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Online Marketing Blog - 3 new articles

Targeting Your Mobile Audience with Aggregate Data #SESCHI

Over a billion smartphones enter the market every year. They’re everywhere, and users are finding new ways to leverage them every day. Mine is rarely more than 3 feet away from me, and I use it for everything from research, social "creeping", and shopping to email, an alarm clock, and my camera. One of my biggest pet peeves is when things aren't mobile compatible. As it turns out, I'm far from alone.

When it comes to websites, 61% of users won't return to a site if they have a negative experience and 40% will go to a competitor's site instead. Add on to that the statistic that 90% of all purchasing decisions begin with online research, and it’s understandable why appealing to mobile audiences has become so important. But doing so is very different than appealing to traditional web users.

Lauren Moores of Dstillery and Ambrish Verma of Microsoft presented on why location is so important when it comes to targeting mobile users, and gave a few pieces of advice to help their fellow marketers target their growing mobile audiences in their SES Session:

Key Mobile Insights

Mobile is not only becoming increasingly popular, but users are relying on it for more and more things and using their devices to multitask. Here are a few key statistics offered in today’s session:

44% of mobile search queries have a strong location intent
84% of shoppers use mobile devices for search while shopping
Mobile users are relying more on apps than on browser searches
Retail queries on mobile drive better engagement than on desktop
There are 4 main reasons people use mobile: communication, looking for local information, getting instant answers, and app usage

Be Present During Each Step of the Consumer Journey through Targeting

The days of making one ad for everyone are long, long gone. Now mobile users expect to see what they want, when they want and in the format they want. On top of that, they want to save time, money and hassle. As a marketer targeting has become an essential way to help them do those things. There are 3 main kinds of targeting:

Device targeting: this makes sure your site and advertisements are optimized for the device they’re using. Device targeting provides some flexibility in budget allocation in terms of targeting certain devices. Device-targeted campaigns have been shown to result in higher click through rates. If you’re targeting mobile users, be sure to include a “click-to-call” button.
Day-time targeting: this ensures that your information is shown at the time it’s most relevant to the searcher. See when people are checking your site, reacting to your ads, and post around those times.
Location targeting and OS targeting: can be used to make sure your information is presented in the most optimized local and time context in order to provide an enriching experience to help users get what they’re looking for from mobile. Local ads can be targeted within a 5-to-100 mile radius of your store. Or you can use zip code, address or DMA.

Use Location to Target the Right Audience, at the Right Time

Location data is essential for capturing the physical patterns of consumers, especially mobile users. There are three key pieces of location information that can help you, as a marketer, find your audience:

The IP address can help you identify if it’s a wi-fi IP address or if it’s “out in the wild”.
Census-blocks are the most granular piece of census data that can be married with demographic data to provide more insight into those using your site.
Latitude and longitude are the key to targeting mobile. This allows you to create a lot of context about a particular user, or a group of users. In your app make sure you have an opt-in for users to access their location for your marketing purposes. On mobile web you will receive the users IP address, so it’s important to emphasize usage of your app.

Using location data, you can make a difference and change your marketing strategy in four areas:

Creative: location can help you determine how to change your messaging, images and even content to appeal to your mobile users. Consider providing directions
Audience Segmentation: location can help you understand where your users are and target those based on their proximity to you, those who will interact with you on a more frequent basis.
Scale: location can help you go from digital to physical. It helps you find where searchers are over-indexing and under-indexing with your brand. This data can be used to scale your advertising by finding people on mobile and targeting them on desktop to expand your advertising and exposure.
Visualization: location can help you visualize your audience in maps and in colors. You can identify where your brand action-takers are, creating an opportunity for you to expand your advertising in those areas. Sometimes you’ll be surprised by where your searchers and customers are!

Include Site Link Extensions

Site links are used to provide users much deeper and richer context. For mobile users it’s all about taking immediate actions in real-time and on-the-go. Guide consumers onto your ideal conversion path with Site Link Extensions. These can help increase click-through rates, and shorten the funnel to increase leads. These can be used to link to social pages or to drive app downloads as well as pages on your site.

Key Takeaways

When considering a mobile strategy and site there are a few key things Moores and Verma advise you to keep in mind:

Define your mobile strategy with a focus on consumer experiences relevant to your business
Reach your customers via mobile site and apps to expand your reach
Optimzie for location and platform to improve ROI mobile campaigns with targeting
Use mobile ad formats to drive conversions with click to call, click to map and site links

I guess the old phrase “location, location, location” still holds true.

Do you use location targeting in your mobile strategy? How could you take it to the next level and make your mobile ads more tailored to those around you?

SES Chicago is winding down, but check back for a recap on the highlights from the conference and the key tips you need to know.

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Tips for Pictures That Generate Breakthrough Results in Social #SESCHI

What picture of your brand are you painting in social? I don’t mean metaphorically, I mean what visuals are you using to represent what you do and what your audience cares about? Study and after study indicates that visual content is far more impactful in social than its text-only counterpart, and yet a majority of brands interacting in social aren’t adjusting their content mix accordingly.

Cliches are Cliches Cause They Work

“A picture is worth a thousand words.” We’ve all heard the phrase, and for good reason. Especially when it comes to engaging your audience in social. Laura Roth, of Incisive Media, moderates today’s session focused on ‘harnessing the power of visuals’ in social.

Krista Nehrer, CEO of Boot Camp Digital, is the first presenter and she wastes no time to ‘prove’ images have more impact. Nehrer shows an image of a baby on the screen in the conference room. It flashes for only a moment, but when asked, the audience is able to describe the image to a T. More than simply proving recall, the audience also responded to the image with emotion.

She then flashes a ton of text on the screen. Again the information is only shown for a moment. This time, the audience falls silent. We were not only unable to recall a majority of the information, we (or at least I) felt no emotion in reaction to the flashing text. Science actually supports that an image is worth a thousand words! Take that 8th grade science teacher who yelled at me for doodling.

The 3 R’s of Pictures

Nehrer introduces her 3 R’s of creating quality images.

Real Pictures
Real Things
Real People

Her point is simple and clear. People respond to images they relate to. So real photos taken of real things by real people is far more relatable, than say, my 8th grade doodles or photo shopped creatures.

Translating these best practices to social, Nehrer points out that using images in social requires an understanding that real images drive real engagement.

Instagram & User Generated Content is Growing

Consumers are savvy and they don’t appreciate feeling misled. To keep brands and marketers to their promise, consumers are taking their own images to demonstrate how the product appears when they received it. The images featured here of the Big Mac – ad vs. a consumer’s reality – is a quintessential example.

This emerging behavior is a great reminder to deliver on our brand promises as part of an image strategy. Expect your audience to generate their wn images and pictures of your brand. The question is, are you giving a product that is ‘photo-ready’?

Continuing the discussion on user generated content, Cara Phillips of Federated Media, brings us back in history.

The Kiss is Gone

If you’re over 20 years old you’re likely familiar with the picture known affectionately as ‘The Kiss’. It’s a WWII era image of a sailor dipping and kissing a young woman. That single image captured the imagination of the nation and still resonates with many today. But in some ways, the days of ‘The Kiss’ are over. Which is not to say photos don’t work. In fact, it’s the contrary. Photos work so well that we’re all generating our own photos. So in moments of great crisis or emotion, there are hundreds, thousands or millions of ‘photographers’ capturing the moment – not one.

Photos are Art

Phillips, who spends every working hour of her day creating visual content, wants to empower the audience (and marketers everywhere) to think like an artist. ‘Photos are art, it’s subjective. So to be successful publishing images in social, you need to trust your own judgement of what photos are good.’ She then shows 2 different images of a boy with a dog, side-by-side. Both were cute, but boy on the left is being photographed in a ‘Glamour Shots’ like environment and is dawning all white. The boy on the right has messing hair, some dirt on his face and slobbering pooch. The image to the right ‘wins’ with the audience, and it’s not even close. Sorry ‘Glamour Shots’!

Consistent Visual Strategy

Phillips asserts that brands that succeed with visuals in social have a consistent visual strategy. Meaning, not only do they produce quality images on a consistent basis, but the visuals are all connected under a common – overarching theme. Pointing to Nike as a gold standard, Phillips explains that the images have a clear theme to her: our products are there to help you perform physical activities and reach your goals. So whether you are looking at their timeline in Facebook or peaking at their Pinterest boards, you’ll walk away with the understanding of how Nike can fit into your life.

Marketers want data to inform all decisions. It’s in our DNA. And while we ultimately can measure the effectiveness of the images we use in social as it relates to certain KPIs, maybe the biggest lesson to take from this session is we need to embrace our inner artist as well. Know your audience, understand what they like and trust your inner artist to stay true to those points.

Stay connected for more posts from SES Chicago. For instant information, you can plug into the conference by following @elizalynnsteely and @bslarsonmn on Twitter.

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How IBM Turned B2B Social into a Lead Gen Machine & How You Can Too #SESCHI

IBM is famous—there's no doubt about that. They’ve been known for everything from innovative products to impressive profits. But at SES Chicago, they're known for their ability to generate leads from social—something B2B companies don't necessarily always do well.

90% of brands say they measure social engagement, but only 15% of CMOs say they can quantify social ROI. Clearly, there's some sort of disconnect that needs to be addressed. Michelle Killebrew and John Lee bridged the gap in their presentation with an IBM case study on how B2B companies can leverage social media for lead gen.

What IBM Did

Killebrew shared a case study that serves as a powerful example of how IBM used social to take their website and social to the next level:

Challenges

The corporate giant was facing several challenges when it came to their digital marketing:
• what to do first
• how to scale
• how to leverage technology to get the lowest CPL
• how to educate extended teams/analysts about acquisitions and vision
• a polarized spectrum of audience needs

Objectives

The company had several objectives for their digital marketing efforts:

create a digital experience that's optimized for engagement
personalization of the user experience, sharing and conversion
drive huge lead volume through paid, owned and earned media
integrate the latest trends in digital marketing (like more video-content, message amplification through social-media, retargeted based on visitor behavior)

Questions They Asked

Those are quite the challenges, and some ambitious objectives to achieve on top of them. In order to do so, IBM asked themselves three questions:

Is This What My Audience Craves? The new age of marketing means that you have to target what searchers and your prospective customers care about most.
How can we Contextually Craft Content to the Lighter Audience? It's all about helping identify personas, and looking at human identification for resonance
What is going to keep my audience engaged? Focus on key concepts your audience cares about, it's not a library of everything. Help them find what they need as quickly as possible.

What They Found & What They Did:

People Crave Relevance: IBM linked social to their site so relevant hashtags show up that the user will actually care about
People Resonate with Visuals: IBM created unique personas on their website based on the needs and characteristics of their audiences. They then gave the personas a human face because, after all, people resonate with human photos. They also included videos on their site that were tailored to the different audiences, making content relevant and visual.
People Like Quick & Easy: IBM made 'factoids' of interesting statistics that web visitors can scroll through. They designed them to be easily shareable with ready-to-go tweets, and built-in images for Facebook and LinkedIn shares. They took it a step further and put social sharing widgets in email so readers can click to share even from emails. When it comes to mobile, easy clicks are extremely important to users. So IBM made it easy for mobile users to click with big, huge buttons.
People Like Themes: IBM created 'rethink' messaging customized to each of the personas they created that represented audience roles and their interests.

How You Can Be Successful At Using B2B Social

Lee was up next to teach the audience how they could leverage social media like IBM to increase their lead gen and successfully attract new customers. His advice came in two unique packages: DJs and Twitter Lead Gen Cards.

Be Successful by Being like a DJ
A DJ is trying to take a group of people in one place that don't know each other, a little uptight and a little shy from one place and move them to a place where they're dancing and having fun. As a marketer that's what we have to do. We have to move our customers and our searchers from a place of inactivity to one of activity that they enjoy. There are 3 lessons marketers can learn from DJs to help us do just that:

1. Think ahead. DJs always plan their playlist—what they hear isn't what you hear. Always plan out your content and your messages, be thinking of the offer after the offer after the offer.
2. Don't think of yourself. DJs play what their audience likes not what they like. Publish what you're your audience craves, not what you want. They're the ones who have to act on it, engage with it, and share it so cater it to their preferences.
3. Watch your audience. If no one's dancing, the DJ is probably doing something wrong. Marketers also need to watch their audiences to know what's resonating and what isn't and respond accordingly.

Twitter Lead Gen Cards:
Twitter saw an opportunity to help B2B marketers bring in more leads without spending more, and turn those leads into meaningful engagement in a shorter amount of time despite the challenges of distracted users that take multitasking to the extreme.

So they introduced lead gen cards that show up in Twitter feeds making them clear and convenient. Users no longer have to click away from Twitter and be taken to your site to fulfill an action, it can all be done in the Twitter Lead Gen Card. These cards have several important elements:
• Content Hook: 140 characters like any other tweet that appears at the top of the card. This has to be interesting and valuable. Don't use just a blog title. Take your best tip, your best fact and put that here—make people want to read and look at the rest.
• Supporting Copy: 50 characters to brand yourself and communicate the experience. If you have to email them something tell them that here so they know how they'll get what they want–tell them what’s going to happen.
• Social Visual Impact: 150 pixels by 600 pixels for banner ads. This picture can be text, but be sure to keep it clean. This is a good place for the name of your blog post or whitepaper. Create multiple images for each image you promote so you can see which one works and which doesn't.
• Integrated CTA Button: users click this button and you automatically get the conversion. Best practices from web and landing pages apply to this button as well. Encourage immediacy with things like "download now", "sign up now"…emphasize the now. The trick with these is they don't actually get the download. A box will pop up and say the company will contact you shortly. So how do you work around? Integrate with marketing automation so they get the asset automatically emailed to them with no lag.
• Auto Lead Capture: when someone clicks that button you get the name, handle, and email associated with that Twitter account. Most people don't use corporate email addresses for that, however there's still opportunities for nurture there and people still respond to follow-up emails.
• Engagement: the number of retweets & favorites still show at the bottom of the card.

How to Set-up a Twitter Lead Gen Card

Twitter knows marketers like easy, so they made it super simple to create a lead gen card. Log in to the Twitter advertisement interface, and from the drop down choose the option that says create new lead gen card, and you're good to go.

How to Nurture

Now that you have all the data, you've connected with this person on social, how do you nurture? Set up a program. Consider emailing 24 hours later with relevant information or other things they may find useful. These tend to be opened more often and have higher click-through rates than traditional emails.

Then start all over, seriously. Continue to improve, redesign, and personalize your marketing efforts so it’s not just a one-and-done initiative. Like Lee said, always be thinking of the offer after the offer.

Stay tuned for our live blog coverage of the last day of SES Chicago.

If you can’t wait for us to post, get live coverage by following along on Twitter with @bslarsonmn or @elizalynnsteely

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