Business Marketing

Many of us have years of experience chasing technology for marketing purposes. Thanks to social networks, we’ve naturally been driven to a host of metrics that include attributes of “engagement” and conversations shared online.

This, in turn, has fueled the Content Marketing Race – and ultimately, the quest for producing what is most relevant or valuable to a company’s current and prospective customers.

As we compete in this context to draw attention for our brand and offerings, perhaps one element has remained constant above all others: the power of visual storytelling.

Why? Because no state-of-the art technology can substitute for state-of-the-heart storytelling. If a picture is worth a thousand words, the story behind it may be worth a million more. Pinterest and Instagram continue proving this out, and every competent marketer on Facebook can point to the power of imagery.

If you’re already producing video as part of your marketing, and your efforts are sophisticated enough to track resulting engagement and lead generation – watch what happens when your focus changes from just features and benefits to cravenly telling a story. Hint: Higher levels of viewership, engagement, and sharing.

U.S. advertisers saw a 31 percent increase in clicks, and a 38 percent increase in impression volume year-over-year, according to Marin’s quarterly report. Those levels were the highest all year.

This trend also led to average CPC increases that were at their highest point throughout the year, and were 9 percent above Q4 2011. A rebounding economy and a longer period between Thanksgiving and Christmas helped to fuel this trend.

Google’s percentage of market share in Q4 was still dominant. It accounted for 67 percent of impressions, but 80 percent of spend. Their ability to monetize their traffic remains a head and shoulders leader.

During Q4 mobile and tablet traffic continued its incredible growth trajectory. CPCs were up by 60 percent YoY, and spend was up 30 percent, according to Covario. Desktop’s share of traffic is now down to 78 percent, and smartphones and tablets make up 12 percent and 10 percent, respectively.

The more interesting piece is confirmed by both Covario and Marin’s reports. They both reported that tablet spend was larger in Q4 than smartphones (9 percent on tablets and 8 percent on smartphones). This is despite a larger amount of clicks going toward smartphones.

2012 saw plenty of change in the SEO industry. The search algorithms have changed, the SERP results have changed, and how SEO professionals operate is changing.While the search landscape has grown and matured, it presents several challenges as well as opportunities to take enterprise SEO to a new level  in 2013. 

Search spend in the U.S. will increase 10 to 15 percent for the rest of 2012—This rate is consistent with macro trends. Search spend is typically indicative of the current state of the economy—as the medium allows advertisers to react quickly to marketplace changes—thus providing a positive outlook for both search and the U.S. economy.

Tablet and mobile spend will make up 15 to 20 percent of all search spend by the end of 2012— Marketers should focus on tablet and mobile markets as they still appear to be underinvested opportunities. Investments in tablet advertising will increase because tablet visitors are rapidly growing, as shown in a recent Adobe Digital Index study. Retail websites’ share of total visits increased from 1 percent to 4 percent in just 12 months. Conversion rates on mobile devices are comparable to desktop performance, even though mobile CPC rates are 30 percent lower. In a rational marketplace, the CPC rates on tablets should be identical to desktop CPC rates if the conversion rates are comparable. Furthermore, current trends indicate that tablets may cannibalize smartphone and desktop search spend as investments continue to shift to tablet devices.

As digital marketers work to provide a good experience for site visitors, they need to strike the right balance between the “spear fisherman” and the “shrimper.” 

Spear fishermen are those who want to go onto a web property and quickly find what they’re looking for: Spear their product or service, get in, and get out. The shrimper, on the other hand, is someone who wants to spend some time browsing, who may be interested in discovering something new, has a general feeling or goal in mind but really doesn’t have a specific product or service targeted yet. These people just want to be served interesting content that’s within the general theme of what they’re looking for.

You could think of this as discoverability, and it is where the goals of the user and merchandiser or marketer can converge.

Smart marketers know that site search is important, specifically when it is focused on helping visitors engage with your brand and quickly find what they are looking for. Investment in this area is going up, with 66% of Forrester respondents saying that their deployments or usage of site search technology will be increasing over the next 12 months.

It’s important to remember that site search is not only about the little search box at the top corner of your web page. It is also about ease of navigation, listening, and findability. Working with products such as those included in the Adobe® Digital Marketing Suite can make this task of providing relevant content to the right user at the right time much easier.

When companies are asked to identify the most critical aspects of site search that need improvement, almost half name relevance or real-time results as most important. Forrester illustrates that relevance is a No. 1 objective, and rightfully so. Users expect to have their search goals met quickly and painlessly.

Working in the digital marketing space, you know that relevance is critically important not only to your current customers but also to your ability to win over prospective customers. Loyalty, your company’s growth, and your credibility all depend on it.

Who are your visitors?

To connect visitors with the right products or services, you need to form a clear picture of your customer. At first glance, your visitors might appear anonymous. But as you collect user profiles and drill into information that they provide, there really is quite a lot of data that you have to draw from.

How can better relevance be realized? It’s best to start with creating segmentation and profiling data. This can be simple at first. For example, you can capture the time of day that somebody clicks on your site, as well as location, gender, and past site behavior. Your marketer will already have access to many of these factors. As you mine available data and create visitor profiles, you have what you need to start personalizing your website experience.

It’s also helpful to consider business metrics. Has somebody already looked at this piece of content? How did the user actually get to your site? Was it from a landing page, a click-through email, or a Google search? All this information can be harvested and then pulled together to help you know your customer better. When these factors are combined and refined, they can create a surprisingly rich profile. A rich profile allows you to provide relevance and ultimately personalize your user experience. And it helps you connect customers to the right products and services.

Great customer experiences don’t happen by accident. They happen when a company makes the effort to know its audience and approaches site search in an expansive and heuristic way. Customers are telling you what they want, and it’s your job to listen and respond. Search data is high-value data. Learn to use it strategically, and you will reap big rewards. It all starts with search, but it can easily end here as well—without successful search results, you can almost guarantee that the site visitor will leave. Lay down the scent and provide easy navigation so that visitors feel like they’re on the right track as they navigate your site and find what they are looking for.

 The world is going Mobile. With the smart phones and tablets, applications are the new way to move prospects into clients and to nurture your existing clientele. For the app owners, they have to give added value content to their customers to maintain the relationship.

Identify the target market segment/segments you will address;

- Know very well the significance (characteristics, advantages, values, conceptions, buyer/user personality) of your brand (product/service, company, institution, person brand) to   include in the communication plan;

- Conceive the message, taking into consideration the elementary 5W (Who, what, where, when, why) or the "4F rule" (friendly, frank, fair, factual) for a start;

- Communication channels (personal channels, as they tend to gain a higher influence: social channels (attention, it`s not the same with social media!)friends, relatives, family members; mediating channels - company reps. interacting with buyers (in social media, among others), expert channels - community influential experts), non personal channels - Internet (ads), prints, radio, TV, etc.

- Timing (when to talk to the targeted market, when to develop promotions?)

- Place (where to develop the communicational campaigns)?

- What budget to assign?

- Most companies skip the step of developing archetypes of the "ideal customers", along with the "different players" within the client' organization. Its vital in identifying the appropriate target communication channels, and in developing the correct message

- Identify what you provide, for whom, for what benefit, in what uniquely effective way,

 in a manner that is clear, concise, compelling, consistent, and continuous -- using whatever mix of media your target audience uses. Choosing the right medium to present the wrong message will only hasten your demise.

- Knowing your audience and their psychographics and even what your competition is doing is a critical step to finding the best approach.

- If you peel past the rhetoric, you'll find that almost all social media success stories can be found in B2C sales environments -- where almost anyone can buy the product or service. But in 6-figure B2B sales environments, especially in the technology sector, you need to appeal to a very exclusive group of people responsible to recommend, fund, and purchase the product or service. I can assure you, they're not counting on Facebook or Twitter to find vendors. I have yet to hear a B2B salesperson lament, "We had the best quality, features, salesmanship, business case, and customer references, but we lost because our competitor did more blogging and Tweeting.

- BEFORE looking to implement 'the keys to effective communication within any market' it is essential that you understand who are your CORE target audience (both in a quantitative & qualitative sense)? Only once you have really got under their skin and understand what makes them tick, will you then be able to 'match' them against the correct media tools & channels to market.

- The breadth of customers that you are attracting and whether/how they are buying. A segmentation scheme that is grounded in customer buying habits and analytics (i.e. propensity to continue to purchase), along with specific goals for each segment, provides a roadmap to communicating. With that in place, you can then overlay demographic profiles and customer channel preference to improve versioning/delivering the communication.

On the Internet, your website is your Billboard to your target audience. There are many things that occur in a visitors mind when deciding to use your services or not.