Digerati Magazine January 2017 Issue by DIGERATI

Video Marketing Trends for 2017 Content Marketing: How to Eat The Elephant in the Room 5 TIPS For Running a Successful Cross-Device Campaign Bridging the Digital Delight Gap Chinaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Next Revolution: Becoming Digital First

The Quantified Self

CONTENTS

> CONTENTS DIGERATI is designed to provide actionable digital insight for marketing and advertising in the digital era. Each issue delivers a 360-degree view of the digital sector from the worlds smartest marketers and technologists, spanning topics like digital innovation, content marketing, mobile, social, search, data and more. Click here to suggest a topic or submit a question.

FEATURE: Understanding the Potential in the Quantified Self Movement

CONTENT MARKETING: The Content Officer’s Challenge: Eating Elephants

15 2

18 19

MOBILE: 5 Tips for Running a

10 Successful Cross Device Campaign

SOCIAL MEDIA: Three Predictions

15 on 2017 by Ben Shute, QBE

CRM: ‘No Such Thing as a CRM Campaign’, says Spotify

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ACQUISITION: Why isn’t direct response

24 thinking working in digital channels?

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EDITOR’S LETTER

Marketing & Advertising in the Digital Era

FEATURE

Understanding the Potential in the Quantified Self Movement

CONTENT

The Content Officer’s Challenge – Eating Elephants

MOBILE

5 Tips for Running a Successful Cross Device Campaign

VIDEO

Video Marketing Trends for 2017, by Brightcove

My Hot Digital Topic for 2017, by David Raab

STRATEGY

The Immutable Laws of Digital Marketing

SOCIAL

Three Predictions on 2017, by Ben Shute

CRM

No Such Thing as a CRM Campaign, Shopify

Chasing Inbox Zero, by Ian Hopkinson

EVENTS

ad:tech Shanghai

SEO

5 SEO Tips for 2017, by Michael Doyle

ACQUISITION

Why Isn’t Direct Response Thinking Working in Digital Channels?

The Year Ahead

CEO IAB Australia shares his thoughts on the year ahead

PODCASTING

6 Reasons Why You Should Start a Podcast

Digital Everything AR, MR, VR, IoT, wearables, conversational interfaces, etc.

AD BLOCKING

How Ad Blockers Are Changing Marketing

OPINION

> EDITOR’S LETTER Marketing and advertising in the digital era can be a complex task. Note that I said ‘can’, I don’t for one minute subscribe to the notion that marketers are so overwhelmed with new technology and emerging ways of doing business - in a world that’s fast becoming ‘digital first’ - that they can’t do their jobs. That’s simply not the case. IMHO, the path forward remains pretty much what it’s always been: spend the majority of your time doing what you know works, invest some time and money on emerging channels and technologies your competitors are using, and when you have time ‘play’ with the new-new thing. An oversimplification, perhaps, but my point is it’s not rocket surgery. It’s just good business. Anyway, it’s a new year and the most exciting time of year in the marketing and digital sector. Everyone returns to work fresh faced, facing a clean slate, and ready to take on a new year with renewed fervor. It’s also the time of year we whip out the crystal ball to prognosticate on trends we expect to see in 2017.

Don’t expect the tech overload to slow down Marketers now have circa 4,500 technologies at their disposal, and whilst many of these technologies overlap, there are always new categories and sub categories of technology emerging. So whilst many may wish otherwise, the fact is there’ll be even more vendors and agencies pushing their wares in 2017, fighting for your time, trying to convince you their tech is the answer to all your woes. I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: keeping pace with technology is the biggest challenge marketers’ face today, and being tech savvy is the new competitive advantage. The issue with managing tech overload is how to filter the relevant tech for your needs, so a simple way to evaluate new tech is to consider if it solves an existing problem or gives you a competitive advantage.

Make the customer your #1 priority Today’s marketer doesn’t just need to be tech savvy; they also need to understand how to be customer centric - how to genuinely put the customer at the forefront of their business and then start making smart decisions informed by analytics that guide actions that deliver the very best customer experience, whilst (ideally) achieving the highest ROI possible from all your marketing efforts.

Making the customer your #1 priority can take many shapes. It could mean a focus on leveraging your first party data better, adopting mass personalization technologies and marketing practices to achieve better cut through, or even focusing on responsive design to ensure a more consistent customer experience.

Taking a wider view of attribution As cross-device centric digital marketing gains sway there needs to be a move away from last touch attribution as the be all, end all approach to attribution. Last touch works well when you’re looking at marketing from a silo, but it’s shortsighted (and simply wrong) when viewed from a multichannel-multi-touch perspective where consumers are interacting with brands in increasingly more complex ways.

Expect more spin and BS than ever before! As challenging as it can be to filter tech on relevancy, it’s even harder to filter the wheat from the chafe in the media sector. The recent global faux debate inspired by Coca Cola’s Global CMO suggesting that TV is a more effective channel than digital, offering a better ROI, is a great example of spin in action. This is clearly an agency driven agenda that’s being circulated and regurgitated to prop up an outdated industry that’s no longer as relevant or dominant as it once was.

Likewise, expect to hear more Twitter acquisition rumors, more stories about Yahoo’s tenuous future, more fluff about why programmatic is going to change the life of everyone on the planet. That’s a given. Our role at Digerati is to help marketers filter what’s relevant from what’s not. To provide actionable insight from the coal face and from the smartest marketers and technologists in market. Time will tell if our prognostications come true, but what we do know today is that 2017 will be just like 2016, but not. Christopher Edwards Editor in Chief, Digerati Magazine

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LIFELOGGING

Mindtrek.org

Understanding the Potential in

the Quantified Self Movement

he Quantified Self*, also known as lifelogging, is a movement to incorporate technology into data acquisition on aspects of a person’s daily life in terms of inputs (food consumed, quality of surrounding air), states (mood, arousal, blood oxygen levels), and performance, whether mental or physical. In short, quantified self is a movement towards self-knowledge through self-tracking with one, or more, appropriate and relevant

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technologies. IDG estimate there may be as many as 50B connected devices in the next handful of years, as such, the rapidly exploding QS sector presents both a myriad opportunities and challenges for brands. Digerati sat down with Nathan Kinch, Head of Experience and Labs at Meeco, to better understand the social dynamics around person-first technology, as well as gain clarity on how brands can achieve commercial benefit by tapping into lifelogging.

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IDG estimate there will be 50B connected devices by 2020, is this all new devices, or..?

The value of global household appliance consumption in 2016 will exceed $500 billion USD. The notion that absolutely everything will be connected doesn’t mean everything is a new type or category of device. It means our core devices, like our fridge, oven, temperature control, iron, kettle and toaster, will become connected if they haven’t already.

LIFELOGGING

To put it in context, about 600 million household devices will ship this year. We of course have our obsession with our phones, which make up another very large portion of IDG’s estimate. We then have ancillary home and work devices that are going to become connected. Lots of these will be new, or at least constantly evolving; as a result of what is becoming possible. We then have vehicles. Tesla has stated pretty clearly that their fully autonomous vehicles are already under production. Lastly we have wearables and ‘embeddables’. Often this is the first category of device people think about when you start talking about device connectivity.

Quantified self is the global movement of self-tracking in an attempt to understand and optimize something. What that something is, the ‘thing’ the quantified selfenthusiast is motivated by, is entirely up to them.

overly philosophical, has not evolved to as mature a state as our relationship with general discovery. The quantified self-movement is breaking that mold, and rapidly accelerating the move towards selfdiscovery that is quantified.

Human beings are natural explorers. We have a desire to learn - to seek out the unknown. Take

In reality, this is still a very niche movement. MapMyRun isn’t the crux of the movement. It is, however, widely used and very commercially valuable. Why? Well, MapMyRun took advantage of our extrinsic motivation and made running, or quantifying running, about community.

Whether there is a pressing need for these devices is yet to really play out. It’s not 2020 and we can’t ‘predict’ the future. However, what we can say is that new categories of devices are enabling new value to be realized.

If you look at technology in context, and its purpose to augment human capability, then the value that connected devices can help create for us as individuals, for our families, for our communities, for our workplaces, for our cities and for our society in general, is significant. So the ‘need’ is not yet clear, at least in the eyes of the many, but the value potential certainly is.

How do you define / explain the swelling interest in The “quantified self” movement?

our relationship with the process of discovery. For a long time, discovery took place human-to-human, and therefore our knowledge was limited by who we had access to. We then evolved as a species to begin documenting human knowledge in more standardised ways. The very quiet library revolution then had its turn. Our knowledge was therefore limited by what we could gain access to, and had the cognitive space to comprehend, within the four walls of the library. Then there was the internet and modern web browser. What’s the phrase again? Oh yeah, “Just Google it”. Well, our relationship with self-discovery, without getting

A device like Hexoskin, on the other hand, is much more closely aligned to the QS movement, enabling individuals to capture and analyse real time biometrics that have previously been exclusively reserved for professional athletes within training centers of excellence.

The QS movement is therefore a tail of two parts. One side is about quantifying simple movement, but sharing that with your peers. Again, the extrinsic motivation this taps into is why we’ve seen the adoption we have. The second side is genuinely about a deep pursuit of self-understanding for the purpose of optimisation – whatever optimisation may mean to the individual. Where this side of the movement goes long-term has incredible potential. Think constant monitoring for predicative and preventative

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LIFELOGGING

treatment of chronic aliment. Think a device that constantly monitors our posture, gives us real-time feedback and helps solve the multi-billiondollar cost of back injuries. Then there’s the impact this could have on our sleep cycles – another multibillion-dollar challenge. In summation, the tale of two parts is the current state. As the capabilities become simpler and easier to adopt, yet deliver us more meaningful value, the QS movement will become commonplace. In fact, it won’t have to be known as quantified self. It will simply be.

Just because we can doesn’t mean we should, so why ‘should’ we care about measuring all aspects of our daily lives with the help of wearable technology?

To answer this, we have to go back to the purpose of technology, which is really to augment human capability. We therefore need to look at technology as something we hire to fulfill a purpose in our lives.

If what motivates us is being able to play with our grandkids in the park for a couple of hours every weekend, and have them think we’re the coolest most active grandparents out there, then the incorporation of wearable devices into our life may help us achieve that. By understanding our physiology, our environment, and various other inputs, we can help directly affect the output. So we shouldn’t care about the measurement per se. We should continue to care about the things that are meaningful in our lives and simply hire technology, or more specifically wearables and accompanying platforms that handle the data privately and securely, to

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Garmin, Fitbit and the Apple Watch are all wearable devices we see on the wrists of people on a daily basis. Moov is another we’ll likely see becoming more and more popular.

LIFELOGGING

help us achieve those things by augmenting our base capabilities.

What wearable devices and apps are most popular, and what do you see becoming more popular that’s not yet mainstream?

Garmin, Fitbit and the Apple Watch are all wearable devices we see on the wrists of people on a daily basis. Moov is another we’ll likely see becoming more and more popular. For fitness enthusiasts, Athos and Hexoskin are the types of devices that could really create a lot of value and make daily training more meaningful.

citizens will control their personal data. Without going into the detail of the General Data Protection Regulation that’s enforcing this, this is having a transformative effect on the way organisations are allowed to deal with personal data. So, given that the control of personal information is beginning to move into the hands of the people, and these devices and applications are all about personal data, this data will effectively become an asset. This is actually a much bigger cultural shift, of which wearables and connected devices are a subset. With all this change, people will need easy to use applications that

The bigger picture however, is that wearables will become closer to us – embedded in some cases. A good early example of this is U.S. based biolinq; a skin patch that analyses body fluid in real time. These types of devices can be completely hidden to the public, yet provide a huge range of benefits to the wearer and to the health professionals the wearer may have a relationship with.

How do you see these devices and apps impacting and shaping culture?

Well, these devices are all about capturing and analysing data. MapMyFitness (MayMyRun, MapMyRide etc.) was purchased by UnderArmour for $150m USD. The value of the company was in the personal data it had access to.

give them control over all of their information, whether that comes from a wearable, their fridge, or from their online browsing. And once they have control, they will need a means of deriving value.

The personal data landscape is at an inflexion point in 2016. Personal data has become an asset, but it’s never been in the control of the person the data relates to.

Organisations will also need ways to compliantly make use of personal data that creates value for their customers and value for their bottom line. We’re on the cusp of a revolution with all this and it’s very exciting.

In Europe, from 2018 onwards,

Platforms like Meeco, that on

one side enable people like you and I to save, sync and share our data on our terms, whilst on the other, enable organisations to ask for, and make effective use of the personal data they gain access to through means of explicit consent, are a critical piece of the infrastructure of this evolving market.

What, if any, brands are successfully tapping into this movement? Under Armour is doing well with their running app, but who else, and why are they succeeding in your view?

Both UnderArmour and Nike view themselves as tech companies. This is likely the same for various other sporting vendors who now have key divisions focusing on the broader digital world. You could also look at retailers who are using body-scanning technology like Body Labs Inc. to ensure the perfect fit as good examples of leaders in this space.

But really, the leaders will be those who are most effectively able to ask for explicit permission to use personal data from a variety of sources so that they may craft unique and valuable experiences for their customers. These are the brands that will deliver and gain the most value from this movement. To support this, we really need the legal frameworks, business rules, and technical capabilities to give people agency, whilst also enabling organisations to innovate and create new, sustained value for their customers. A whole market is emerging to support this, and Meeco is one of those leading the charge. *Wikipedia definition

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CONTENT

The Content Officer’s challenge:

How to Eat

The Elephant in the Room?

by Christopher Edwards

f all the challenges Chief Content Officers and Content Marketers face today – a steady stream of emerging content formats and marketing technologies, finding (and keeping) human talent, and the ever evolving list of tasks on our to-do lists - I’d argue that one recent problem that won’t be going away anytime soon is how we choose to employ content marketing to tackle the issue of “attention economics”.

In an attention economy, attention is a scarce commodity. And as human beings with a finite amount of time at our disposal, it’s never been more challenging - and vital - for content marketers to understand how to capture consumers’ attention. But the truth is, the only way to capture attention in a struggling attention economy is to beg, borrow and steal that attention away from other brands. And therein lies the Chief Content Officer’s challenge. How to maintain an omniscient view of all our content marketing initiatives, whilst staying up to speed with multiple platforms, content formats and shifting consumer expectations, in order to steal attention, drive traffic, leads, sales and improve customer experience? Moreover, how do we

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best advocate and encourage those who employ us to start thinking like a publisher in a stormy sea already crowded with flotsam (bad content) and jetsam (worse content)? The answer to this question is the answer to the age old riddle ‘what’s the best way to eat an elephant?’ By taking one bite at a time! In a world where more than 200 Million pieces of content are published every day, the only way to steal attention is by keeping the big picture in mind whilst taking baby steps toward your end goal. For whilst attention may wander as everyone else is busy making noise in the hopes of being heard, attention will stay with the content marketers and brands who stopped to think before they cried Wolf.

Begin With The End In Mind The best content marketing strategies and success stories start with a clear understanding of the end goal. As noted above, content can achieve many goals at different stages of the buyer journey, but not all content can achieve every goal,

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so start by considering what you’re trying to achieve with your content? Having a clear understanding of your measures of success makes it far easier to align your production effort with specific business goals behind the creation of a piece (or series) of content. Defining and then managing a set of goals will make it easier for you to manage diverse contributors and content types. Equally important is linking your end goal/s to your understanding of your target consumer. What do they like? What do they want? And vitally important: what value can you add to their lives? When you have solid answers to these questions, you can take a baby step forward…

Understand The Menu When you know your goal, and you know your target audience, it’s far easier to undertake an audit to know what owned content you have, what gaps you need filled, and what channels and formats you need to start focusing on to steal

attention away from your competitors. This is the stage where the rubber meets the road, where your brand message is intertwined with relevant content and appropriate channels.

CONTENT

This sounds simple, but it’s rarely used in practice. Almost everyone jumped on the content bandwagon, pushing out a bunch of owned content they loved, only to see it fail because their audience said meh. Those who failed failed because they assumed one size fits all. They never took the time to adjust their message and imagery to the relevant audience, channels and content formats.

Create The Road Map It’s at this point you can begin mapping out a content strategy that aligns with, supports and extends the organizations wider marketing initiatives, both short and longterm. But don’t make the mistake of assuming this is a one-time thing. Continuous evolution of content strategy is a must, not a maybe. The creation and ongoing development of a functional content calendar will be the road map that keeps you on track by outlining who does what, when, what content goes where and what’s being measured. It’s a fluid single point of truth that should also be used to capture analytics so you can measure success.

Processes / Production Whilst the above steps may give you the confidence to enter the fray, experience has shown me that at this point it’s far better to focus on developing standards, systems and best practices (both human and technological) for future content creation, distribution, measurement and iterative content innovation. Establishing work flows for content ideation, content production, editing, publishing, and retiring content will become the engine that keeps your content efforts honest, on brand, efficient and effective.

Test & Adjust The age old maxim that marketers know 50% of their marketing budget works, just not which 50%, doesn’t hold true in a digital ecosystem where everything is measurable, where every hour invested is quantifiable. Conducting regular usability testing to gauge content effectiveness - gathering data and analytics in order to make recommendations based on those results - to revise, revamp or retire content will save you time and money. Market data can also be leveraged for content and channel optimization by tapping into emerging content themes/topics and then creating content that bridges these gaps.

Stop, Collaborate & Listen

Freepik

One of the most crucial elements underpinning content marketing success is making and taking the time to collaborate with other business siloes like public relations, communications, marketing, customer service and IT. Taking the time to do this makes it easier to integrate your content into traditional marketing campaigns,

whilst at the same time ensuring all content stays on-brand, consistent in terms of style, quality and tone of voice, and optimized for search and user experience across all channels. Listening to your internal business leaders, as well as your writers, designers, editors, content strategists and external agency stakeholders, will save you time, money and face. Irrespective of how many years you’ve been working in the content sector, you should never overestimate your knowledge and expertise, or underestimate your teams. Hubris kills content campaigns faster than no budget, poor copy or creative.

In Closing… Ultimately, as the corporate storyteller, the CCO will be measured on the continual improvement of customer nurturing and retention through storytelling, as well as the increase in new prospects into the enterprise through consistent development and deployment. He or she will be evaluated against the increase in defined customer engagement metrics, as well as be held accountable for metrics around lifetime customer value, customer satisfaction, and employee advocacy.

The CCO or Content Marketing lead needs to become a hybrid species: a passionate technologist who knows what tech can – and cannot – do, who’s comfortable managing multidisciplinary teams and tight editorial schedules and deadlines, with a fluency in web analytics tools and a near ninja nimbleness that allows them to embrace change and adapt to strategies on the fly. It’s often a complex, competitive and confusing role to play, but if I’m to be perfectly honest, there’s no role I’d rather play…

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MULTI-SCREEN

hile cross-device campaigns offer better and more comprehensive results for advertisers than single channel campaigns, their implementation and optimization can also take up more of a campaign manager’s time if not executed efficiently. Here are five tips for running successful and headachefree cross-device campaigns:

campaign to be deemed a true success, measure the business outcomes and clearly define KPIs to measure success holistically. In order to design a crosschannel approach that addresses the complexity and diversity of today’s media landscape and consumer behaviors, “follow the user to find the conversion.” Furthermore, as users move across screens, consider the frequency in which the message is delivered to a customer (i.e. frequency capping). Frequency caps are set to ensure maximum impact and to eliminate over-exposure among a target audience to a specific message.

Target faces, not places

Today, consumers use multiple devices and methods to shop. Your customer might use their phone to browse and add a product to their basket, compare prices on other websites via their desktop, or complete the sale on a tablet at home after doing all of the above. That’s why, when running a crossdevice campaign, it is important to focus on the user’s device behavior to accurately determine how to best optimize each campaign. The best media plans don’t focus on inventory; they focus on users. Carefully examine all campaign data available to capture everything you can about your customer’s purchasing behavior and journey in order to target more effectively in the future.

Learn from successes and duplicate the testing method

Test and learn from every campaign. Each campaign represents an opportunity for further improvement. To begin with, keep audience targeting as broad as possible. Start with a high bid CPM, and test one campaign at a time to pinpoint which types of campaigns are most responsive to cross-device. Once campaigns are flighting smoothly, repeat the method (rather than the creative). Repeated testing helps marketers build stronger campaigns over time based on data-driven results.

5 TIPS For Running A Successful Cross-Device Campaign

Measure real business outcomes instead of vanity metrics

Cross-device campaigns are only as effective as the attribution model in place. Marketers typically want to know where the user last viewed (not clicked) the ad prior to the conversion, as this data provides them with rich insights that they can apply to future campaigns. For a

two-week testing period to gather data before considering major revisions to a campaign’s setup or strategy. Optimize to ensure all messaging is consistent and that each stage of the buying process offers an exceptional user experience so as to not lose customers on the path to conversion.

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by Matthew Joyce, Country Manager, ANZ at DataXu

Optimize, optimize, optimize

It is a “best practice” to continuously monitor and optimize all campaign performance. Focus on key ROI metrics and use data to tweak tactics throughout the campaign to help meet goals. Avoid too many unnecessary changes however, or else efficiency will be lost. And remember to be patient, as campaigns do not deliver all at once! It is important to have a

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Use device- specific creatives to provide users with a seamless experience Studies have shown that sequences of ads are often more effective in engaging customers than repeated call-to-action messages. They also tend to deliver much higher conversion rates. Given that mobile search is officially a way of life for most consumers in 2016, make mobile a key part of any flight. Customize creatives to each device they will be shown on to make ads more mobilefriendly. Technology might enable the most optimized, targeted ad serving in the world, but if the creative itself isn’t executed well, the campaign will fall short of its intended results.

VIDEO

Freepik

Video Marketing Trends for 2017 by Mark Stanton, Vice President, ANZ, Brightcove 12

n 2017, online video will continue to be critical for marketers looking to engage with their audience and ultimately boost conversion rates — a ComScore report found 64 percent of viewers are more likely to buy a product online after watching a video. However, online video alone won’t be enough to ensure conversion. Marketers need to build successful strategies on the right mix of distribution, content and analytics. We expect to see more branded videos created specifically for social media in 2017. Aussies are already spending an average of six hours per week watching videos on social networks alone, so marketers will need to take a closer look at making video part of their social media strategy in the new year. It’s necessary to work to the strengths of each social network and note their weaknesses. Social video cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach, and just as repurposing TV

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ads didn’t work on social, publishing the same video across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Snapchat won’t boost audience engagement or convert prospective customers into tangible sales. It can be tempting to go all-in on Facebook with its sheer size — at eight billion video views per day — but with fewer than half of all views completing a 16 second video, attention is short. The same applies to Twitter, which requires videos shorter than 30 seconds to achieve high completion rates. YouTube is suited to longer videos of up to two minutes in length but requires significant calls to action to ensure that viewers don’t simply head to an unrelated video. And with the rise in mobile content, all effort on social video can be for naught if the video is heavily dependent on audio, which the majority of users have muted on mobile. Distribution aside, it can be easy to fall into the trap of relying on

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well-worn assumptions when setting strategy. Marketers need to ensure they don’t fall into that rut, and constantly test those assumptions using data to determine what works and what doesn’t, and constantly evolve the strategy to meet their audience’s changing behaviours. Don’t just rely on ‘views’ — we’ve seen what happens when that metric is relied upon too heavily. Instead, dig into the data to better understand how content is actually being consumed — how long are users spending on the video, and when do they stop watching it. That will tell you how long the video should be, where the content is causing viewers to drop off, and where marketers need to work on the approach to ensure high completion rates. In 2017, we’ll see more marketers use data to test their own assumptions and adapt to what is working. We’ll also see how social continues to play an ever-greater, though nuanced role in how marketers distribute that content on their own online video platform as well as external sources. It will be survival of the fittest for marketers — grow and adapt, or see your strategies fall to the wayside, overtaken by those who can.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

My Hot Digital Topic for 2017 –

Artificial Intelligence by David Raab

still outperform most marketing tasks simply because they are tireless drudges willing to look at more details in more instances than any humanly possible.

f there’s one thing that marketers can expect to find themselves dealing with incessantly in 2017, it’s artificial intelligence. But AI won’t be single thing; it will be embedded in literally hundreds of things from chat bots to content generators to psychological profilers. People who always prided themselves on creativity and insights will find computers can actually deliver those perfectly well, at least within the limited boundaries of most digital marketing tasks. And machines are infinitely patient, so even without the spark of genius that may or may not still be uniquely human, they will

The challenge for marketers will be learning to manage their new assistants. One issue will be the Sorcerer’s Apprentice problem: supervising systems that do the same thing over and over again because they don’t know when to stop. But that’s one of the easier problems to solve; some notion of goal-seeking is already present in many intelligent systems. The greater challenge will be understanding what the systems are doing and why: unlike enchanted broomsticks bringing an endless parade of buckets up a staircase, most machine-managed decisions will be invisible tasks like bidding on ad impressions or selecting content to present during a web visit. Marketers can watch those bids and contents all day long and still not know whether the computer is choosing wisely. So they need to seek out systems that do explain the logic behind their actions, or, since computers are very bad at explaining things, at least illustrate clearly the factors they are weighing most heavily in their decisions. These factors include both inputs used to guide choices in individual cases, and outputs they are using to

measure success. But there’s an even bigger problem, which is getting all those systems to work effectively together. First, they simply need to communicate with each other, either directly, through a shared translation system, or by referencing a common data store. Once that’s set up, the real fun begins: if several – or dozens or hundreds – of systems are simultaneously adjusting their choices to achieve an optimal output, it’s literally impossible to predict the results. And it’s distinctly possible that the actual results will be suboptimal. Marketers will need some way to avoid this outcome, probably by limiting how many systems they use or which systems are active simultaneously. What makes all this really hard is the black box nature of so many artificial intelligence applications, which makes harmful interactions among systems really hard to spot. This all sounds highly theoretical, but remember that AI is already embedded in many of your systems and that vendors are rushing to add it to the rest. So marketers should be actively listening for these issues and have a plan to address them effectively as they arise.

David M. Raab, Principal, Raab Associates. David advises marketers on marketing technology planning, vendor selection, and analytics. He is author of the Customer Experience Matrix blog, several books, and hundreds of articles on marketing issues.

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STRATEGY

The Immutable Laws of Digital Marketing by Jeff Cooper at Founding Partner, Step Change

The user’s intention determines their pathway

This applies to everyone who arrives at your brand. Every interaction needs to have an objective so that you can effectively lead them down the sales funnel. A person who does heavy research should find a series of informative articles, checklists, white papers, or other assets as appropriate to help them form a decision. Someone who comparisonshops would be more easily wooed when they are able to see how your product performs up against your competitors’. And if you don’t create a kind of content and win the customer, your competition will.

Clarity is key Clarity in your design creates clarity in the minds of your customers. Make your domain, branding, colours, fonts, and writing style aligned to present a distinct brand that differs from your competitors. You also need to provide clarity of purpose to support wallet share. It’s not enough for your service to be

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unique; you need to express exactly what the difference is between you and your competition.

Topic leadership is vital When people search for information about a product you provide, they need to see you at or near the top. Very few surfers go past the first page of Google results. If they do not see you there, it is as if you do not exist. Search all the terms that are relevant to see where you stand.

Remember the laws of influence Exclusivity, authority, reciprocity, and social proof are all vital. Show how your customers get a deal no one else does. Publish content that shows your authority in your area. Give something, such as a free report, to spur people to reciprocate with their business. And never forget that your happy customers are your best ambassadors; they can draw their friends and colleagues to your brand.

What you measure is what you manage Without clear analytics, you have no clear idea what is working and what is not. Define and track your key metrics so that you always know where you stand. For instance, metrics can show you if your email open rate is lower than your industry

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Freepik

igital marketing is an area that seems to change constantly. But as platforms rise and fall and new marketing channels emerge, a few rules never change. Keep these immutable laws in mind, and you will always stay on the right track.

average. By tracking this metric, you can make adjustments and see what helps improve your figures. Every metric you test should be tested with real-world clients. It costs nothing to test, but your results are worth more if they are based on actual buyer behavior. And always remember your most important metrics. For instance, you should measure your social following in amplification instead of reach. Amplification shows that people are excited about your brand and providing that vital social proof. By keeping all of these vital laws in mind, you can better adapt as digital marketing continues to expand and change. No matter what system there is, human behavior remains the same. These immutables will allow you to compete and thrive. Source: http://www.toprankblog. com/2016/05/cutthroat-digitalmarketing/ http://themediaoctopus.com/the-7golden-rules-of-digital-marketing/

SOCIAL MEDIA

Three Predictions on 2017 by Ben Shute, QBE

redictions are hard, particularly in an area like social media where the platforms and tools move and scale quickly. I expect, much like last year, that there will be trends that will come and go quickly, but there are three key areas where I think there will be improvements or increased importance.

Twitter will regain lost ground

become even more extreme

of customer service, particularly in regulated industries.

There’s no doubt that customer service has become probably THE single most important function of a social media strategy. Seriously, if you’re doing only one thing, it should be customer service.

Instagram will dominate Snapchat

The great challenge of all of this, however, is that the benchmark for many is set by a few who do it

At some point in the next 12 months there will be acquisition rumors about Twitter, and to be honest, as with every rumbling about this, it will likely be unfounded.

Earlier in the year I wrote that Instagram was succeeding in spite of itself. While it’s taken a bit of a beating at the expense of Snapchat in recent times, it’s made a number of leaps forward in 2016 and feels to be iterating faster than Snapchat as a visual platform. Spectacles may be cool, but the launch of Stories gave the platform a much-needed shot in the arm,

I’ve always remained fairly bullish on Twitter, and I think that they will regain some of their lost ground in 2017. Despite its lack of innovation, they appear to be getting themselves closer to getting their groove back. Their renewed focus on live positioning, partnering with sporting and other live events has been a smart strategy. While curation functions like Moments may have fizzled, by bringing tools like Periscope into the main app they are improving the ability to story tell in the moment and curate for later. Video is only going to get bigger for them. Of course, Twitter still forms an important part of any social customer service strategy, and they have been developing tools to improve this. Expect to see more of it as the year progresses.

Customer service will remain paramount and the expectations of customers will

exceptionally. This makes it challenging for many organisations and poses huge risks from a reputational perspective if they get it wrong or can’t meet that expectation. Many companies will turn to bots to try and improve customer service, but only a few will succeed. Bots became a hot topic when Facebook announced Messenger bots during 2016, and at last count they were in the tens of thousands. The challenge to implementation will be how it sits alongside the empathetic nature

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ck and it now sports an impressive 600 million users. The (in my view) much easier to use version of the ephemeral curation function has seen it grow rapidly.

Improved comment management function, the ability to like comments being trialed, and the new ability to bookmark content makes it feel like it’s approaching the fully fledged network that it can be.

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CRM

No Such Thing as A

“CRM Campaign” by Mayur Gupta, VP, Growth & Marketing at Spotify

recently published an article on AdExchanger on why CRM was way beyond just a technology or a channel. In fact, I strongly question if CRM is even a capability that can be boxed into any single bucket — Consumer Relationship is an objective and if you do the right things, it’s an outcome. But we have boxed it over the years and made it into a thing that is either a software, or a channel or a tactic so often.

It may have worked for many years but in a world lead, controlled and driven by consumer needs and desires, it won’t. Here’s why… Marketing has evolved substantially from the times of the “Mad Men” and witty creative advertising, to a process about driving consumer engagement and accelerating business growth. And the vast amount of data at our fingertips has made marketing measurable, plus better defined its value proposition.

This transformative journey has given marketing professionals a new, shiny object almost every year, from multi-channel to omni-channel experiences, from mobile first and responsive designs to hybrid and native apps, from real-time bidding and big data to programmatic buying, attribution and predictive models and now the world of chatbots, AR & VR.

Consumer Relationship Management; and mind you, I called it a philosophy.

While evolving the core foundation and experiences, marketers tend to fixate on these new concepts until the next one pops up. But there is one philosophy that has remained true for decades: CRM –

Regardless of how big your brand or marketing budget may be; most marketers say “we do CRM.” But this mindset has dramatically varying interpretations, implementation and understanding within the marketing

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This is because CRM is not just data, technology or the email channel. It is the culmination of all these pieces coming together to deliver a broader consumer experience that inspires behavioral change and participation that eventually builds and maintains a “relationship”.

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world. For some: Sending promotional and/or triggered emails, direct mail or SMS to a group of consumers is CRM. “CRM campaigns” are separate and isolated from consumer marketing or advertising efforts. Having a database that stores consumer information is considered CRM. Buying/renting a marketing automation software is doing CRM. But what about: Leveraging consumer data and insights underneath every single

CRM

channel and touch point to deliver the most relevant and contextual experience. Driving personalized experiences, whether that is targeting or retargeting paid media or engaging consumers on social to strengthen relationships. Cross selling and up-selling by leveraging past behavioral data and predictive models. Testing and learning constantly to understand behavior and determine what inspires it. Connecting the dots across channels to establish a universal understanding of the consumer, with an intent to deliver the most seamless, channel agnostic experiences. CRM is not any but all of the above. Beyond the data, technology, and channel, CRM is truly the drive to provide consumers what they need when they need it, or even before they know they need it. It could be a communication, product or service that offers experiences and values at a time, at a location and touch-point of choice and if executed effectively, can ultimately make your customer a loyalist and maximize a lifetime value for your brand. To shift a marketer’s mindset that CRM is only data, technology, or software, embrace these five principles: 1. CRM is NOT a channel. CRM is not a channel and cannot/ should not be organized, planned and executed like one. You need to drive consumer relationship, meet and exceed expectations wherever your customer may be; online or offline, across social, direct mail and email. You need to leverage consumer data and insights from all channels and touch points and deliver the most immersive and relevant experience back through any and all of these

channels, inspiring behavior through the journey. That is CRM. 2. CRM is Consumer Relationship Management. Stop calling it just “CRM” if it helps you. The acronym tends to restrict the scope and understanding of its capability. When you expand and think “consumer relationship management,” it is a whole different world. You quickly realize, it’s not a thing, but a philosophy that creates an outcome on many pieces coming together. 3. CRM connects to everything. You cannot establish the CRM capability in a vertical silo, it needs to be a horizontal orchestration within your org model that touches and connects with everything you do. The CRM function in your marketing organization cannot just be accountable for consumer segmentation and insights related to email and direct mail. The function should establish a universal consumer understanding across the ecosystem. 4. CRM software/technology is NOT enough. Establishing a life-long consumer relationship and loyalty is not just a technology problem. You need to bring the strategy, data and technology together to establish and operationalize a CRM capability. To do this: E stablish an overarching consumer relationship and experience strategy. Set a clear definition of the business problem you are trying to solve, and of the identify the consumer behavior that is causing that problem and establish the eventual consumer experience you intend to deliver to change the behavior. C reate a consumer data and segmentation strategy, one that is not isolated by channel. Remember that it is the same consumer, going through a unified journey to solve emotional and functional needs;

a consumer does not differentiate between channels. D evelop a connected marketing technology ecosystem that is focused on gathering consumer data from all channels and touch points and also has the ability within the content publishing engines to leverage that data and insight to drive a seamless, relevant and connected experience. Define what success looks like, by having tangible KPIs and a subsequent instrumentation strategy to capture data and measure results. Leverage agile ongoing operations to bring all these pieces together and communicate, engage and listen over and over again with agility and nimbleness. 5. Lastly, no such thing as a “CRM Campaign” You market in a digital world, communicating and engaging with the consumer, to meet their emotional and functional needs. This effort requires data and science behind every conversation with the consumer agnostic of channel. We cannot fragment this effort into artificial compartments of a CRM campaign, Digital campaign or a Mobile or Email campaign. It needs to be one connected, seamless and always-on campaign/ experience that applies data and insight to have a bi-directional conversation that fulfills needs and builds loyalty.

Advancement in data, technology and media has put the consumer at the center, giving them tremendous choice and control and expectations are high. This leads to a whole new world of “Consumer Relationship Management” as a fundamental strategy and objective, way beyond an individual tool or tactic as the acronym “CRM” may suggest at times. The sooner brands acknowledge and address that, the faster they will evolve.

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PRODUCTIVITY

Chasing ‘Inbox Zero’ by Ian Hopkinson, Founder at Mad Scientist Digital

’m not a naturally organised person, but I do enjoy order when I’ve finally achieved it. I also appreciate the freedom to let my mind wander free, to create in the messy wilderness of my mind from which some of my best ideas eventuate. Yet one part of my life where structure and freedom collide for me is in how I manage my inbox.

Much like many working professionals, my inbox needs special attention. In 2016, I’d say I achieved the coveted status of ‘Inbox Zero’ about four times, which I think is a solid start (though I’m well aware there’s much left to do). I’m now relieved to admit that freedom from my inbox is actually possible, that living Inbox Zero can be done. For those unfamiliar with the term, the concept of Inbox Zero was introduced by writer and speaker Merlin Mann. According to Mann, the ‘zero’ isn’t a reference to the number of messages in an inbox, rather, it’s “the amount of time an employee’s brain is in his inbox.” Mann’s point is that time and attention are finite, so when an inbox is confused with a “to do” list, productivity wanes. To aid you and I in dealing with this confusion, Mann identifies five possible actions to take for each message: delete, delegate, respond, defer and do.

when necessary. • Process email periodically throughout the day, perhaps at the top of each hour. • Start by deleting or archiving as many new messages as possible. • Then, forward on messages to the people who are in a better position to respond. (I will often loop the appropriate party in via a cc or reply-to just to properly nurture the right outcome). • Quickly respond to new messages that can be answered in two minutes or less. • New messages that require more

than two minutes, and messages that can be answered later, should be moved to a separate “requires response” folder.

Here are some of his top tips for effective email management:

Set aside time each day to respond • to email in the “requires response” folder or chip away at mail in this folder throughout the day.

• Only have your email client open

Some of these tips will work well

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for some, not so much for others. And whilst there’s an endless stream of expert opinions abounding on how to master the inbox, to me the answer is pretty simple: focus. Focus on what’s scheduled; focus on what’s intrusive; focus on what’s important right now; and be laser focused on what can wait. As a business owner, finding a way to tame the inbox becomes even more important. Mann’s strategies might keep things at bay in the short term, but to me, the key question to ask yourself before you access your email is “what are your key areas of focus for this year, month, week, and today?” It’s important to ask: does my incoming and outgoing inbox traffic align my personal goals, and the wider goals of the business? Because if not, you’re actually getting in your own way. It’s taken me a while to realise that my inbox and its hold over me is a reflection of my focus, or lack thereof. That’s why I take a moment to stop and remind myself of what my focus is today, tomorrow, etc. BEFORE I access my email. It’s started working for me, so there’s no reason it can’t work for you too…

EVENTS

China’s Next Revolution:

Becoming Digital First

arketers across the globe have been living and dealing with Digital Disruption for a few years now, but few have experienced such a significant period of disruption as marketers across China. Over the past decade, China has been forced to deal with, and respond to, digital ‘push and pull’ effects that are simultaneously enabling some brands and industries to explore new opportunities, whilst forcing others to rethink long held business models. At the center of this situation is a consumer who’s in control. At one end of the market, the push end, China’s rapidly exploding middle class now have greater access to information via the worldwide web, which in turn is giving them unprecedented autonomy in decision making and in shaping the

relationships they will have with brands via the internet. This in turn is causing the market ‘pull’, whereby MNCs are falling over themselves to enter China in order to grab their piece of the market before too much competition arrives. This combination of greater consumer demand alongside the rapid influx of MNC’s means that it’s never been more important for China’s media and marketing sector to understand the many ways in which digital technologies and business models can be harnessed to face increasing competition. Which is the very reason why ad:tech Shanghai has been relaunched and reshaped to help direct China’s marketers. Over the course of the two-day event, delegates will see countless examples of how international and local brands are exploiting digital

innovations and technologies in order to capture market share, create new markets or simply to hold market ground. Attendees will learn how many of China’s leading Internet companies are addressing digital disruption, as well as see how the real opportunity for futureproofing China’s rapidly evolving digital sector is had by focusing on tomorrow’s disruptors. ‘Revolution Post Disruption’ is the theme for ad:tech Shanghai 2017. The goal of the event is to provide the strategic tools, concepts and perspectives to allow China’s smartest marketers and media people to develop a strategic response to emerging digital possibilities. The event will be held at the Portman Ritz Carlton, Shanghai on March 30-31, and tickets are now available at http:// en.shanghai.made.ad-tech.com/

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SEO

5 SEO Trends for 2017 by Michael Doyle, MD at Top4.com.au

s every new year begins, it’s important to examine the digital marketing landscape for the year behind us and the year ahead. From an SEO standpoint, there were several important developments in 2016 that will continue to evolve and grow in 2017 as Google continues to update their algorithms, but of all the things to watch out for in 2017, here are a few that Search Engine Land tells us to keep our eye on.

gather data and heuristics to provide results more effectively.

2. Rich answers and snippets

In 2017, brands will need to place value on optimizing their digital content based on intent instead of specific keywords. For your SEO strategy, it will be critical to:

In response to our queries, Google often displays the required information directly in search results, along with other helpful websites, videos, movie or event information, reviews or specific dates.

1. Optimization for user intent

Keywords are still important, but typing in simple words yields simple results. Web users today know exactly what they’re looking for, and search engines are getting much better at identifying user intent. Therefore, users are now entering phrases or full queries in search engines, which

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1. Investigate. What are users searching for that brings them to your page? What questions do they want your content to answer? 2. Optimize. Once you’ve gathered your research data and found areas that need work, make the changes needed to boost ratings. Based on your research, tell a story by altering content to reflect the reader’s experience. 3. Adjust. Keep up with analytics to see what’s working and what’s not so you can update accordingly.

Structured data markup (schema markup) can help website owners achieve these enhanced listings on search engine results pages (SERPs). This markup works to assist search engines in understanding web content, allowing them to display that information in a way that’s helpful for users. As an example, let’s say you search Google for tips to be happy at work. The SERP will feature a direct answer (featured snippet), followed by listings containing rich snippets relevant to your search query: According to a Stone Temple

SEO

Consulting study, the volume of rich answers appearing in search results has nearly doubled from 2014 to 2016. If this trend continues we’re likely to see an even larger number in the years to come.

experiments to make its index mobile-first.

5. Voice search Voice search has been an ongoing project in the tech industry for a few years now. It has become one of the fastest-growing search options because it’s hands-free, fast and futuristic.

As you add structured data markup to your website it will increase your chances of having an enhanced SERP listing, being featured in a rich answer, or (in the case of branded searches) having a knowledge panel appear. Users love quick access to useful information like this, so do yourself a favour and consider implementing schema markup for your website in 2017, if you haven’t already.

3. Cross-channel marketing Cross-channel and multi-channel marketing sound similar, but in reality, they’re very different. Multi-channel simply means establishing a presence on two or more platforms. Crosschannel means using several channels to market your brand in an integrated way. For instance, if users are browsing products on a mobile app, but chose not to buy, you can send them targeted ads based on their searches via email or social media. Multi-channel marketing is by no means a new phenomenon. Crosschannel marketing, however, is relatively recent extension of it. Crosschannel marketing’s primary goal is to create a consistent brand presence across multiple channels so users can move seamlessly between devices and platforms to discover information on their path to making a purchase. Econsultancy’s fourth annual CrossChannel Marketing Report shows 73%

of respondents claimed that crosschannel marketing had a significant impact on increased conversion rates. However, it’s only effective if you know your target audience and their consumption habits. Here’s a simple strategy that will suit any business: Know what the right message is Find the right time to release it

As technology improves with each update, the error rate of voice search plunges. In his keynote speech at SMX West 2016, Behshad Behzadi, Google’s director of conversational search, noted that the speech recognition error rate lowered from around 25% two years ago to just 8% today. The goal for voice search in 2017 is to move from voice recognition to voice understanding. This involves changes with respect to:

Previous searches Location-based context Context based on frequently used apps

Use the correct channel

Personalized information

4. Mobile growth

Keyword research based on spoken queries

Mobile search is growing at a rapid pace and isn’t showing any signs of slowing down in the future. Traffic distribution is shifting from desktop towards mobile devices, with many websites already getting the majority of their traffic from mobile devices. In May 2015, Google reported that mobile searches had exceeded desktop searches on the search engine. Since then, the company has taken many steps which signal that mobile, not desktop, should be considered as the default user experience. Google recently announced that it has begun

With massive improvements to Siri, Google Now and Cortana, SEO pros would be wise to closely examine voice innovation and think beyond text-based queries in 2017.

Conclusion Users are increasingly more connected and engaged with the content they consume, so it’s vitally important for marketers to understand – and SEO pros to factor these upcoming trends into the bigger picture to ensure you’re ready to take on future challenges.

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CUSTOMER ACQUISITION

Why isn’t Direct Response Thinking Working in Digital Channels by Joel Nicholson, Marketsoft

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simply blasted out across various digital channels rather than in a controlled measured framework

• Using traditional measurement frameworks such as response rates per customer segment or per offer type is perhaps floored when customer experiences are not linear across a few channels anymore. Actions to consider… • So what can we do? Given we are living in a multi-channel future, complexity is one of our biggest enemies, so keep focused on 1 or 2 core channels until proven either way before jumping to the next shiny thing!

is code for conversion failure!’. There are plenty of examples where brilliant digital and video content campaigns have driven tens of thousands of clicks, however only ten or more actual purchases

The challenges… • How is customer acquisition via digital channels performing in your organisation? Are there some channels such as SEO and key word advertising that are driving consistent leads, yet other channels such as retargeting banner ads achieving very little? • With the proliferation of digital channels to hundreds of options, are you actually able to measure and learn statistically the best channel combinations for you organisation? • Have you heard the great marketing quote – ‘“awareness”

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The concepts… • In many businesses, spending in traditional offline direct channels such as mail and phone have all but stopped and most budgets have been diverted to digital channels. Is this smart when customers are engaging across all channels? • Video content is the latest gold rush channel over the past year, however many businesses are reporting that they are being

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• If you are harnessing the power of video content to gain connection with your audience, make it easy for them to click to the next step in the customer decision cycle and setup predefined metrics before embarking on the campaign. An example might be channel source verses click through verses conversion. • Finally, capturing the right data is key to understanding the likelihood of customers buying through digital channels. Traditional data from channels like mail where simply promo codes or source of database list. The new digital data points can be subtler, such as combination of search words and how many fields the customer is willing to populate in their enquiry form.

IAB INSIGHT

The Year

Ahead by Vijay Solanki, CEO at IAB Australia

n 2017, digital will continue to grow because consumers will continue their immersion. With that, digital advertising will continue to evolve and, as a result, so will we. The IAB will step up its role in measurement and industry education. The measurement piece will see us move from monthly metrics to daily ratings. We recognise that we have a responsibility to explain digital measurement methodologies that are focussed on real consumer behaviour. 2017 will see the innovations in 2016 move from test phase into commercial product. That includes new formats of video and formats like VR/AR. Mobile ad formats will continue to evolve as digital grows in its ability to drive brand uplift as well as sales. Video will continue to be a key driver of brand performance. It will be distributed in new formats like 360 video, but the ability to distribute across multiple platforms will be an even bigger driver of performance. That includes mobile, of course, but also the rise of the connected TV. I also expect to see video more often on other formats like outdoor. It is the format underpinned by data that helps increase effectiveness.

Ads will continue to become more personalised and more contextualised.

of the medium as it gets ever more sophisticated.

With this, the growth of programmatic is inevitable. Programmatic, and the use of data, will grow as we streamline the process of getting the right ad to the right consumer at the right time and place – all at the right value. There will be two camps: those already in programmatic and those looking to step into it. Education will improve and the industry will move along the digital value chain. We also will see consumer usage of mobile devices continue to increase, but more importantly, the technology and capability enabling mobile ad experiences will continue to get better. As digital continues to evolve, with tech stacks and terminology, there is always the risk of growing complexity. The IAB recognise that we are not all tech experts: Our role will be to simplify and explain digital advertising and its associated technology. We are about a single, joined-up and supportive community. We can help each other. Part of the IAB’s mission in 2017 is to the make this tech as simple as possible and help the industry make sense

We will continue to build a trustworthy digital value chain. Marketers and their agencies want to see increases in viewability standards and metrics, but the industry has started to see the value and importance of content and context. We know viewability is important but never as important as marketing outcomes. We will continue to champion viewability but we will focus hard to share the models that drive great marketing outcomes.

Measurement will continue to become even more important. We all want to feel confident in the data and analytics. It’s now five years since we launched digital measurement in the marketplace. The system developed by IAB and Nielsen is one of the most sophisticated and independent in the world and we are dedicated to building upon and expanding these strengths to improve the quality of Australian audience measurement. The coming year will see the launch of Daily Ratings which will have a significant impact on the marketplace. In 2017, simplifying digital and continuing to inspire when it comes to its key benefits will be key to our agenda at the IAB.

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PODCASTING

6 Reasons Why You

Should Start a Podcast by Dave Visaya, from Podcast Engineers

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Shout communications

ate last year, I started a thread on Quora asking what made people start their podcast. To my surprise I received some notable responses that are equally spectacular and thoughtprovoking, so I thought I would share them as they are brilliant food for thought for anyone out there who’s been considering creating their own podcast. Here are some of the answers I loved and some of the key points in their answers that I think will help anyone who is still starting out.

Podcasting could help you meet influential people from the get go! “When I first started podcasting I was down and out… I wanted a way to meet celebrities, give away free content to poor people, and hoped I could grow my business too. Right from the get-go podcasting helped me meet celebrities and soon it led to my business shifting and exploding all of the sudden. Now I podcast to give away content, meet the most amazing people, create a community, changing the lives of my listeners, growing my business, giving back, and making money.” It’s fantastic to be able to have all of it because of podcasting. — Luis Congdon, Thriving Launch Podcast Now, if you want a perfect excuse to meet the key and influential people

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in your industry, the best way to go about it is probably stating, “Hey (insert famous guy’s name), I have a podcast that caters to this and that, I’d love you to be in it.” BAM! You got an opening that is hard to say no to. I bet with a great pitch, you will be able to get any influential person! On top of that, you automatically get credible and amazing content for your audience.

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You can reach your niche! I started as a service to help Pastor’s stay encouraged in an industry that sees 1500 leave the ministry every month. Most people have no clue as to the pressures of this job, so my podcast is designed to encourage this niche group. — Casey Sabella, Minister’s Toolbox Podcast

PODCASTING

If you think you don’t have the voice to share your message, you might be wrong. As long as you are passionate about your advocacy, then there’s no stopping you in getting your message through. Podcasting is a very powerful tool to reach your niche without the heavy initial cost. It is a revolutionary medium for reaching the right audience by just being intentional with your message and advocacy. Be like Casey, and go reach your niche!

Reaching a different audience At first, I had a blog called Another DAM Blog, but I believe different people consume content in different ways, so I thought my (blog) content could reach a different audience if I would read my most popular (based on the analytics) blog posts into audio podcast episodes. That was a good start to my podcast, but I knew monologues were not enough... — Henrik de Gyor, Another DAM Blog Podcast If you are like Henrik here, you might have an existing blog, platform, or even followers that need more content delivered in a unique way. Podcasting is a great method to reach your audience. Conveying your message to your listeners will be easier with video on the go. Connecting with them will be effortless through the accessibility of your blogs or posts. They can even listen to you on a regular basis-while driving or doing something else. This just makes consumption of information to varied audience pretty seamless, which brings us to the next point…

There are so many people who need great, daily content! Back in 2009 when I started my career as a real estate agent, I realize that

driving would be a big part of my daily routine. So I started listening to podcast and I realized that there are many great podcast but no one has a daily podcast. So I told myself, I could create a daily podcast that interviews today’s successful entrepreneurs where they share their journey in all aspects. — John Lee Dumas, EOFire Podcast If you’ve been listening to podcasts, you probably know this guy. His shows are full of energy and it’s making a huge impact in many people’s lives including his! Today, John Lee has earned bulk of his income through podcasting just because he saw the need of people

I started my podcast, Economics Detective Radio, after finishing my Master’s degree. During my MA, I listened to EconTalk religiously. I actually calculated that I had spent more total time listening to EconTalk than I spent in class. - Garrett Petersen

for great, daily content.

Sometimes, podcasts are just the best source for education I started my podcast, Economics Detective Radio, after finishing my Master’s degree. During my MA, I listened to EconTalk religiously. I actually calculated that I had spent more total time listening to EconTalk than I spent in class. — Garrett Petersen, Economics Detective Radio As mentioned earlier, if you are an expert in something or in any field -- could even be in magic tricks, you can definitely start a podcast. Because here at Podcast Engineers, we truly believe that every one of us has unique stories, ideas, and skills, that someone out there needs to hear them. You may never know it but you can change someone’s life just by sharing your brilliance.

Showcase your creativity! I’d been running a monthly songwriter’s meet-up for a bunch of years and a new university radio station approached me to adapt it to the radio. I think they were thinking of the standard “interview/showcase” kind of thing but I always hated those shows, so I took the best parts from all my favourite podcasts and created a something that I would want to listen to. — Phil Emery, Song Talk Radio Why listen to boring podcasts when you can create yours? With podcasting, you should consider that sky’s the limit when it comes to creativity. Create a unique show, do it solo or with partners and guests. Do dramatic talks or monologues, you basically can do anything! As long as it is something that people would want to listen to, you can never go wrong with being creative.

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MARKETING TECHNOLOGY

Freepik

5 Disruptions to Marketing,

Part 4: Digital Everything by Scott Brinker This is Part 4 of a 5-part series on 5 Disruptions to Marketing (you can start with Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 if you haven’t already): 1. Digital transformation redefines “marketing” beyond the marketing department. 2. Microservices & APIs (and open source) form the fabric of marketing infrastructure.

3. V ertical competition presents a greater strategic threat than horizontal competition. 4. AR, MR, VR, IoT, wearables, conversational interfaces, etc. give us digital everything. 5. Artificial intelligence multiplies the operational complexity of marketing & business.

4. DIGITAL EVERYTHING

TVs, connected cars, connected

The previous section on vertical competition looked at the explosion of new “client interfaces” — augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), smartwatches, connected

like Amazon Echo and Google Home,

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appliances, voice-command centers home automation, etc. — through the lens of how they will disrupt the strategic landscape of the digital marketing channel.

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Who controls access to consumers, at least in a particular context, and what market leverage does that give them? But the explosion of client interfaces is also disrupting marketing in a more direct way — increasing the number and variety of different kinds of digital touchpoints we need to build for our marketing, products, and services. Let’s step back to consider how “simple” our digital environment has been. Building digital experiences used to be a highfalutin way of saying, “We’re going to build something on the web.” A website. An e-commerce store. A microsite. A landing page. An embeddable web widget. Each of

MARKETING TECHNOLOGY

these had their own UX specialties and marketing practices. As a former landing page conversion optimization geek, I fully appreciate how deep each of those different rabbit holes can go. But they were all just web pages, with tremendous commonality in their function and design — on their front-end, they’re all simply HTML, CSS, and Javascript that render in a commoditized web browser. Consumer expectations evolved more or less consistently across all of them. Because of that commonality, web experience management (WXM) platforms — the fancy name for web content management systems (CMS) — were able to provide a common backbone for most of those experiences. And these platforms could be run as a relatively isolated back-office applications. But then the digital experience mission forked. Mobile — specifically iOS and Android smartphones, then eventually tablets — created the second major kind of client interface: native mobile apps. Building mobile apps was a different discipline than web development, required different programming and design skills (e.g., touch interfaces), and had different consumer expectations. Mobile apps were also powered on the back-end by software systems that were different than website platforms. In fact, mobile apps were often built to harness multiple backend services, some internal to the company, others available via external APIs from other providers. (Take note of the rise of microservices here!).

slower connection speeds. Initially, mobile websites were separate from designed-for-desktop websites. But eventually, responsive design, which let websites dynamically adapt to browsers on phones, tablets, or laptops/desktops, became the preferred approach. It’s worth noting that there’s been a growing battle between native mobile apps and progressive web apps (PWA) that act a lot like native mobile apps, but are built using web technologies. But for the most part, “websites” and “mobile apps” have remained as separate customer touchpoints, usually developed by completely separate teams. For most marketers, keeping up with these different kinds of

touchpoints — even with just two main categories — has been challenging. As mobile usage has skyrocketed, through both websites and apps, “mobile first” — design everything so it works great on mobile devices first, and then adapt to the desktop — has become a rallying cry in marketing and digital product development. Partly to better meet consumer expectations, but also partly to narrow the focus of work to be done. Can we just build one experience for everyone?

But the reign of “mobile first” may topple nearly as soon as it began. Because now we have a multitude of new client interfaces, many which are either not web-based or use web interfaces in very different contexts.

In parallel, mobile web — web experiences on mobile devices — grew as a kind of hybrid of these two branches of digital touchpoints. They had their own set of design principles, crafted for smaller screens and

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MARKETING TECHNOLOGY

Two of the most popular are wearables/watches and chatbots. The latter category includes textbased bots, in apps such as Slack and Facebook Messenger, and voicecontrolled bots, such as Google Assistant, Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana, and Amazon Alexa. (If you doubt these things will apply to your business, you should browse the range of Slack apps and Alexa skills available today — with hundreds more on the way.) These are very different interfaces than web or mobile apps, and we’re just starting to figure out wearable interface design and conversational interface design. Beyond interface design, there’s the larger question of what kinds of new marketing and customer experiences will thrive on these different kinds of touchpoints.

But there are many, many more different kinds of digital interfaces — just click on the Internet of Things (IoT) Landscape at the top of this post to get a sense of the incredible variety of digital touchpoints that are blossoming now. That landscape was published back in March of this year, and I guarantee you it’s grown since then. (I have some experience with these things.) Let me emphasize that most of these things are not “labs only” technologies. They’re out in the market and rapidly gaining adoption, thanks to the accelerating diffusion of innovation. A recent report on

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•w earables — smart watches and more purpose-specific wearables

The latter category includes textbased bots, in apps such as Slack and Facebook Messenger, and voice-controlled bots, such as Google Assistant, Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana, and Amazon Alexa. IoT by the IAB — sounds like a Robin Williams riff — provides some data on adoption. Remember the two-way fork between web experiences and mobile apps? Those were the good old days. Now, we’re facing a multi-branched fan of digital customer touchpoints: •w eb — must work on desktop/ laptop, tablet, smartphone, etc. •m obile — native apps, SMS (not dead yet!), AR/VR experiences, etc. •b eacon-triggered and geolocationbased mobile experiences • c hatbots — screen-based and voicebased, across a variety of devices

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•A R/VR glasses and headsets — from Google Cardboard to Occulus and HoloLens • c onnected TVs with an explosion of OTT content and services • c onnected cars — Android Auto and Dash are two platform examples •d igital out-of-home signage and digital kiosks — including augmented reality features •A PIs as a digital interface for citizen developers with tools like IFTTT •n ew point-of-sale experiences — Amazon Go is an example of how far this can go •3 D printing for digitally delivering physical items to prospects/ customers • …and an essentially infinite array of more specific Internet of Things enabled objects And that’s a very high-level list. Each of those client interfaces has its own developer toolkits, design principles, and marketing/ business use cases. If you’re feeling a little dizzy, then you are properly comprehending the situation. So what does this mean for marketing? What should we do? I have 3 recommendations.

#1 EMBRACE DIGITAL EVERYTHING. Digital is no longer just your website or you mobile app. Nearly everything in the world is becoming connected and acquiring digital properties. It’s a little overwhelming — see Martec’s Law — but it’s also incredibly exciting. My advice is to personally try out as many of these new connected technologies as possible, even if you’re not normally an early adopter. It’s the best way to develop an intuition for these new kinds of client

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interfaces. As you use them, let your imagination wander: how might this be used in my business? Digital everything requires a mind shift.

#2 THINK MECHANISMS MORE THAN MEDIA. While a few of these new client interfaces are essentially just new media types or media delivery channels — for instance, VR content or 3D printed content — most of them enable new kinds of services to be provided to prospects and customers. This brings us back full circle to digital transformation. Marketing, in the broadest sense of the term, must deliver more than just communications. It must deliver delightful customer experiences that provide mechanisms — my fancy term for “functionality” — that help people accomplish things. Or, for an incredible

demonstration of chatbot mechanisms — many of which you will actually find quite helpful — check out HubSpot’s GrowthBot for marketing and sales professionals. You can install it on Slack or Facebook Messenger, and it’s a perfect example of how HubSpot is able to build a brand relationship with its target audience (you) by providing useful services. And yes, I took that screen capture at 5:58 AM, which is the perfect time

to rely on a bot instead of a human assistant.

#3 “SERVICE FIRST” (AND “DATA FIRST”) DEVELOPMENT.

In a digital world with a multitude of client interfaces — with new ones arriving at a blinding rate — building “mobile first” for any one particular interface can be technically and conceptually limiting. Instead, we should think of the capabilities we want to engage prospects and customers with at an architectural layer below individual client interfaces. We should move to a “service first” or “data first” approach to digital development, unifying our underlying back-end systems, data respositories, and business logic so we can support many different client touchpoints with a consistent and coherent experience. Again, this brings us back to flexible microservices as the ideal technical architecture for marketing systems in this brave new world. (See how the 5 disruptions in this series feed into each other?)

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AD BLOCKING

How Ad Blockers Are Changing Marketing The wire

by Didac Hormiga, CEO and Co-Founder at Pinr

â&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve blocked 201,504 advertisements on Google Chrome in the past 11 months by simply activating an ad blocker. Hundreds of millions of other people have also begun using these ad blockers, and therefore advertising is being forced to change drastically. According to a study conducted by Juniper Research, ad blocking software could cost marketers more than 27 billion dollars before 2020. Additionally, the amount of people who are using ad blockers is continuing to rise significantly. Most of this software

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is currently on computers and on some phones now; however, in the near future, this could also expand to majority of large phone brands, and block billions of advertisements annually. Ad blockers are leading to many large and rapid changes in the marketing world, so I decided to analyze a few of them:

Increase in Product Placement Because of traditional ads not working on many videos online, content creators are resorting to other marketing techniques

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such as product placement. Many YouTubers have seen a large decline in revenue per view because of ad blockers, so many of them compensate by increasing the amount of product placement in the videos. Some content creators directly recommended certain brands and blatantly promote them, but some people do it more discreetly by wearing a shirt, eating a snack, using an app, driving a car, drinking a drink or in many other ways. Many celebrities post photos on Instagram and Twitter wearing certain products, and use that as a

AD BLOCKING

major revenue source. However, this extends far beyond YouTube and Instagram and into movies and TV shows as well. Some of the movies and shows that have used product placement in 2016 include, Batman vs. Superman (Jolly Rancher), The Bachelor (McDonalds), House of Cards (agar.io), Captain America (Audi), and many others.

More Affiliate Marketing Similarly to the large increase in product placement for YouTubers, affiliate marketing has also seen a massive increase on YouTube and in general as a marketing technique. Now most YouTubers have affiliate links in the descriptions of their videos. Additionally, many blogs, articles and websites link to other websites and gain commission on any purchases there. According to prweb, almost 40% of Amazonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s revenue last year came through affiliate marketing. As marketing through the stereotypical ads continues to become more difficult, affiliate marketing will continue to increase as a marketing technique in order to generate revenues for individuals as well as larger corporations.

Companies Are Becoming The Story Tellers Companies are now shifting to becoming the storytellers in order to capture an audienceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s attention. A shareable story greatly increases the chances of a message going viral. Most people can tell a good story. However, a great company or marketer should be able to convey their values and their message through a story through is applicable or interesting to a large audience. As advertising becomes more difficult,

Some of the movies and shows that have used product placement in 2016 include, Batman vs. Superman (Jolly Rancher), The Bachelor (McDonalds), House of Cards (agar.io), Captain America (Audi), and many others. companies will have to shift to telling the stories and creating the content themselves as a marketing and advertising strategy.

Content Blocking Some companies like Business Insider and other news sources are blocking their content to viewers who have adblocker activated for their website. Their model is simple, if you want to view their content, you either have to disable your adblocker or pay a subscription fee to view it ad free. In the future, more

websites might switch to a model similar to this one, even though it might repel visitors at first. Overall, the changes in the marketing and advertising industry due to ad blockers are forcing companies to find many creative solutions. Companies are spending more money finding the best ways to get around ad-blocking algorithms, and will most likely continue to spend even more in the future. As the number of advertisements blocked continues to greatly expand, it will be interesting to see how the market reacts.

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