Build Your DIGITAL Profile using data to help you calculate your next marketing move. These and others also help you understand and keep up with trending topics, habits, and content that your customers are interested in. Data is great—we all know that. But what matters is what you do with the data. Making informed and calculated marketing decisions based on intelligent data is the marketer’s secret weapon.
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PAID SOCIAL MEDIA ADVERTISING Where do most of your customers spend about half of their time online? On social media sites of course. Facebook knows this. Linkedin and Twitter know this, as does every other social media platform on the web. This is why social media advertising has become big business. Facebook for example knows that building “likes” isn’t as important as it once was. But using its paid and highly targeted advertising data is. Now, re-targeting and Facebook’s custom audience features allow you to get a better return on your advertising budget. Facebook now dominates the worldwide social media advertising budget. It’s on target to hit over $14 billion in advertising revenue in 2015 and has become a serious rival to Google. Measurement of ROI is gaining serious attention. That is why social media advertising platforms usually come with detailed statistics of advertising performance including reach, shares, impressions, engagement, and other measures that allow marketers to analyze, interpret, and improve their advertising strategies. Although Facebook is
Issue 10 - OCTOBER 2015
leading the race in the social media advertising space, other social networks still offer marketers valuable advertising opportunities that vary depending on the specific type of business or service being advertised while being narrowly targeted to the specific audience. Targeted social advertising—on desktop, notebook, tablet, mobile, and whatever might appear in the future—is here to stay. If you have not included this in your advertising budget, we would suggest you re-evaluate your plans.
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MOBILE ADVERTISING The growth of mobile advertising is astronomical. To put this in perspective, consider: 73% of Facebook’s $14 billion advertising revenue this year comes just from mobile advertising and it has barely begun to cash in on its one billion users on WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger platforms. That is soon to change over the next few years. Making mobile a priority in your marketing and media focus is imperative in today’s business and customer engagement ecosystem. You don’t need to go through a thorough research study to know that smart phones have now become extensions of the human body. Just go for a walk and see how most people are glued to their mobile phone screens to get the picture. However, you will need to consider that mobile requires a different approach in how you create your digital marketing assets and use the screen to display media and calls to action. With mobile, less is more. What you want is for your customers to read about your offer or update, view a
video, capture an email, or contact you. Enabling easy mobile purchasing and other transactions are features that add tremendous value to your products and services and build not only revenue, but customer loyalty.
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VISUAL MEDIA Images, photos, embedded videos in social networks, and now streaming video (Facebook, Meerkat and Periscope) are changing the engagement landscape. People love taking pictures and viewing and sharing images. This has been enabled by the rapid rise of mobile phones with high-quality cameras that are now a standard feature on most new handsets. Research indicates that an increase of more than 50% in engagement is experienced when a tweet includes an image or video as opposed to one without. This trend will only continue to grow as more people move to mobile as their primary computer screen and as developing countries gain more access to affordable smartphones and accessible internet connectivity. So, what marketing automation platforms are you considering? Is mobile on your advertising plan for next year? Are you already active in social media advertising and using Facebook’s targeted Ads? If not, you’re missing one of, if not the most important marketing trend in the last several decades. Don’t let digital marketing disrupt your business; take advantage of all it has to offer, because if you miss this trend, you probably won’t be around to miss the next.