of your marketing analytics dashboard, be sure to follow these six steps:

1. Embed Analytics Into Marketing Decisions

Analytics should not be a mere complimentary tactic to your marketing strategy that allows you to see how you’re doing — it should be an important part of the marketing decision making process. Once you begin using analytics, you should use the data you’ve gathered from previous campaigns to help inform future campaigns and strategies.

2. Use Your Analytics For A Better Understanding Of Your Customer

Marketing analytics can help provide you with incredible insight into your customers, thereby providing all kinds of opportunity for growth. The challenge is in collecting data from a wide range of data points. The reason that this is a challenge is that there are often barriers between marketing, operations, and sales data. If you can gather and analyze data from all three of these facets of your business, you’ll be able to get a more complete picture of your customer, thereby allowing you to form a much more effective marketing strategy.

3. Develop And Hire Talent That Understands Marketing Analytics

Marketing analytics is unique in that it requires analytical thinking to read and understand the data, but it also requires creativity to put that data to use in actionable steps. You’ll want to focus on developing and hiring talent that understands both the science of analytics and the art of analytics, which is no easy feat. However, having such individuals on your team will help you get the absolute most out of your marketing analytics.

4. Organize Your Analytics Operating Model

If you’re going to embed your marketing analytics dashboard into your company’s marketing decision-making process, then it’s important that you organize its operating model to reflect how decisions are made. For example, if your company makes your marketing decisions by brand, then you might want to dedicate analytics resources.

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5. Focus Marketing Analytics On New Opportunities

One of the common traps companies fall into is using their analytics to adjust their marketing tactics on current strategies. While you should certainly do this, you should also leverage certain marketing analytics, such as data mining and predictive analytics, to find new opportunities, such as new marketing strategies, new business models, new markets, and more.

6. Learn When To Measure And When To Act

The use of analytics allows you to analyze and measure data at any time, but knowing when to act on that data you have can be tricky. There’s the temptation to want to wait until you can measure everything and obtain more data before making key decisions. Waiting too long can cause you to miss out on potential opportunities. On the other hand, constantly acting on the data you have can be a serious mistake as well. Many strategies do take time before you’ll begin seeing results.

As you know, using analytics will help you get the most out of your marketing strategy. These tips will help you get even more out of your marketing analytics dashboard.

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Top Benefits of Using Case Studies For Your Business

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Consumers are a lot less susceptible to fancy sales pitches in this day and age, which is why the use of case studies can be very effective in building brand trust. Many consumers will ask friends and family for recommendations or look up online reviews before doing business with a particular brand. They do this because they simply trust other consumers more than they are willing to trust a brand. It’s due to these reasons that you should consider using case studies. We’ve gone over the case study questions you should ask, but the following is some information on what they actually are and how case studies benefits your marketing efforts:

What are Case Studies?

Case studies are similar to testimonials in that they provide audiences with an account of previous customer experiences with the brand. However, testimonials are typically basic interviews that function as little more than positive reviews. Case studies are more in-depth and concern the entire process that the customer went through. Basically, it’s a depiction of their buyer journey and how your business helped to fulfill their needs from beginning to end. This allows for an element of storytelling that’s much more engaging

What are the Case Studies Benefits?

Although case studies require a lot more effort to put together than the typical testimonial, it’s well worth the time and resources required. Many businesses will even produce their case studies as video content that their audiences can watch. The following are just a few of the benefits of creating case studies:

Build brand trust

Case studies are extremely effective in building trust because of the very fact that they represent the viewpoint of your previous customers. Instead of you telling your audience how great your brand is and how effective your products or services are, you’re having your customers do it for you. Not only do audiences trust other consumers more than they trust companies, but by allowing your previous customers to tell their stories, they are basically endorsing your brand, which gives your business more credibility.

Engage through storytelling

Simply having customers tell the audience that your product is great is just a basic customer testimonial. It’s not that interesting, nor is it very engaging. Case studies are more concerned with telling the story of the customer. The customer is the hero, their problem is the conflict and your brand’s solution is the resolution. The use of storytelling helps to make a brand much more relatable and will allow your audience to see how you fulfilled that customer’s need at every stage of the buyer journey.

Click here to learn the six C’s of story branding

Identify brand evangelists

To find the subjects of your case studies, you’ll need to speak to several clients or customers and request that they participate. Those that are willing are your brand evangelists. They are offering to tell their story because they believe in your brand. Knowing who your brand evangelists are is helpful because they can help improve your brand reputation through word-of-mouth marketing.

Assist your sales team

Having an assortment of case studies available on your site can be hugely beneficial to your sales team. This is because they can recommend prospects to watch specific case studies of previous customers who may have had similar problems. This, in turn, can help them close deals.

As you can see, case studies can be very beneficial to your marketing efforts. If you are not already using case studies in your business, we encourage you to give them a try. They are a powerful tool that can help you achieve a variety of goals.

 

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