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Dear Friends: Welcome to a BrandKnew year. My best wishes to you and yours for an incredibly fulfilling 2020. In keeping with new beginnings and new possibilities, this edition has ample in store. We talk about how ideas and culture go hand in hand. We have also laid bare some of the global advertising trends that we learnt in the previous year. It is said that in an increasingly commoditised world, customer experience is your best product. The feature on how experience strategists are the true brand custodians now further endorses that thinking. We also do a bit of a deep dive into social media trends that we can watch out for this year. In a world that is increasingly moving towards value than vanity, Brandless Brands will make its mark. Read more about it in this issue. The new kid on the block is ‘ Conversational Marketing ‘- is your marketing strategy incorporating that? Examine that in this edition. This is an issue wherein we are watching and talking trends and the infographic on brand logo design trends to watch for in 2020 pays heed to that. Content Marketing is the new advertising- especially if you are a start up- understand how you can maximise your content marketing budget as a start up. We once again take a sneak peek at what 5G would mean for marketers and the trends to watch out for. As always, plenty to more to soak in and I leave you to do just that. Till the next, my very best!
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Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher Business Development Director: Rishi Mohan Brand Engagement and Outreach Specialist: Anuva Madan Country Head India: Rohit Unni Research & Analysis: Meeta Pendse Country Head, Australia: Norbert D’Souza Country Head, UK: Sagar Patil Performance Marketing Architect: Ryan Govindan Video Content Specialist: Mikhaela Cena Content Development Specialist: Abijith Pradeep Trend & Market Intelligence: Simran Thanwani Revenue Generation Specialist: Nitin Kumar
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CONTENTS
From Physical to Digital and Back Again: Three Ways for Brands to Stand Out Brand size, creativity main drivers of effectiveness 10 Logo Design Trends That Will Take Charge in 2020 [Infographic] Brandless Brands Will Surge in 2020 as Consumers Prioritize Value Over Marketing Does Your 2020 Marketing Strategy Include Conversational Marketing? WARC Global Advertising Trends – Three themes from 2019 Why experience strategists are the new brand custodians Why Older Entrepreneurs Have the Edge It’s Coming: Is Your Brand Prepared for an Economic Downturn? Cultural Velocity: Five ways to make ideas move in culture 5G’s Impact on Marketing in 2020: Trends and Predictions 20 Fresh Examples Of Customer Experience Innovation For B2B 6 Social Media Predictions for 2020 [Infographic] The Top 10 Events That Shaped – And Rocked – The Digital Ad Industry Over The Past Decade The Architects of Our Digital Hellscape Are Very Sorry How to Maximize Your Startup’s Content-Marketing Budget How to read body language: Examples from around the world Book, Line & Sinker
From Physical to Digital and Back Again: Three Ways for Brands (B2C or B2B) to Stand Out By Jason Rose
THERE IS A CLEAR TREND OF B2C BRANDS THAT ONCE EXISTED ONLY ONLINE OPENING PHYSICAL LOCATIONS: EVERLANE, GLOSSIER, BONOBOS, AND OF COURSE AMAZON ARE JUST A FEW EXAMPLES. Being online-first allowed those brands to tap into the convenience that digital offers, gradually building a strong audience of loyal customers. Now, the same brands are revitalizing brick-and-mortar retail. It seems we have gone from physical experiences to digital, and now the pendulum is swinging back to physical. Why is this happening? Digital transformation is all about moving from the physical world into the digital world. It’s about re-establishing processes and modernizing legacy systems to enable engagement with customers in an entirely new way. However, last time I checked, we still live in the physical world, where experiences can connect with all five senses. Yet, many brands have gone all in on digital, overcrowding customers and relying on two senses: sight and sound. Some 44% of companies have already moved to a digital-first approach for the customer experience, according to IDG. Thinking of a customer experience in digital-only terms is limiting. I would argue that for brands to stand out and truly capture (and keep) customer attention, they must incorporate physical elements and appeal to all of a customer’s senses. Like those digital-native brands that are opening storefronts, it’s about striking a balance.
An Unexpected Mailer Breaks Through the Noise I recently experienced another example of this digital-tophysical trend some months back from a B2B brand. I received a mailer from a brand that I had previously engaged with on digital channels. I opened it, expecting some branded tchotchke, and perhaps a Starbucks gift card. I was wrong. The box inside opened to reveal a TV screen with a looping video talking about how the solution was going to revolutionize my experience. It was further connected with a high-end chocolate taste experience, with detailed instructions on how to enjoy it. What’s more? It included tickets to attend an upcoming event the brand was holding. Wow, I was immediately sold on the brand and what it had to offer. It had found a unique way to break through the noise and reach me as an individual.
Three Tactics to Help Brands Stand Out in a Digital World So, how can brands—B2B or B2C—take cues from the retail pop-up shops or tech companies sending engaging mailers? Here’s how to break through the digital noise.
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1. Physical Touchpoints Undoubtedly, physical touchpoints are one of the best ways to differentiate yourself from other brands, enabling you to appeal to all five senses. In-store experiences that activate customers’ senses lead them to have stronger emotional connections to a brand and its product or service. Direct mail may be considered antiquated, but now that most brands are focused on optimizing consumer engagement digitally, it’s the physical, real-world experiences that will keep a brand at the forefront of a consumer’s mind.
2. Incentivize Action Including event tickets within the mailer I received served as an incentive for me to continue the conversation and form a deeper connection with the brand. Other brands should learn from that: If you can provide incentive to customers (through special offers or promotions) to break the fourth wall, so to speak, and visit you in a physical location, you will instantly form a stronger relationship than you had before.
3. Keep It Interesting Consumers look for novel and exciting ways to connect with brands. Whether it’s donating a piece of revenue to a charitable cause, hosting an event, or employing usergenerated content in marketing strategies, brands must continuously find new ways to engage with their audiences. Another part of keeping things interesting is to introduce new shopping models that serve different customer needs and inspire shoppers to keep coming back. For example,
retailers could test out “immersive experiential centers” that engage with customers beyond simply selling them products. Immersive experiences are highly curated and allow retailers to give consumers a deeper look into their brand and culture, showcasing what makes them unique. Similarly, retailers could open a “brand store” that focuses solely on promoting the brand itself. The purpose of the store would be to communicate the brand’s values and social and community involvement, and convey customer stories in a way that invites the consumer to come “inside” the brand and from a stronger relationship. Though both store examples might not result in sales in the moment, they’ll go a long way toward fulfilling customer needs and developing brand advocates over time.
Finding Your Balance Many businesses are still on their digital transformation journeys, but consider this article a reminder not to oversteer. Smart marketers know they need to have the right mix of digital and physical touchpoints. The key lies in having a cohesive strategy, thinking of the total experience, and translating that into a consistent approach for your brand—meeting customers on the channels they prefer in new and surprising ways.
Jason Rose is CMO of SAP Customer Experience, where he is responsible for all aspects of marketing strategy and execution.
Brand size, creativity main drivers of effectiveness By WARC Staff
Brand size and creativity are the two most important contributors to marketing effectiveness, according to analysis that included thousands of entries to the Effie Awards among its data sources. Mark Ritson – a consultant who has worked with brands like Johnson & Johnson, De Beers, and Sephora, as well as undertaking duties in academia and the media – assessed several-thousand submissions to the Effie Awards. Coupled with third-party research, industry wisdom and his own professional experience, he used this dataset to outline the core drivers of effectiveness. And the top-ranked factor is “how big you already are,” he explained at the Media, Marketing & Effectiveness event convened by thinktv, a marketing and research association dedicated to commercial television in Canada. (For more, read WARC’s in-depth report: The top ten drivers of marketing effectiveness from the Effie Awards – and beyond.) Why is this the case? Because large brands have developed – among other things – a substantial “share of mind”, “share of shelf”, and equity level with consumers. “They have deeper pockets [and] bigger existing salience,” added Ritson. And one of the primary reasons for building a brand is that “it gives you an unfair advantage in future effectiveness”. For smaller brands, there is a clear lesson: “Unless you’re
prepared to bulk up, unless you’re prepared to scratch your way up the league table, you’ll never get there,” Ritson said. Exceptional creative can help brands – big or small – make an impact, and this claimed second spot among the most important effectiveness drivers as identified by Ritson. In 2010, and in the Effies cases before this date that Ritson analysed, creative was the dominant theme that was discussed in award submissions. From 2011 to 2015, media assumed heightened importance – a shift prompted, he suggested, by the rise of digital, the growth of programmatic advertising, concerns about brand safety, and so on. For submissions in the 2016 and 2017 Effies, it was either creative or a joint emphasis on media and creative that received priority treatment. A recent study by marketing consultant Peter Field also has warned that short-termism is leading to a decline in creative effectiveness, while Orlando Wood, from research firm System1, has argued that TV ads are skewed towards “leftbrain” traits that are linked with immediate results, not longterm growth. “Creativity drives so much of effectiveness – and we’ve all forgotten it in the last decade,” Ritson affirmed. “We now need to remember it for the decade that comes.”
10 Logo Design Trends That Will Take Charge in 2020 [Infographic] By Mark Walker-Ford
Are you considering redesigning your company logo in 2020? Want to know the logo design trends that are predicted to take 2020 by storm? The team from Logaster share their 10 logo design trends for 2020 in this infographic.
• Gradients • Cluttered design • Chaotic arrangement • Geometric letters
Here’s what makes their list:
• Emblems
• Simplification
• Scaling
• Original geometry
• Text destruction
• Unusual fonts
Check out the infographic for more detail.
Brandless Brands Will Surge in 2020 as Consumers Prioritize Value Over Marketing By eMarketer Editors
An interesting irony of today’s retail landscape is that brands have never been more and less important. “In one sense, the growing popularity of D2C illustrates the value of differentiation, product innovation and addressing unmet customer needs,” said Andrew Lipsman, eMarketer principal analyst and author of our latest report, “The Future of Retail 2020: 10 Trends that Will Shape the Year Ahead.” “At the same time, today’s consumers are looking for value and aren’t necessarily attached to particular brands—or possess fondness for the retailer over the brands on the store shelves.” In brick-and-mortar, the retailers opening the greatest numbers of new stores skew heavily toward this “brandless” dynamic. According to an IHL Group report in August 2019, several of the retailers topping the list were discount merchants— and specifically dollar stores—trafficking heavily in generic merchandise. In the grocery space, growth was coming from discount supermarkets like Aldi, which is dominated by private-label products. (Trader Joe’s, who shares a parent company with Aldi, is similarly driven by private labels and has gained a cult following among shoppers.) Aptly named D2C brand Brandless—an online purveyor of minimalist grocery, wellness and home goods—has oriented its brand around the rise of digital-first shoppers who prefer products that include fewer, more natural ingredients. These shoppers have an evolving view of brands and don’t harbor any particular affinity for household names they grew up with.
“Consumer mindset is shifting, and people are not antibrand. They’re leaning more toward anti-the-way-it-used-tobe,” said Aaron Magness, CMO of Brandless. What might appear to be a small aperture in brand sentiment is widening, and it’s creating new opportunities for nontraditional private labels to emerge. “Private labels used to signify cheaper, lower-quality ingredients,” Lipsman said. “Today, brandless brands are flipping that notion on its head and providing what many perceive as better quality while maintaining good value.” In August 2019, Target introduced Good & Gather, a new food and beverage store brand, as part of the company’s revamped private-label strategy. “The idea behind the brand is simple: great food made for real life,” Target CEO Brian Cornell said on the company’s Q3 2019 earnings call. “Good & Gather incorporates simple, high-quality ingredients without any artificial flavors, synthetic colors, artificial sweeteners or high-fructose corn syrup.” The brand has received a positive reception from customers and appears to have contributed to Target’s strong bottom-line performance in Q3. “For the retailer, it’s a very opportunistic move—good from a financial standpoint to be able to drive volume through an owned brand,” said Jason Young, chief marketing and media officer at retail marketing tech provider Quotient Technology. “Certain commoditized categories across segments with high price sensitivity, that’s where the vulnerability is going to exist.”
Does Your 2020 Marketing Strategy Include Conversational Marketing? By Dan Moyle
So many shiny objects. So little time.
Human vs Chatbots
As soon as you focus on a successful marketing tool, along comes a squirrel to distract you.
One of the biggest opportunities in conversational marketing is using chatbots to engage visitors and start a conversation. Similar to how marketing teams are using intent and timebased automation, companies can use chatbots to create micro conversations that are contextually relevant, timely and drive a natural conversation.
You’ve figured out blogging for business. You’re measuring your marketing efforts with a great dashboard. You’re rocking it on social media. Heck, you’re even creating videos for YouTube and LinkedIn. And here comes conversational marketing as one more tool to fit into your business growth toolbox. We get it. It’s annoying. Here’s the thing though. If you’re not considering conversational marketing as part of your 2020 marketing strategy, you’re going to miss out on a critical component of a successful modern marketing playbook.
Conversational Marketing Stats: 79% of consumers are willing to use messaging apps to get customer service 82% of consumers rate an “immediate” response as very important when they have a question 36% of companies use live chat for marketing, sales or customer service inquiries As you can see, almost every customer you interact with wants to communicate through chat. They want a conversation. And yet so many businesses, not just yours, actually use live chat. It’s time to really serve our customers. One quick note: You’ll want to know the two sides to conversational marketing tool, live chat with a human and chatbots.
Let’s face it, nothing’s better than one-on-one human interaction to provide value, but in most cases, it’s not scalable. We live in an instant gratification world. While a five minute response to a lead via email is great, it seems like ages when it was thought of from a chat point of view. AI and chatbots can leverage this opportunity and bridge this scalability gap to: open the conversation, answer common questions, qualify leads and even set meetings, in a natural way that your prospect will love. Ready to dive into conversational marketing for your 2020 marketing strategy?
Add Conversational Marketing to Your 2020 Marketing Strategy Step 1: Map Out Buyer’s Journey Before you can start with a meaningful conversation or content piece, you have to know where it is intended to show up in the buyer’s journey. Ask yourself questions about how the content is going to be consumed and consider how the user story (below) ties in. Where is that user in the buyer’s journey when you want them to interact with your messaging and where does the result of the conversation take them.
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Step 2: Create User Stories While typically used in agile development, user stories are short, simple descriptions of a feature as told from the perspective of the person who desires the new capability. Usually, it’s a user or customer of the system.
In order to have an effective conversation, you need to create a connection. That means context and understanding. If we understand where someone is coming from, it’s very easy for us to start to engage in a conversation. In person that might mean eye contact and non-verbal cues. Online, that looks different. But we can still connect through context and empathy.
These can follow a simple template:
Value
As a [type of user], I want [some goal] so that [some reason].
When developing a conversation that moves forward, thinking about value and what each side offers may seem transactional at first. However, the fact is we’re all looking for what we can give and get out of a conversation. If we want to create a meaningful conversation, we’ve got to make sure that it’s equal on both sides.
By creating a conversational marketing user story, you can shift the focus from writing about benefits, to discussing them with your prospect.
Step 3: Role Play the Conversation We love sticky notes! Use them to outline the questions and potential answers on a board or on the wall. The goal here is to map out the conversation and make it easy to adjust language and order of questions etc. Make sure your user story is top and center to keep the conversation on point.
Step 4: Identify Triggers for Next Question Once you have your questions and potential answers outlined with sticky notes, the next step is to focus on the triggers for each question. Think about whether you’ll provide free text answers or if you’re providing buttons for the user to check (keeps the conversation natural and focused).
Trust Another aspect of an effective conversation is trust. Trust is something that has to be given on both sides in order for a conversation to be truly effective. We build trust through empathy, connection and offering value.
1-1 > 1-Many These things add up to real connections and conversations because one-to-one is greater than one to many. Which is how we’ve always marketed to our customers. Broadcasting our message to as many people as possible doesn’t work as well as it used to. Now we have to be ready to have conversations with one person in order to drive revenue.
Step 5: Identify Different Branches of the Conversation
The good news? We can still scale those conversations.
Now that you have your questions and potential answers outlined, decide whether you want to allow conversations to branch off to other conversation flows. This could make the conversation more contextually relevant after a simple yes/no question, or could be more advanced with multiple options to choose from.
Conversational marketing is an easy offshoot of the inbound methodology. At its core, conversational marketing, chatbots and live chat allow for your sales and marketing teams to always be providing value to your prospective customers when they need it the most.
Step 6: Publish and Promote Get your message out there. It’s always easy to make excuses and not publish your conversations. So set it and let it out into the wild. Try implementing your conversational marketing piece on multiple mediums. Publish on Facebook Messenger and also consider using the same conversation on your website, too.
Step 7: Analyze & Iterate Once your message is out and people are engaging with your bot, start to look for similarities where people fall off. That trend indicates areas you should consider spending time on. Add your enhancements and then continually iterate, analyze and improve the conversations.
What it Means to be Conversational Connection
Always be Helpful
As you are building out your playbooks, chatbot user flows, or engaging in live chat, find ways to make it easy to help your prospects. Identify the pages where people have the most questions and if they are not sales conversations, think about updating the content on those pages to disclose the common questions right away. Stay connected with your prospects by making it easier than ever to get the information they need. This can be a huge opportunity to win your prospect over your competition.
The Time is NOW to Get Started In review, 2020 shouldn’t come and go without a tactical change to your overall strategy. In a world where more content is being produced, interruptions are more frequent and we’re more easily distracted than ever, we, as marketers and business owners need to focus on optimizing our conversions as much as we focus on “NEW” content. That’s why implementing conversational marketing strategies is critical.
WARC Global Advertising Trends – Three themes from 2019 By WARC Staff
Privacy and brand safety in a programmatic world, a slowdown in social media growth and the advertising potential provided by gaming and podcasts are the three main themes to emerge from an analysis of readership across all of this year’s Global Advertising Trends reports. James McDonald, Managing Editor, WARC Data, and author of the research, says: “As 2019 draws to a close and we look ahead to 2020, for our last Global Ad Trends report of the year we have reviewed all of the data published throughout 2019 to draw out the key insights and main themes for practitioners. “A bellwether for the industry at large, the report is a good starting point to help brands and agencies alike prepare for the year ahead.”
Privacy and brand safety in a programmatic world Changing consumer sentiment towards data use was a major topic of interest for practitioners this year. Research
shows many consumers have taken steps to limit their online footprint in light of concerns around data misuse, with 44% reducing the amount of data they share online and over a quarter (27%) deploying an ad blocker. The issue of data privacy has been noted by practitioners, with the majority stating in WARC’s Marketer’s Toolkit that provisions around data protection are now in place, though there is still more to do – 14% have no data protection strategy in place, rising to 23% in Asia. A continuing problem is how these data inform ad buying, particularly programmatically, where 50% of practitioners agree that the ad tech has yet to live up to its potential. Concerns around brand safety, context and negative adjacency have not gone away. Privacy will continue to be on the agenda for 2020, not least due to the introduction of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and web browsers are starting to take a lead on the issue. Contextual advertising (based on non-personal information) is one response to this.
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The social slowdown In June’s edition of WARC’s Global Ad Trends, it was found that ad growth in the social and messaging sector had halved over the year. WARC’s Marketer’s Toolkit finds that one in five
Almost one in four adults has watched a gaming livestream in the past month, and this rises to almost one in three among 16-24 year-olds. Alphabet-owned YouTube and Amazonowned Twitch are vying for eyeballs, but the fact that over 90% of content on the latter is live-streamed presents opportunities for advertisers looking to reach young audiences spending less time with linear TV. Podcast advertising has potential; adspend is expected to double to $1.6bn by 2022 and the New York Times is already reporting strong revenue growth from the format. Listeners are highly engaged and research shows that ads increase brand consideration; 17% of listeners are ‘much more likely’ to consider a brand after hearing their ad during a podcast, while 37% are ‘somewhat more likely to’. But context is key, and a standardised measurement framework is still to be formally established. Other new key media intelligence on WARC Data across regions
marketers intends to reduce spend on Facebook in 2020, with Twitter and Snap also facing the prospect of muted revenue growth. This could be a signal of a changing of the guard; Americans aged 13 to 16 years-old are already using TikTok more than they are Facebook and Twitter. This cooling in growth comes at a time when trust in information on social media reached new lows and calls for greater regulation for tech and social media companies grow louder. The highest levels of mistrust are recorded in Great Britain (83%), Sweden (81%) and France (79%). The US is placed seventh on 70%. Internet adspend excluding Google and Facebook is expected to have declined for the second year running in 2019. There is also a rising distrust in influencer content worldwide, borne out of concerns around authenticity and credibility. Indeed, in the UK, influencers are seen as less credible than politicians.
Ad potential for gaming and podcasts
Global: • Consumers: half of consumers have boycotted a brand with different values • Brands & Advertisers: retail brands account for half of in-app gaming adspend • Media & Tech: marketers are using Instagram Stories to boost e-commerce
Americas: • Consumers: over 80% of Americans are concerned about data privacy • Brands & Advertisers: just 39% of brands integrate consumer data in their loyalty schemes • Media & Tech: smartphone penetration tops 80% in Brazil
Asia Pacific: • Consumers: Digital video consumption doubles in Hong Kong • Brands & Advertisers: 76% of Southeast Asian marketers report poor customer growth • Media
&
Tech:
brand
safety
and
fraud
limiting
programmatic in-app spend are top concerns
Europe, Middle East and Africa: • Consumers: 15% of consumers avoid linear TV and only stream • Brands & Advertisers: silos are the biggest obstacle to data-driven marketing
Why experience strategists are the new brand custodians By Stephen Whiteside
As chief strategy officer of agency R/GA, Tom Morton works with big-name clients like Samsung, Nike, Google and ESPN. Whatever the brand or category, he believes, it is now imperative to craft end-to-end customer experiences – from browsing in a digital or physical store to delivering post-sales service via calls centers or chatbots. Achieving a favorable interaction at every stage of the customer journey requires a nuanced experience strategy that is based on meaningful innovation, activating user data, and constructing an ecosystem that has members, not customers. Speaking at a strategy-focused event held by WARC in New York, Morton outlined four considerations for marketers that want to be leaders the in the customer experience space:
stock market. What do these firms have in common? “All of them are essentially ecosystems,” Morton said. “The vast majority of the most valuable companies in the world are those that have been built on a system.” Other forward-looking enterprises are adopting an equivalent model, too. An example: Disney, which has launched a video-streaming platform to supplement its existing range of entertainment assets, from movie studios to TV networks and theme parks. Nike, the sporting-goods manufacturer, is also blending digital assets – like the SNKRs app for “sneakerheads” – with its physical products in compelling ways.
1) Experiences build mega-brands
Drilling down into this topic, Morton identified the traits characterizing “system” brands, as they:
“It is experiences that are the driving force behind brands today,” Morton explained.
• “come to life in their interface and their innovation”;
And he offered a profound point of evidence to support this claim by looking at Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft – the only companies to have been valued at over $1 trillion by the
• turn “user data into services”; • have “the ultimate goal of turning their customers into members.”
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While the leading “system” brands deliver powerful utility, Morton suggested, they also possess a clear purpose, narrative and story. “The truth is for these brands that purpose, that narrative, is really baked into the experience.
usually ask standard questions when designing a service:
“They are ‘doing’ rather than ‘telling’ their story in that respect.”
• “Is it viable as well? Is there a business in this?”
2) Experience strategists as brand guardians If experiences are central to brand connectivity – from logging in to apps to navigating websites – this has clear implications for strategists. “The people who develop those experiences are now, for good or bad, in the role of brand guardians,” Morton said. Such a notion upends the established role of strategy, which traditionally aimed to “build the brand story”. That remains a critical task, but now has a complementary step: reflecting a brand’s principles via every consumer touchpoint and mode of engagement. “The expanded role … is you are building the brand story, and you’re building the brand system – and one is feeding the other, and you’re learning from both,” Morton said. “What this is going to mean … is that you’re going to have to accept that you’re doing both of these things, and you’re doing both of them in roughly equal measure.” Fusing these responsibilities, he proposed, takes precedence over the false dichotomy that is frequently heard between storytelling, on the one hand, and the rigid emphasis on tactics and performance marketing, as championed in Silicon Valley, on the other. “If you are experience strategists, guess what?” Morton said. “Like it or not, you are now in charge of the brand and what that brand stands for.”
3) Using the brand lens If experience strategists are brand guardians, they will have to expand on playbooks that have typically been premised around user experience and human-centered design. These principles are extremely valuable, Morton asserted. “But the catch is that can also be like a wind tunnel for a brand. Because if that’s the only path you follow, then you might end up making something that is frictionless, and very useful, and completely indistinguishable from the competition,” he warned. Zeroing in on current users is the source of a further problem, too: “If you’re designing only for the person who’s already using, and right in front of the brand, you might not be doing anything to attract the new user you need to bring in to actually grow the brand.” User-experience specialists, said Morton,
• “Is it desirable? Do the users want it?” • “Is it feasible? Can it be done technologically?”
He suggested that two more “lenses” be appended to this list to make sure that experience strategists are not at risk of ending up with commoditized, undifferentiated offerings: • The cultural lens: “Will this thing be meaningful? Will it travel? Will it be relevant?” • The brand lens: “Will this be authentic to the brand that’s providing it?” “Once you put those extra lenses in when designing an experience, you actually end up making things that are much richer, much more meaningful, and much more effective,” Morton said. An example came from Nike’s Air Jordan line. To mark the 30th anniversary of Michael Jordan’s iconic leap in the 1988 Slam Dunk Contest – as immortalized in the brand’s logo – it brought the basketball legend back to the court using an augmented reality experience on Snapchat’s messaging app. Users could also purchase the new Air Jordan III sneakers through this channel. Recreating the story of Jordan’s famous dunk and providing a novel, user-friendly commerce opportunity led to the sneakers selling out in 23 minutes. “Experience builds brands – and a little bit of extra brand narative can make all the difference,” Morton said. Another case in point involves Walmart, the retailer with the brand proposition of enabling shoppers to “Save money, live better.” If the chain’s low prices are well-known, improving the daily lives of its customers extends beyond domestic finances. How? By cutting down the hours and minutes they have to invest in the weekly shop, stock-up trips, or picking up a much-needed recipe ingredient.
“Living better so often means making the best use of your time,” Morton said. From pick-up towers in its stores to trialing home delivery and introducing a digital payments service, the retailer has unveiled experiences that “deeply carry the Walmart brand, that deeply carry the ethos of ‘Save money, live better,’” Morton said. The Bentonville, Arkansas-based company even backed its grocery pickup with a high-profile ad campaign that used storytelling to promote this experience:
This means the modern generation of strategists can use technology for positive or negative reasons. Assisting someone in eating healthy foods and exercising is one option. “Or you can develop gambling services that no one ever leaves. Or you can do a Cambridge Analytica, and develop a highly sinister political campaign,” Morton said. These choices are ethical in nature and scope, and require asking questions such as: • “Are we building something around worst intentions or are we building it for someone’s best self?”
“Brand systems need stories that … give them some color, some culture, some authenticity, some recognition,” Morton said. “And, also, brand stories need systems; they need to play out in ways that are going to reach people.”
• “Are we exploiting the user or are we respecting the user?”
4) Ethics
• “Does this product have good intentions? Is it designed to make people thrive? Or is it designed to exploit them and play on their worst selves?”
Mobile phones are often the venue for reaching people. And these devices, Morton said, exemplify the complex decisions that face experience strategists, as they are: • private, and contain huge amounts of personal data, while simultaneously connecting users to public forums, like social media; • commercial, as a business channel, while allowing people to engage in civic activities; • trivial, as consumers can play games and scroll through light-hearted content, and serious, such as by letting individuals monitor their health; • disposable, in the sense of being easy to discard or trade up, while being addictive in many ways. Brand experiences must strike the correct balance on each of these dimensions. And that means ethics should be at the center of experiential strategies. “The services that we are being asked to design are being put into extremely morally ambivalent places,” Morton said.
• “Are we thwarting a goal or are we helping people achieve a goal?”
“This isn’t like a grandiose thing that experience strategists are going to experience in the abstract,” said Morton. “Everyday, you are going to counter these little moral forks.” In choosing the right or wrong course, experience strategists can exert a colossal influence on society at large. “These are choices that a lot of brand owners don’t know how to make, a lot of the platforms are trying to stop us from making, and a lot of politicians haven’t got around to working out how to regulate or answer,” Morton said. “The truth is, if you are in experience strategy, you’re actually going to have a much bigger challenge to impact the world just by making some ethical choices about how you design products.”
Stephen Whiteside, WARC
Why Older Entrepreneurs Have the Edge By Knowledge@Wharton
Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates founded their pathbreaking companies when they were still in their teens. Steve Jobs founded Apple at 21. Their stories, which get a lot of media attention, have many believing that younger entrepreneurs are the most successful. However, research from Wharton management professor Daniel Kim shows they are exceptions to the rule, and that the average age of successful entrepreneurs is actually a lot older. The study, “Age and High-growth Entrepreneurship,” determined the most successful founders in the United States are in their 40s. Javier Miranda, principal economist at the U.S. Census Bureau; Benjamin Jones, professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University; and Pierre Azoulay, professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, coauthored the study. Kim sat down with Knowledge@Wharton to talk about why middle-aged entrepreneurs bring the benefit of experience to the founder’s table. (Listen to the podcast at the top of this page.)
Daniel Kim: There’s this prevailing view that entrepreneurs, especially the most successful ones, tend to be young. Paul Graham, a prominent venture investor, once quipped that when evaluating entrepreneurs, the cut-off is 32. After that age, they start to become a little skeptical. If that perspective is true, it raises a lot of questions on why experience doesn’t seem to matter for entrepreneurship like it does for other types of careers.
“There seemed to be this very consistent finding that the likelihood of entrepreneurial success rises with age.”
An edited transcript of the conversation follows.
Knowledge@Wharton: What are some of the advantages that younger people might have when trying to found a successful company? And what are some advantages you might have if you’re a little older?
Knowledge@Wharton: If “age ain’t nothing but a number,” as the Aaliyah song goes, why was it important to ask this research question about the average age of successful entrepreneurs?
Kim: There are some theories on why young people may be better entrepreneurs. Two ideas come to mind. One is that younger people might be more capable of disruptive ideas because they’re less beholden to existing paradigms or ways
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of doing things. As a result, they might be better positioned to come up with new, groundbreaking ideas. The second idea is that young people just have more time and energy. Because starting a venture is a really taxing journey, that might put them at an advantage. Knowledge@Wharton: To study this, how did you pinpoint age and separate high-growth start-ups from just any business? Kim: To provide a systematic answer to this question, what my co-authors and I have done is leverage confidential administrative data sets from the U.S. government that allowed us to study the population of entrepreneurs in the U.S. to have real findings on this question.
Knowledge@Wharton: What were some of the most surprising findings? What was the magic number? Kim: Among all the entrepreneurs in the U.S. between 2007 and 2014, at the time of founding, the average age was 42. The vast majority of these companies are small businesses like laundromats and restaurants that have little to no intention of growing to become a large organization. To reshift our focus on high-tech startups, which are probably the more prototypical startups we have in our minds, we looked at the high-tech industries as well as venture capital-backed and patent-owning firms. And there, the average age was slightly higher, 43. Then when we zoomed in on these entrepreneurial regions like Silicon Valley or even Boston, we found that the average age was still in the early 40s. Knowledge@Wharton: In the paper, you gave a batting average for creating successful firms. Can you share that? Kim: The real question here is, what about the most successful entrepreneurs? It’s possible that the extreme upper tail is where maybe perhaps the younger entrepreneurs really shine. We looked at the fastest-growing startups in the U.S., which would be the top 0.1% in terms of their employment growth over five years. In that region, the average age was actually higher at 45. When we took a different definition of success, which would be exits through an IPO or an acquisition, the average age was still in the mid-40s. So, there seemed to be this very consistent finding that the likelihood of entrepreneurial success rises with age. Knowledge@Wharton: Your study also found other peaks and valleys with age and entrepreneurs. Tell us about that. Kim: I think an underlying question here is, what is driving the age effect? Because age reflects many, many things in life. We know that with age, many benefits accumulate, including your social ties — your relationship with suppliers and potential hires and co-founders — as well as financial wealth and human capital that you gain from working in different companies. What we’ve found to be the most supportive in really explaining this link between age and entrepreneurial success was prior experience. The number of years that one spends in the same industry as the startup was predictive of that company’s future performance. Knowledge@Wharton: Startups are often founded by teams rather than one person. Did you find trends among founding teams? Kim: That is a ripe area for research. What we’ve done is take the average age within a founding team. Just for robustness checks, we’ve taken the oldest founder and the youngest founder. But there could be some areas that we could explore in terms of age diversity on a team. You could have the Zuckerbergs and Sheryl Sandbergs on a team, where you have a very young entrepreneur and perhaps an older manager to balance out those views. But we haven’t really directly tested for those stories yet. Knowledge@Wharton: Zuckerberg and Gates may be the exception to the rule, but your paper looks a little closer at
that. You argue that it’s not necessarily that they are outliers, but that we might be looking at the question incorrectly in terms of looking at their whole career. Kim: Right. The first point would be that when you look at just the Zuckerbergs and Gates of the world, you’re really cherrypicking the examples that the media likes to show. When we look at those individuals and their career histories, there is some evidence that over time they get better as operators and entrepreneurs of real companies. Even in that example, we have reasons to think that age is still an advantage in terms of being an entrepreneur. Knowledge@Wharton: It’s not that Mark Zuckerberg reached his peak at 19, or that Steve Jobs reached his peak at 21. Jobs did all sorts of things after 21. Elon Musk has done all sorts of things since founding Tesla. Kim: Exactly. And we want to caveat this: Some ideas just can’t wait. Zuckerberg founding a company at age 19 was the right time to do that. We’re not saying you should only be an entrepreneur when you’re 45. There are some caveats and outliers here. But we’re trying to make this general point that this link between entrepreneurship and age is a really strong one. Knowledge@Wharton: It’s not unusual at Wharton to meet undergrads who have startups or even high school students who are startup veterans. How should this research inform what we teach about entrepreneurship to younger people? We shouldn’t discourage them, but does this change the message? Kim: There are a lot of implications for educators, like those of us here at Wharton, as well as policymakers. How do we promote entrepreneurship? In teaching entrepreneurship, universities tend to focus on encouraging students to start new companies while they’re in school or shortly after graduation. Perhaps that’s the wrong model because what these results are showing us is that this might lead to suboptimal entry of young workers into entrepreneurship. This might be a very premature career move because their chances might have been better if they had gained more industry experience prior to starting their own company. We might want to think about how do we promote better entrepreneurship? Which is by encouraging students to gain relevant experience before diving into their own ventures. Knowledge@Wharton: It also seems to suggest that if you fail at one startup when you’re younger, that doesn’t mean it’s the end of the story for you. Your peak might not yet have come. Kim: Exactly. There’s the whole mantra of fail fast, so we also need to look at serial entrepreneurs, whether it really makes sense to try and then fail, and if that actually helps you become a better entrepreneur. I think the jury’s still out on that question. We hope to study that as well.
Knowledge@Wharton: How do you hope that founders and also funders engage with this research? You pointed out that venture capital often favors the young, and this research shows that might not be the best approach.
“When you look at just the Zuckerbergs and Gates of the world, you’re really cherrypicking the examples that the media likes to show.” Kim: What we did in the first place was just look at venture investors and their portfolio of companies, and then their founders, just to see whether this age bias appeared in the companies that they invest in. And we found that to be true. Among the three venture capital firms that we looked at, they really invested in younger entrepreneurs. There are two things that could be happening here. One, they could just be misinformed. Perhaps they just didn’t know that there is an age advantage to entrepreneurship. And now, they’re more informed. The second one is more nuanced. They may know what’s happening, but they also know that there’s greater bargaining power against young entrepreneurs. This is more of a rational bias, if you will. It’s really unclear why and how the investors are taking into account the age effect in entrepreneurship, but there seems to be this bias among the venture investors towards younger entrepreneurs. Knowledge@Wharton: What do you hope that midcareer or late-career professionals who are thinking about becoming entrepreneurs take from this? Kim: That’s a great point. I’ve spoken to many executive MBA students who are in their early 40s and late 30s, and I’ve heard many perspectives that it might be too late for them to become entrepreneurs. What we want to do is discourage and dispel that myth because what we’re finding is they actually might be in the best position to start new companies. Knowledge@Wharton: What are some future lines for this research? Kim: One paper that we’re trying to do right now is on immigration. We’ve been really fascinated by both the role that entrepreneurs play in the U.S. in terms of creating new jobs through new ventures, and by how population-level data sets allow us to study this in a comprehensive way. We’re looking at immigrant entrepreneurs and the role that they play in creating jobs in the U.S. economy versus the jobs that are perhaps being “taken” by new immigrants in the U.S., and really comparing those two streams.
It’s Coming: Is Your Brand Prepared for an Economic Downturn? THE WARNING SIGNS OF A RECESSION ARE ALL AROUND. ECONOMIC GROWTH SLOWED DOWN EARLIER THIS YEAR, TREASURY YIELDS ARE DOWN, FREIGHT SHIPMENTS ARE SLOWING, AND 60% OF ECONOMISTS SURVEYED BY THE NABE EXPECT A RECESSION BY THE END OF 2020. By Adam Ortman
Marketers would do well to heed the early warnings. Recession-proofing takes time and steady effort, and you will hit unforeseen speed bumps. With a head start, you can overcome those obstacles to ensure you have strong promotional offers, strategic product segmentation, and new creative ready in the wings when you need them. Proactivity can also make you nimbler. “Set it and forget it” is an excellent strategy for your Crock-Pot, but it’s an outdated approach for marketing. In our “tradigital” media ecosystem, we need to build for agility. Many traditionally minded media companies—those that rely on ads for revenue—can’t shift quickly enough and might not make it through.
Tight times mean tighter budgets To understand the need for a proactive recessionary plan, consider the effects of a recession on consumer behavior and brands’ media planning strategies. As a recession rolls in, consumers make drastic changes to their spending habits: Limiting excessive purchases or finding substitutions: Consumers will ditch luxury products, go off-brand for daily needs, and drop some planned purchases entirely. Shifting fitness or meal plans: Subscribers might decide they can plan their own meals or find cheaper alternatives online.
Trimming tech: Customers might cut the cord on their cable subscriptions or shift their mobile phone plans to be more data-heavy as a substitute for home Internet access. Rethinking travel plans: Many will choose a staycation or camping trip over more lavish getaways. Saving money: That rainy-day fund looks a lot more sensible in a downpour. As consumer spending tightens, media budgets eventually follow suit. After the 2008 crash, ad spending across all media fell 13%. Marketers tend to shift toward cheaper digital mediums instead of large TV buys or direct marketing. Those same marketers will also look for lower-cost production alternatives—using an iPhone to capture 4K video rather than investing in a high-end production crew will do just fine, right? People will seek solutions that fit a tighter budget while being able to provide fresh ad creative consistently. In the meantime, budget-crunched clients or C-suites will expect higher productivity for less.
Prepare for the worst Whatever the economic climate, planning and exercising foresight is critical to your success. The following five tactics will ensure you’re ready for the ups and downs.
1. Understand shifting consumer behaviors Deepening your understanding of how a recession will affect the behavior of your target consumers enables you to respond to those changes more effectively. Consider the fitness industry. Gym memberships are usually one of the first expenses consumers cut from their budgets. Knowing this—along with the reasons for these decisions— might encourage gyms to improve their member experiences or emphasize relationships with trainers.
2. Consider product/offering segmentations During a recession, consumers are looking for ways to save money. To stay relevant, think about new ways to offer your product that focus on lower price points. Service-based businesses such as gyms, car washes, or subscriptionbased programs will take a bigger hit in a downturn when customers explore at-home substitutes. How could you tweak your product or service to provide that lower-cost alternative? As a practical example for brick-and-mortar fitness brands, for instance, you might offer a lower-cost online program that members can follow at home in place of in-person fitness classes. You could also provide short-term discounts to members who are unemployed due to the economic downturn, allowing you to keep them as consumers during a hard financial climate. In a recession, some revenue is better than no revenue.
3. Get creative with promotions Timely promotions can grab budget-conscious customers during a downturn. Starbucks got creative during the 2008 recession by offering a free pastry with any coffee purchase before 10:30 AM. More than 1 million patrons showed up in Starbucks stores across the US to take advantage of the deal. Think about your opportunities. Finding a way to offer something free (think Amazon’s free shipping) is a big draw, but even discounts of 5-10% can help you stand out without sacrificing your bottom line. Don’t become overly dependent on those promotions, though. The long-term effect of ongoing discounts and freebies can deteriorate your brand. Instead, pinpoint valuable shortterm opportunities to generate sales without devaluing your offerings.
4. Fish with bait rather than a net During a downturn, you need to narrow your targets. Less expensive digital advertising channels are more precise and yield much more data that you can use for optimization and targeting, ultimately increasing the effectiveness of your campaigns. Many of those tools have powerful CRM capabilities. For example, Google Ads’ Customer Match or Facebook can find “customer lookalikes” and increase the power of your media campaigns. My company once used Google’s AI and machine-learning to help a financial services client increase sales 18%. There are many tools at marketers’ disposal to ensure efficient and effective performance—even when budgets are tight.
5. Demonstrate empathy Remember that your customers feel the pains of a recession just as much as your brand does. Put yourself in their shoes so you can craft marketing messages that empathize with their challenges. Consumers will be more discerning about their buying choices when money is tight. It’s perhaps not the ideal moment to lead with a $10,000 price tag as your main selling point. If you can’t avoid a high price, find ways to highlight your financing or rebate offers. Meet customers where they are, which will help you build credibility and ensure your brand remains relevant in a changing market. *** If the economists are right, a recession might be right around the corner. This is no time to panic, though. With a little proactivity, your marketing plan can guide you safely through the storm while addressing your customers’ needs.
Adam Ortman is the director of innovation and technology at Generator Media + Analytics, a fully integrated media agency in New York City.
Cultural Velocity: Five ways to make ideas move in culture By WARC Staff
Stefan Burford, Global Chief Strategy Officer at Initiative, outlines five methods by which marketers can build brand relevance in culture. The traditional model for marketing was simple – find a compelling product benefit, dramatise it in a 30-second advert (or maybe print ad) and then use that to intercept our lives in the most suitable media channels. A proven model designed to deliver reach and frequency against a predefined target audience. But technology has created not only new platforms for communication, but also increased expectations around brands and their purpose (and relevance) in our lives.
through culture not in the spaces around it. The faster they move through it, the more relevant they can become. We call this ‘Cultural Velocity’. In our new book, Cultural Velocity: Making Ideas Move, we researched, unpicked and decoded hundreds of the most successful campaigns from across the world, and identified the five paths to help brands harness this opportunity.
Cultural Agitation
The dual problem brands (particularly big brands) are facing today is that consumers can both literally and emotionally switch off. They can switch off their attention to the brands that don’t feel relevant to their lives, switch off (or at least skip through) the ads that are constantly being blasted at them or mute the conversations, content or posts that don’t interest them. But all is not lost. Great brands and ideas can still catch on, they just do so in a different way. And that is through culture. The latest research has shown that people want (and expect) brands to have a point of view on the world and play an active role for good. In many countries, particularly where there is a void of institutional leadership, they expect brands to step up, to take a stand on a range of issues, to show they care and are interested in moving culture forward in a positive way. In this fast moving and purpose focused world, all brands (big or small) have the opportunity to create new ideas so powerful, so topical and so provocative that they move
Agitation is built by challenging the status quo and associating the brand with a polarising issue (such as EDEKA supermarket clearing its shelves of foreign goods to shine a light on the power of diversity) or a person (like Nike and Colin Kaepernick with ‘Dream Crazy’). Driving conversation and attention by stirring the pot and asking the audience to pick a side. Using attention grabbing acts and a public announcement to garner media attention and amplify a message.
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Cultural spotlights
Cultural collision Collisions happen when you pair two things that aren’t usually seen together to create surprise and excitement. Bringing together unexpected elements (eg KLARNA payments firm and hip-hop star Snoop Dogg) or juxtaposing disparate things (like the exclusive clothing line made by HUMAN MADE with fast food brand KFC). Generating surprise, and thus conversation and attention, by using a spokesperson that seems quite different or collaborating with a brand or property that seems quite dissimilar.
Cultural proximity
Shining a light on an issue that is important but does not get a lot of attention (such as the award-winning Holland & Barrett ‘ME.NO.PAUSE’ campaign), and bringing it to the fore. Something that may not be that surprising, but impacts lots of people, and highlights its importance or value. Taking the interest that exists already and providing the spark that amplifies it and pushes it into mainstream consciousness.
Cultural contributors
Providing open access to information, resources, and tools, with the goal of enacting positive, meaningful cultural change. Encouraging others to participate by making it easier for them to do so (e.g. Volvo and ‘The E.V.A. Initiative’, where it released crash data to make all cars safer for everyone). Increasing the relevance of a brand by demonstrating hyperlocal knowledge and understanding. Using data to power neighbourhood specific ads, or subcultural specific passions, that show understanding and cultural embeddedness. That the brand is part of the subculture, not outside it. That the brand gets and represents the community. Spotify has consistently and successfully applied this hyper-local strategy in its annual end of year ‘Wrapped’ campaigns where they shine a light on the unexpected tastes of a neighbourhood or popularity of a song around a cultural moment.
Each of these five routes is a powerful way to build relevance in culture, but they do require a large dose of bravery. It can be easier to make a misstep and to look exploitative, fickle or out of touch. It requires an unwavering commitment to the history and authenticity of the brand as well as a constant connection with the audience and the topics that matter to them. By decoding and understanding how to make ideas that move, any brand can harness the power of ‘Cultural Velocity’.
5G’s Impact on Marketing in 2020: Trends and Predictions By Indrajeet Deshpande
2019 witnessed the emergence of 5G in its commercial usage capacity. With 2020 just around the corner, let’s look at the trends and predictions about how 5G will impact marketing in the future.
5G’s Impact on Marketing: 3 Trends
The 5G (fifth-generation wireless) network saw its first significant deployment in April 2019. This new wireless technology is about 10 times faster than its predecessor – the 4G network.
1. Demand surge in 5G mobile devices
The impact of 5G will be inevitable across different industries. The rapid growth of technologies, such as the internet of things (IoT), immersive technology, artificial intelligence (AI), and the rise of 5G could lead to great things for marketers. As marketers are bracing themselves for 2020, let’s look at the trends and predictions surrounding 5G’s impact on marketing.
Here are three key trends that will define the impact of 5G on marketing:
5G will continue to be a novelty as 2020 begins, and after much controversy and debate that happened in 2019, users will want to experience it firsthand. This means there will be a high demand for 5G-enabled smartphones. This changing behavior will require brands to rethink their mobile experience. Here are a few trends that will take center stage: Brands will prioritize website speed optimization and performance. 5G’s low latency network will easily distinguish poor-performing websites. Google Chrome’s
mobile app has already started notifying users if a website is slow to load. Brands will create more ephemeral content and focus more on mobile-only platforms to drive engagement. As the usage of social media, video games, etc. will grow, advertising needs to become more niche/platform specific. Marketers will compartmentalize ad campaigns and targeting strategies for specific social media platforms and apps/games.
2. The true potential of high-res videos Verizon Media surveyed advertisers and customers to understand the impact 5G will have from their perspectives. Here are three key findings: 72% are looking forward to faster data transfer speeds 57% are excited to stream HD video content 54% want better quality video streaming experience One of the biggest obstacles preventing marketers from doubling down on videos is the page load speed. 4G networks are fast, but lag issues still creep up when streaming videos. 5G, on the other hand, will reduce the buffer time to nil. Video advertising will be the biggest beneficiary of this. Brands will fully embrace video and make it a primary component of their advertising strategy. According to eMarketer, the digital video ad spend in the U.S. alone will go up to $22.18 billion.
3. Content creation for smartphone usage There’s a difference between how users use a computer and smartphone. Desktop search queries can be more elaborate, whereas smartphone usage is more “in the moment.” Keeping this in mind, marketers will create content that is more suitable for mobile devices. The content will be created around screenless searches (voice search and digital assistants) and micro-moments (I want to go, know, do, or buy). Therefore, the content will be more conversational and FAQ-themed to help users find information on the go.
5G’s Impact on Marketing: 3 Predictions Here are three potential impacts of 5G on marketing that we can expect in 2020:
1. IoT and Advertising The biggest strength of IoT and wearable technology is the depth of personalization, and organizations can immensely benefit from it as 5G adoption grows. Connected devices are a data goldmine for advertisers. This can enable advertisers to run personalized, contextual, and locationbased ads. 5G and IoT combined can up the ante through real-time
“While it’s still too early to determine all of the ways 5G will impact retail, the sky’s the limit on how this technology can improve and enhance the customer experience, and so it’s important that retailers prepare by understanding the various types of 5G networking capabilities.” ~ Sunil Kumar, CEO and co-Founder, GroundTruth, exclusively to MarTech Advisor ads. For instance, if you are near a supermarket you regularly shop at, location-based ads or push notifications can show you a list of groceries you can buy based on your historical data and consumption patterns.
2. Brands Will Dive Into Immersive Technologies The last few years have seen brands experimenting with augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). One of the primary reasons why AR, VR, and all forms of extended reality (XR) haven’t become mainstream yet is because these technologies need high bandwidth, low latency network to deliver an optimal experience. With the introduction of 5G, marketers can experiment more with these technologies to make the customer experience and buyer journey more immersive and interactive.
3. Better Customer Experience (CX) 5G will increase the utility of smartphone and IoT devices in users’ lives. Hyper-personalized content delivery, highbandwidth digital experiences, faster websites will ensure the CX is exceptional. It’s also predicted that the usage of ad blockers will go down, allowing advertisers to serve ads effectively.
Parting Words There’s still plenty of time for 5G to become mainstream. Also, the data usage limit or the pricing for 5G data plans could be a challenge, which marketers need to take into account. But that shouldn’t deter brands from being creative, right? Indrajeet is a Marketing professional with 6+ years of experience in managing different facets of Digital Marketing. After working with SpiderG - a Pune based SaaS startup, he is now ready to work as a freelance marketer with different SaaS startups helping them with marketing strategy, plan and execution.
20 Fresh Examples Of Customer Experience Innovation For B2B By Blake Morgan
B2B companies aren’t typically known for being customer centric. But a recent push for customer experience has put B2B customers in the middle of many companies’ strategic decisions. Accenture reports that 90% of B2B executives say customer experience is very important to achieving their organizations’ strategic priorities, and many companies are finding innovative solutions.
customers to connect with other IT professionals and get the latest news on Apple products. The community encourages customers to share ideas and start conversations to improve all aspects of their businesses. Jamf even hosts user conferences and events around the country to build community.
Customer experience innovation takes on many forms in the B2B world, from leveraging new technology to streamlining sales journeys and offering personalized marketing. Here are 20 examples of how B2B companies are building innovative customer experiences.
Instead of waiting 20 days to secure a traditional small business loan, Kabbage created an entirely online system that approves customers in 10 minutes or less. The customizable system streamlines the lending process and takes out much of the headache of funding a small business.
Thyssenkrupp
Kabbage
Coca-Cola
Elevator company Thyssenkrupp recently started using VR in many of its global showrooms so that customers can truly experience a Thyssenkrupp elevator or stairlift instead of reading a catalog. Customers can see how the item would look and work in their space and better understand the technology that goes into creating a powerful elevator.
A major problem for B2B Coca-Cola customers was visualizing how the vending machines or coolers would look in their space. Coca-Cola turned to AR so that customers can see how each type of beverage display would look and fit in their store. Being able to see exactly how the design works in the space helps customers feel more confident in their purchase.
Knotel
Nationwide
Knotel designs personalized workspaces for small companies, but putting customers in the offices was the best way to improve up the overall experience. Knotel built a popup showroom in New York for potential customers to walk through flexible office spaces and work with representatives in person to design their perfect office space.
Insurance company Nationwide runs a department called the Office of Customer Advocacy to help B2B clients better understand their policies and payouts. Instead of leaving customers in the dark during the often-complicated insurance process, Nationwide advocates for customers and collects data to continually improve.
Jamf
Hubspot
Jamf, a company that helps small businesses manage their Apple devices, created a community called Jamf Nation for
Hubspot customers are acknowledged and welcomed to the website right away with a chatbot called HubBot. The bot
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asks a few basic questions to understand the customer and get the right human agent to connect. HubBot can answer questions and streamlines much of the overall experience.
Bell Canada B2B communications company Bell Canada proactively finds ways to solve customers’ problems by identifying common questions or issues. When the company sees a trend in customers calling with a particular question, it creates self-service solutions such as phone instructions or email directions to help customers solve the problem on their own without having to call the company.
Cisco It’s one thing to see an item in a catalog, but it’s another to experience it in real life. Cisco used AR and VR technology to create an interactive product catalog customers can access anywhere in the world. The technology allows customers to see products in 3D and imagine them in their business before actually making the purchase.
Paycor Aside from its payroll solutions products, Paycor also runs an HR Center of Excellence to serve as a resource for all HR issues. The company gathers data from 30,000 HR and finance professionals to provide its customers with real action plans to drive success in all areas of their businesses.
Hexagon To build a transparent relationship with customers, industrial IT solutions company Hexagon created an AR version of its annual report. Customers and shareholders can see a virtual demonstration of products in the report on their smartphone to see all the features and get authentic updates from the company.
RapidMiner B2B tech company RapidMiner helps customers get where they need to go quickly with an online chatbot called MarlaBot. The first simple question of asking customers what brought them to RapidMiner points them in the right direction to either automatically answer questions or connect them with a human sales rep without wasting time.
Sodexo Management services company Sodexo created a pop-up commercial showroom in Paris so its customers could truly experience its line of catering items. The company partnered with a local restaurant so customers could see the items in action before making a purchase.
ServiceMax Management software company ServiceMax knows its products are used by a wide variety of industries, each with their own unique needs and applications. To create a more personalized experience, the company uses machine learning technology to quickly discover a website visitor’s purpose and predict their most rewarding journey. Instead of having to
sort through dozens of products that don’t apply to them, customers are automatically routed to personalized pages for their line of work, which creates a more convenient buying journey.
Fidelity The simple act of suggesting next steps ensures B2B customers get all the help they need. When a Fidelity customer changes their business address, for example, the automatic list of suggested next steps could recommend the customer order new checks or change their insurance. The proactive list helps customers stay on top of everything and prevents future issues from arising.
Ingersoll Rand The B2B HVAC business uses AI to segment customers based on industry and location. Real-time data alerts the company to changes in weather and climate, so the company can address issues in areas hit by storms or severe weather. Offering an automatic and personalized experience for each customer helps relieve much of the stress of running a business.
VMWare To establish itself as an industry leader and provide resources for customers, cloud infrastructure company VMWare produces large amounts of content on blogs and user guides. To ensure content is accurate and timely, the company uses an AI-powered editor. The editor also sorts content to more accurately recommend the right articles to each customer.
Motorex Oil company Motorex created an AR-powered interactive factory tour to highlight the unique aspects of its product. As B2B customers toured the facility, they could stop at access hidden AR content with their phones. The tech-driven tour added transparency to the company and showed how it differs from the competition.
Qumolo Data storage company Qumolo runs a portal called Qumolo Care that gives customers quick access to self-service resources and a community to share best practices and collaborate. The portal allows customers to take control of their own experience and get the most out of the product as possible.
Mack B2B customers don’t want to be pushed into a large sale before they’re ready, so truck company Mack uses AI to nurture relationships until customers are at a point to actually buy. The company tracks the website activity of potential customers and only sends their information to a local dealer once they hit certain KPIs. The move helps salespeople know their leads are serious and stops customers from wasting time before they’re ready. These 20 companies show the constant need to establish strong B2B customer relationships and provide innovative and convenient solutions.
6 Social Media Predictions for 2020 [Infographic] By Anna Bredava
To make relevant predictions for the year ahead, it’s vital to first have an understanding of what’s been going on social media for the past couple of years. This includes the tests that have been carried out, the bans that have been introduced, the regulations that have been changed, etc. At my company, Awario, we’re always watching closely, and for our 2020 trend predictions, we took a deeper look at both the trends that have been evolving for some time, along with more recent shifts. We’ve collected our findings into this infographic, which covers a range of key areas that are likely to see increased focus as we head into a new decade. Hopefully these tips will help with your strategic planning.
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Anna Bredava, Social Media Marketing Manager. As a social media marketing manager for Awario, I love talking about all things social media. I write a monthly write up focusing on the major news from social media industry as well as explore and analyze social media data on Awario’s blog.
The Top 10 Events That Shaped – And Rocked – The Digital Ad Industry Over The Past Decade By Allison Schiff
The programmatic ecosystem spent the last 10 years in a state of hyper growth, and programmatic spending surpassed $100 billion dollars globally for the first time in 2019.
“The commodity ones went out of business or turned into DSPs or SSPs,” said Chris Kane, founder and CEO of programmatic consultancy Jounce Media.
While the next 10 years will likely bring a slowdown due to market maturation and data regulations, it’s indisputable that programmatic buying and the rise of ad tech changed the face of digital advertising.
But the ad network model of buying and repackaging ad space, marking it up and then flipping it for a profit with a nontransparent margin is still alive and well – just look at the walled gardens.
Here are 10 of the biggest trends to impact ad tech, digital marketing and the programmatic space since, in the words of MediaMath CEO Joe Zawadzki, the math men took over.
“We think more than half of programmatic advertising is
Any others you’d add? Leave your feedback in the comments. From remnant to premium Back in the late ’90s, real-time bidding was synonymous with remnant inventory. It took a long time for the worm to turn, and roughly five or six years ago, advertisers started asking to transact more premium placements programmatically – “a clear sign that programmatic had potential to be more than an inventory waste bin,” said Adam Schenkel, SVP of global commercial development at GumGum. Private marketplaces, programmatic guaranteed, progress in the fight against fraud and the rise of header bidding all helped contribute to the mindshift, said Dennis Buchheim, EVP and GM of the IAB Tech Lab. But although trust issues continue to cast some doubt on the quality of programmatic, the association with remnant inventory is mainly a thing of the past.
Fall of the ad nets This more premium ecosystem created far less room for traditional ad networks, which had been in decline since the emergence of the ad exchange.
from ad networks, mostly the Google Display Network,” Kane said. And ad networks are doing just fine in the app world too, where real-time auctions are only just starting to gain traction.
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Mobile dominates It was “the year of mobile” so many times over the past decade that the prediction became a punchline. Today, mobile is the dominant and driving force in digital advertising.
Privacy gets real … and cookies face an uncertain future
But the transition didn’t take as long as it seemed, said Andrew Frank, a research VP at Gartner. “Hype always makes things seem to take longer to reach maturity than tech fans initially think they will,” he said. But mobile ad revenue did take its sweet time catching up with user growth. It finally started to happen in 2018, when desktop and mobile ad spend drew nearly even with time spent in those channels, compared with the wide gulf that previously existed between the two – a chasm repeatedly pointed out by Mary Meeker in her annual trend reports.
Rise of the walled gardens
There’s no doubt that privacy is getting real for the advertising industry as regulations come into effect around the world, and the browsers crack down on cross-site tracking. But the cookie didn’t just decide to crumble. There were numerous watershed moments that contributed to consumer wariness of online advertising and the data collection that supports it, said Omer Tene, VP and chief knowledge officer at the International Association of Privacy Professionals. Ed Snowden’s revelations about government access to data, the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the constant drumbeat of massive-scale data breaches, like Equifax, all affected the privacy of nearly every American household. But although cookies and cross-site tracking face an uncertain future, it’s not a foregone conclusion that “2020” will be the date of death engraved on their tombstones. If there’s any one trend that characterizes the 2010s, it’s the walled gardens reigning supreme. But it wasn’t inevitable that Facebook and Google would play such a domineering role. “It was really clear that they would have massive ad businesses – but not at all clear that they would close off third-party demand, third-party targeting data and thirdparty measurement,” Jounce’s Kane said. Some of the largest advertisers on the planet, including P&G and Unilever, rail against walled garden dominance, but the weight that big buyers throw around has nothing on the scale that Facebook and Google garner from small and medium-sized businesses. SMBs are an enormous source of ad revenue for the walled gardens, attracted by easy-to-use self-service tools that help the little guys achieve digital scale. “There are millions of advertisers who only buy on Facebook and Google,” Kane said. “The long tail has been totally neglected by the DSPs.”
“To be sure, regulations keep tightening controls and intensifying scrutiny on ad tech, [but] until digital gatekeepers, such as browser makers and app store platforms, act decisively – which could raise competition concerns – we are unlikely to witness a dramatic shift,” Tene said.
In-housing Agency-client trust hasn’t been anything to write home about for some time, and brands brought their digital marketing efforts in house and demanded greater transparency from their agency partners. But the scale of in-housing activity by large advertisers is actually limited, said Brian Wieser, global president of business intelligence at GroupM. “It’s worth considering whether or not an in-housing initiative is mostly about taking ownership of contracts or working with a managed service, which, for lack of better characterization, may be an agency by a different name,” said Wieser.
The switch to first-price auctions
TTD takes over The Trade Desk, which went public in 2016, separated itself from the pack partially because it was a little late to the DSP space, but not late enough that it missed the boat. “They could see how the landscape was developing with fresh eyes,” said Joanna O’Connell, a VP and principal analyst at Forrester. “To that point, they started out smart by going hard after agencies with an easy-to-use tool – a way to get scale quickly.” And The Trade Desk’s post-IPO success “has been great for the industry,” MacKeigan said. TTD’s finance department has done an “miraculous job of creating predictability and forecasting in an industry that is notoriously bad at it,” he said. “That’s why The Trade Desk gets rewarded with the multiples that they do.”
The lack of transparency was a factor in the shift away from second-price auctions. Second-price was the name of the game in programmatic for so long because of how effective it is for search, and we all know who dominates the search market. But Google’s firstprice advantage, thanks to the favorable relationship it had set up between DoubleClick for Publishers and AdX, began to rankle, and by 2015, header bidding was in full swing. The rise of header bidding was a major factor driving the industry’s embrace of first price, as were “complicated and unclear auction dynamics,” like bid shading, which caused buyers to demand more transparency, said Kyle Dozeman, VP of advertiser solutions at PubMatic.
TTD is also good at reading the tea leaves in another area: digital video, particularly OTT and CTV, where the company has made a big, concerted and “very smart” investment, O’Connell said.
Enter data-driven TV If it’s been the year of mobile since what feels like the dawn of time, the same could be said for the slow and (sort of) steady march toward using digital techniques to transact and evaluate TV advertising. Progress in this area has been … less than rapid. But the legacy linear TV business is finally showing signs of shifting. And it’s about time. Consumer behavior is moving to digital viewing at a rapid clip.
The switch from second-price to first happened fairly quickly once it started. “If one exchange was on first price, that exchange benefited more than other exchanges,” Dozeman said. “Once one moved, all had to move and had to move quickly if they didn’t want to lose share of wallet.” Even Google caved with a move to first price for Google Ad Manager in March.
Ad tech consolidates With a few noteworthy exceptions like The Trade Desk, the public markets have not been kind to ad tech companies. So consolidation became inevitable, although not all of the exits were enviable. “If you look at the LUMAscape, the vast majority of consolidation has come through bankruptcy,” said Dan MacKeigan, a founding partner of Spring Lake Equity Partners. The main factors driving consolidation in the ad tech industry over the past 10 years actually had more to do with desperation than enthusiasm about the sector. “Net consolidation in ad tech is underway as far fewer companies are being founded and funded,” said Elgin Thompson, managing director of technology investment banking at JMP Securities.
But although the industry is taking notice, it’s still too optimistic to say that data-driven TV is here. Better keep an eye on the next 10 years as the tectonic plates of TV buying continue to shift. “Don’t expect the whole world to look different overnight,” O’Connell said.
The Architects of Our Digital Hellscape Are Very Sorry TECH LEADERS NEED TO INNOVATE ON THEIR APOLOGIES. BUT GIVEN THE STATE OF THE INTERNET, IS A MEANINGFUL MEA CULPA EVEN POSSIBLE? By Rose Eveleth
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If you’re feeling a bit uneasy right now, you’re not alone. It’s the end of not just a year but a decade, and we’re not exactly closing on a high note. There’s more misinformation than ever, climate change is putting the future of humanity at risk, devices are eroding our privacy, and the police are happily tagging along at each and every step. What happened to the internet we were promised at the beginning of the decade, the one so full of creativity, connection, and joy? It was squandered, as many writers have pointed out, by engineers and CEOs who opted for profit over people at every turn with seemingly no consequences. As these people’s role in creating a physical and digital world built on surveillance, harassment, and child labor has become more clear, we’ve seen a wave of pseudo apologies for the tools and decisions that got us here. For the past few years, the men (and it’s almost entirely men) who built this digital hellscape have been on a veritable atonement tour. Chris Wetherell fessed up to the RT button on Twitter’s being perhaps a bad idea. Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes admitted that Facebook had become too powerful. Another former Facebook employee, Sandy Parakilas, admitted that the company had no real interest in protecting user data. Ethan Zuckerman took credit, and blame, for his role in building an ad-supported internet (and coding the first popup ad). Guillaume Chaslot, a former YouTube engineer, revealed just how bad and biased the site’s algorithm has become. Loren Brichter, who helped invent the infinite scroll, made his regrets public. Even Mark Zuckerberg uttered the words “I’m sorry” in congressional testimony. Yet none of it feels satisfying. Perhaps it’s because many of these apologies only happen when these men have something else to promote, like a book, a TED talk, or a new company. (Writer Audrey Watters has termed this lucrative side business the “regrets industry.”) Perhaps it’s because most of these men are still incredibly wealthy, thanks in large part to the decisions they’re theoretically apologizing for. Perhaps it’s because, Zuckerberg aside, they almost never actually say the magic phrase that every child learns: “I’m sorry.” Or perhaps it’s because it would be impossible for one person to apologize for the current state of the internet. Let’s start by laying out what separates a good apology from a bad one. Writer Lux Alptraum, the author of Faking It: The Lies Women Tell About Sex—and the Truths They Reveal, has thought (and written) a lot about this question. She suggested a three-part test for these techpologies. “A good apology says, number one, ‘This was bad, I recognize this was bad, and you are perfectly within your right to be hurt and angry and upset.’ Number two, a good apology says not just that harm was caused but that the harm was someone’s responsibility. And, ideally, number three, it shows growth and commitment to repair.” It turns out that when you look at the apologies offered by the architects of our technological present, they often fail at least two of these three things. Number one: The apologizer must recognize the harm done. Some techpologies do this well. Chaslot, the former YouTube engineer who built the platform’s recommendation algorithm,
has tweeted about how that algorithm specifically impacted public understanding of things like the shape of the Earth, which is not merely subject to silly (and false) conspiracy theories but has also been connected to the murder of over 600 teachers by Boko Haram in Nigeria. Parakilas, one of the contrite former Facebookers, wrote that if the company isn’t regulated, “nothing less than democracy is at stake.” Other times, apologizers are vague about the actual impact of their work, or they focus on their initial goals rather than the outcome. The Chris Hughes “regreditorial,” for example, never actual states the harm Facebook has done beyond saying very generally that “the News Feed algorithm could change our culture, influence elections and empower nationalist leaders.” (Unlike Parakilas, Hughes won’t go so far as to say that Facebook threatens democracy, only that it “could” have “influence.”) Justin Rosenstein, a former Facebook employee apologizing for inventing the “Like” button, told The Guardian, “It is very common for humans to develop things with the best of intentions and for them to have unintended, negative consequences.” Then there’s apology criterion number two: Take responsibility for the harm that you’ve just acknowledged. Those who do this almost always speak from a place of remove—as former employees who, years later, look back and safely regret their role in all of this. And even here, there’s a catch. In most cases, the people apologizing don’t really deserve the full credit or blame for the technology in question. Even if a piece of software or hardware were invented by one person alone, its use and deployment would never be a singular decision. Chris Wetherell, who was profiled by BuzzFeed as “The Man Who Built the Retweet,” cannot take sole responsibility for the impact of this button. Wetherell seems to know this: In his Twitter bio, he clarifies that he “Only *HELPED* build retweet.” Though Zuckerman, now the director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, has apologized for his part in building an ad-supported web, he also can’t take responsibility for an entire business model. “The notion that I invented anything is just absurd,” he told me. “It was a shitty decision and a shitty move, but it wasn’t exactly a move of technical brilliance. There’s no way I can take responsibility for the harms or benefits of the web as a whole.” Yet to hear an apology coming from a brand isn’t likely to feel satisfying either. For all their horny tweets, brands are not people, and people may be inclined to feel that corporate communications reflect cold, calculated PR rather than true and genuine emotion. When Uber spent $500 million apologizing for everything from the CEO’s connection to Donald Trump to allegations of gender bias and sexual harassment, the campaign failed to change most people’s minds. Even Zuckerberg’s apology to Congress felt more like a faceless Uber ad than a real person’s reckoning with his sins. “Either you over-empower individuals and give them too much credit, which is what happened to me,” said Zuckerman, “or you have people who really are that powerful and then you’re perhaps not dealing with a human being anymore so much as you’re dealing with a media brand.” Here is perhaps where journalists should fess up to being part of this problem. We love a personal redemption story,
even if it’s ultimately toothless. By allowing individuals to take responsibility for the digital mess we’re in, the media perpetuates the “great man” myth. This not only misrepresents how technology is built and deployed, it impedes discussion of meaningful solutions and progress. When journalists overstate one person’s role in creating the problem, we also overestimate their ability to fix it. Take Tristan Harris, for example, who has made a second career out of warning people about the perils of “attention stealing” systems. His argument is that he was once the problem, and now he can be the solution. This is a narrative that journalists love: This very publication called Harris “part Don Draper, part Carrie Mathison, and part John Nash as portrayed by Russell Crowe.” But Harris can no more be blamed for “attention stealing” writ large as he can be expected to fix it singlehandedly. This brings us to the third part of the three-point test: showing some kind of meaningful action toward repair. I think this is where many tech apologies feel unsatisfying to the consumers who are living with the consequences. Because almost none of these people who trot out their apologies can, on their own, repair the harm done. “You should be able to ask someone who’s apologizing for something to undo it,” says Zuckerman. “Part of what’s so unsatisfying is the thing they’re apologizing for isn’t undoable.” In some cases, it’s unclear whether those expressing their misgivings and regrets are even trying. Many still work for companies within this ecosystem, gathering a steady and probably lucrative paycheck while slamming their former employers. Parakilas, who has called out Facebook for data harvesting, went from Facebook to Uber, and now works at Apple. Rosenstein, who helped implement the “Like” button at Facebook, and who has spoken up about the addictive nature of said likes, cofounded a company that “improves office productivity.” “These people are getting status and money and clearing their conscience, but the rest of us aren’t getting anything but the recognition that we live in a fucked up world,” says Alptraum.
For his part, Zuckerman is working to fix the problem he helped create. He’s currently working on imagining and building a new way of thinking about the web—one that looks more like a public good than a private-monopoly-run product. “I don’t feel like I have the solution. What I do think is that everybody who is critiquing platforms is thinking way too small. They’re thinking about small tweaks to a system that is pretty badly broken. What we actually need is a much better vision of social media that is actually good for us as citizens in a democracy. ” It’s also possible that it’s too soon to judge any of these apologies. Changing an entire system takes teams and years of work. “The apology has to be the start of a process, and maybe the reason an apology feels unsatisfying is that they feel like the end of the process,” says Zuckerman. “If the apology is the first step, then maybe we appreciate the apology five, 10, 20 years later. Some of these apologies are insincere, some are inappropriate, and some just aren’t there yet. We have to give people the time to see.” Perhaps my desire to see a meaningful apology for our current digital hellscape is wishful thinking. It might, in fact, be impossible to properly apologize for any of this. (In fact, some research hints that apologies are always better when we imagine them than when we actually receive them.) But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. “Maybe the apology is the first step in trying to think about doing that affirmative, forward-looking work,” Zuckerman told me. So this December, I’m channeling a sentiment that several celebrities have lately shared on Instagram earlier this year: “I don’t want to end this year on bad terms with anybody. APOLOGIZE TO ME.” Rose Eveleth (@roseveleth) is an Ideas contributor at WIRED. She’s also the host and producer of “Flash Forward,” a podcast about possible (and not so possible) future scenarios, and has covered everything from fake tumbleweed farms to million-dollar baccarat heists.
How to Maximize Your Startup’s Content-Marketing Budget BUSINESSES WITH RAZOR-THIN MARGINS CAN STILL GENERATE REAL ROI. By Lucas Miller
You’re running a new startup and trying your hardest to keep your budget alive -- sound familiar? If so, content marketing might not seem like your top priority, but it can be vital to your company’s success. According to reserach performed by Aberdeen, 51 percent of companies report that leads from content marketing are of a higher quality than leads found through traditional advertising. So even if you’re busy putting out the various fires that inevitably occur at young companies, the time and money spent on content marketing will give you unmatchable ROI. In a way, you can hardly afford not to do it. The question is: How do you create effective content when your budget is smaller than you’d like?
Start a Blog (Yes, This Still Works) Creating a blog is an easy first step toward improving content marketing without breaking your budget. Situate it somewhere on your website that is easy to find, and include links in your posts to other parts of the site. Plus, there are a few options for how you can generate blog content at a low price. First, you can write the posts yourself. After all, you are running a business; you clearly have some expertise in your industry. You can also have members of your team create content, particularly if they have strong writing skills and an open hour or two in their schedules. (A.I.-powered tools like Grammarly are helpful in aiding employees who don’t have writing expertise.) Another option is to hire a freelance writer. Freelance content writers having varying rates and varying quality levels, so you may need to spend some time searching for who’s a good match with your budget and quality goals.
Monitor Buzzing Industry Topics There’ll come a moment in every content marketer’s life where they hit a road block in finding topics to write about. Fortunately, there are simple ways to get around that issue. Follow industry leaders and other competitors to see what topics are popular in your field. It’s important to create content based around ideas people want to read about. It’s also important to use data on your own content to see which
topics are most effective at turning leads into customers. You can use tools such as Google Analytics to track this.
Build an Engaged Subscriber List A recent study by Adobe found that roughly 98 percent of millennials check their personal email at least every few hours. It’s not surprising, then, that email marketing has been found to be a highly effective, low-cost, low-effort tack. The first step in email marketing is to produce content that can populate a regular newsletter. The good news is that if you are already putting time and effort into blog writing, you can simply repurpose that content. All it takes is a slight change of format, and you have a ready-to-go message for your dedicated customers. The next step is to build a strong list of email subscribers. This can be a slow process, but the higher quality content you send, the quicker this process should be. Once you have a large strong list of subscribers, you have access to people who’ve already declared themselves fans of your content and can function as top-quality leads. And with most email-marketing services, you can track open rates, helping you determine which newsletters are more appealing to the largest cross-section of subscribers. Pay attention to this data and refine your content accordingly.
Create Video Content Written content is awesome, but video has an even higher ROI. A survey conducted by Renderforest found that 78 percent of businesses increased their web traffic after creating video content. It can seem more difficult to produce on a small budget, but there are a multitude of free apps and tools to help you create zero-budget, high-quality videos with your own phone. Apps like Splice, Videoshop and InShot are easy to use and will make your videos look professional. To save time, reuse topics from your blogs and email newsletters. By repurposing your pre-gathered information, you can create highly engaging video content on a very short time schedule. And as you know -- and is central to all the above suggestions -- more time saved equals more money saved.
How to read body language: Examples from around the world By Terence Brake
If you want to make a great first impression no matter where you are, learning how to read body language is key. And while you may be familiar with the customs and nonverbal cues of your own culture, traveling abroad is a different story. Different cultures have their own interpretations of body language. For example, direct eye contact may be expected in one country, but be inappropriate in another. Some other important nonverbal cues to pay attention to are hand gestures, personal space, and even posture. Included below are some helpful tips on how to read body language, as well as a few examples of body language from around the world.
5 Tips on How to Read Body Language 1. Proximity Paying attention to how close someone stands to others during conversation is vital. If you stand too close to someone, it
might be a sign of aggression in their culture. On the other hand, if you stand too far away, it might come across as insincere. In Japan, it’s common to have more of a distance between others. One reason for this need of extra space is the bow made when greeting others. This is quite different from Latin American cultures, which are very tactile and affectionate. When speaking with someone from a Latin American country, be prepared to stand very close to the other person.
2. Face and Eyes Many times, observing a person’s facial expressions can tell much more than their words. Is the person looking away, or at someone else? This might mean that he or she is not fully engaged in the conversation. Direct eye contact on the other hand is typically a sign of
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genuine interest. Another sign of sincerity is a smile that involves the entire face. A smile that involves just the mouth might be a forced smile.
3. Hand Gestures Always be sure to observe the hands of whoever you’re speaking with. Are they motioning with their hands as they speak, or are their hands folded? In what context do they use certain gestures or signs? A seemingly small gesture can have a positive meaning in one country, but a completely opposite meaning in another. In the US for example, a thumbs-up sign signals a confirmation. In the Middle East, however this same gesture is offensive!
Head Movement Head movements can have very different meanings in different parts of the world. For example, in India, a side-toside head tilt is used to confirm something. In Japan, a nod means that you have been heard, but not necessarily that there is agreement.
Eye Contact In most Western cultures, eye contact shows that you are being attentive and interested in the speaker. Constant eye contact in Japan can make people feel incredibly awkward.
4. Arm and Feet Positioning Posture is also key in understanding body language. Pay attention to how others’ arms and feet are positioned while speaking. In some cultures, folding your arms across your chest appears standoffish and even insulting. Sitting positions are also very important. Positioning your feet to show your soles while sitting is considered very rude in most Middle Eastern countries.
5. Mirroring Appropriate body language in a culture will usually be mirrored. So one of the most important tips on how to read body language is by merely observing the other person to see if he or she is mirroring your movements. It’s always on the safe side to shadow what you see others doing in another culture. Over time you’ll learn to adopt that culture’s customs so you don’t stand out too much from the crowd!
Body Language Examples From Around the Globe Check out this animated infographic with examples of how body language differs around the world. Be sure to click on each magnifying glass for more details! Here are some more body language examples that represent the many cultural differences around the world.
In Spanish and Arabic cultures, strong visual contact is very common between people of the same sex and not looking back is often considered disrespectful.
Nose Contact Blowing your nose into a handkerchief is a typical action in
Western cultures, but it’s considered dirty and rude to the Japanese. Tapping your nose in Italy means “watch out,” while it means that something is “confidential” in the UK.
Lips and Kisses In the Filipino culture, the lips are used to point toward something, while Americans would use their fingers. Kisses in public are a normal way to say hello or goodbye to a loved one in some European cultures, but in Asian cultures, these gestures are considered intimate and are often left for the privacy of one’s home.
Finger Signs It’s important to be cautious when using finger gestures in other countries. Here are the various meanings of joining the thumb and index finger to form a ring: This is positive sign in the US, meaning “OK.” In France and Germany, this signals “zero” or “nothing.” In Japan, this sign means “money” if you’re in a professional setting.
Physical Contact While an almost automatic response for some people, touch is very important to consider when with people from other cultures. In the British culture for example, they are more conservative with their tactile gestures. In the US, Americans are more open to handshakes and hugs. Other countries where it may be considered rude to touch others include: Japan Australia New Zealand Portugal Scandinavia Some countries where it’s generally okay to touch the other speaker include: Turkey France
In some Mediterranean, Arabic, and Latin American countries, this gesture is an obscenity.
Italy
Proximity
Spain
Personal space varies greatly across cultures. It’s common in China for people to stand very close to one another, while Americans are accustomed to a lot of physical space. Latin American cultures are very tactile and affectionate so they also stand closer to one another.
Greece
Terence Brake is an author in the global learning & development field and has over 20 years experience helping executives to work better across cultures.
Book,
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The Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences (Financial Times Series) By Matt Watkinson This book covers ten principles you can use to make real world improvements to your customers’ experiences, whatever your business does and whoever you are. For managers, leaders and those starting a new business, the book shows that making improvements customers will appreciate doesn’t need to be complicated or cost a fortune.
Sinker Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (3rd Edition) (Voices That Matter) 3rd Edition By Steve Krug Since Don’t Make Me Think was first published in 2000, hundreds of thousands of Web designers and developers have relied on usability guru Steve Krug’s guide to help them understand the principles of intuitive navigation and information design. Witty, commonsensical, and eminently practical, it’s one of the best-loved and most recommended books on the subject.
By Marty Neumeier
Get Scrappy: Smarter Digital Marketing for Businesses Big and Small
When everybody zigs, zag,” says Marty Neumeier in this fresh view of brand strategy. ZAG follows the ultra-clear “whiteboard overview” style of the author’s first book, THE BRAND GAP, but drills deeper into the question of how brands can harness the power of differentiation. The author argues that in an extremely cluttered marketplace, traditional differentiation is no longer enough— today companies need “radical differentiation” to create lasting value for their shareholders...
By Nick Westergaard It’s an exciting time to be in marketing, with an array of equalizing platforms from the Internet to social media to content marketing, that have reset the playing field for businesses large and small. Yet, it’s also a challenging time, with much work to do and an ever-changing array of platforms, features, and networks to master--all on tighter budgets than ever before. Don’t get discouraged, get scrappy!
Change Anything: The New Science of Personal Success
Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content
Zag: The Number One Strategy of High-Performance Brands
By Kerry Patterson A stunning new approach to how individuals can not only change their lives for the better in the workplace, but also their lives away from the office, including (but not limited to) finding ways to improve one’s working relationship with others, one’s overall health, outlook on life, and so on.
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business By Charles Duhigg In The Power of Habit, award-winning business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. Distilling vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives that take us from the boardrooms of Procter & Gamble to the sidelines of the NFL to the front lines of the civil rights movement...
By Ann Handley Everybody Writes is a go-to guide to attracting and retaining customers through stellar online communication, because in our content-driven world, every one of us is, in fact, a writer. If you have a web site, you are a publisher. If you are on social media, you are in marketing. And that means that we are all relying on our words to carry our marketing messages. We are all writers.
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less By Greg McKeown The Way of the Essentialist isn’t about getting more done in less time. It’s about getting only the right things done. It is not a time management strategy, or a productivity technique. It is a systematic discipline for discerning what is absolutely essential, then eliminating everything that is not, so we can make the highest possible contribution towards the things that really matter.
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Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life
The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster: Why Now Is the Time to #JoinTheRide
By Susan David
By Darren Hardy
Emotional agility is a revolutionary, science-based approach that allows us to navigate life’s twists and turns with self-acceptance, clear-sightedness, and an open mind. Renowned psychologist Susan David developed this concept after studying emotions, happiness, and achievement for more than twenty years.
The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster: Why Now Is The Time To #JoinTheRide, will prepare you for the wild ride of entrepreneurship. It will warn you (of forthcoming fears, doubts, and the selfdefeating conditioning of your upbringing and past), inoculate you (from the naysayers, dreamstealers, and pains of rejection and failure), and guide you...
Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time Kindle Edition
Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike
By Brian Tracy The legendary Eat That Frog! (more than 1.5 million copies sold worldwide and translated into 42 languages) will change your life. There just isn’t enough time for everything on our “To Do” list—and there never will be. Successful people don’t try to do everything. They learn to focus on the most important tasks and make sure they get done.
By Phil Knight Bill Gates named Shoe Dog one of his five favorite books of 2016 and called it “an amazing tale, a refreshingly honest reminder of what the path to business success really looks like. It’s a messy, perilous, and chaotic journey, riddled with mistakes, endless struggles, and sacrifice. Phil Knight opens up in ways few CEOs are willing to do.”
Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
By Donald Miller Donald Miller’s StoryBrand process is a proven solution to the struggle business leaders face when talking about their businesses. This revolutionary method for connecting with customers provides listeners with the ultimate competitive advantage, revealing the secret for helping their customers understand the compelling benefits of using their products, ideas, or services.
In Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier, such as applying the human scale principle, using the Velcro Theory of Memory, and creating curiosity gaps. Along the way, we discover that sticky messages of all kinds—from the infamous “kidney theft ring” hoax to a coach’s lessons on sportsmanship to a vision for a new product at Sony—draw their power from the same six traits.
Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time
Selfie Made: Your Ultimate Guide to Social Media Stardom
By Howard Schultz
Selfie Made is a one-of-a-kind guide to creating a digital identity, finding an audience, and building a powerful brand your own! on the Internet. Whether you want to be in front of or behind the camera, produce click-worthy content or start your own business, this book is the place to begin. Written by Meridith Valiando Rojas, the hugely successful (and super friendly IRL) founder of DigiTour who has worked with every major star from YouTube to Musical.
The success of Starbucks Coffee Company is one of the most amazing business stories in decades. What started as a single store on Seattle’s waterfront has grown into the largest coffee chain on the planet. Just as remarkable as this incredible growth is the fact that Starbucks has managed to maintain its renowned commitment to product excellence and employee satisfaction.
By Chip Heath, Dan Heath
By Meridith Valiando Rojas