Consumers Don't Have an Attention Problem. It's Just That Your Advertising Isn't Very Good.

With so much media available to consume, quality matters more than ever for ads.

If a brand releases an ad and no one sees it, is it still called "advertising"?

People have more tools than ever before to skip out on ads entirely. More than three-fourths of the people in North America engage in automated ad-blocking, and 10 percent of them block ads across four kinds of media or more, according to Deloitte. Much like the question of trees falling in forests, what good is a brand's message at a time when people generally don't want to hear its sound?

Ad units are shrinking in the wake of ad-blocking technology, but human attention span remains unchanged. Today's consumers are surely more distracted than any previous generation, so they guard their attention spans more mercilessly. When advertisers can successfully command that attention for a minute or two, it means the consumer is watching an ad for the same reason he or she binge-watches Stranger Things on Netflix: The ad has managed to present itself as relevant or vital to the viewer. It wins every time.

Just 10 years ago, Gillette dominated the razor blade market. Its ads were comfortable, predictable 30-second units that reminded everyone of something they already knew: You need razor blades on the regular, so you might as well buy Gillette.

But, the market had to reorganize itself with the appearance of Dollar Shave Club and its distinctly off-the-wall messaging. The notorious startup used quirky 90-second ads to spread its word online, presenting itself as unignorable by comparison to the competition. Even though we live in a time when people can skip ads, block ads and avoid ads, Dollar Shave Club's marketing won major viral attention. It didn't exactly kill Gillette's Goliath, but it sure made Goliath sweat.

The lesson here is that people don't hate all ads, they just hate the crappy ones. The bar for perceived quality in advertising is so low these days that many choose not to engage with anything on principle alone. People even close web pages they want to visit when the page auto-plays a video ad. When job number one of the advertiser is to interest consumers, it's never been easier to annoy them.

Far from the rise of the six-second ad unit, there's strong evidence that people generally want long-form content.

Ooyala reports that long-form video content consumption is up 30 percent from last year. Instagram used to be all about sharing individual photos and short videos, but now with the launch of IGTV supports 60-minute videos. The most widely subscribed YouTuber, PewDiePie, regularly posts 20-minute-long videos to a community of millions of fans. Joe Rogan's podcast blends comedy, politics and philosophy for two to three hours at a stretch, and is one of the most popular podcasts on the internet.

People can, of course, handle stories and follow them over time. It's one of the defining characteristics of humanity. But, there are so many stories competing for our attention nowadays that we are extremely selective about which ones we let into our lives. If any of these opt-in narratives will come from advertising, those ads must first run the ad-blocking gauntlet, then be immediately relevant and spectacular to the consumer upon arrival. The bar for perceived quality in advertising these days is actually quite high.

But, there is meaningful assistance on your way to clearing it. Social listening tools trawl the internet to learn what's being said about and around different brands. With help from a company specializing in consumer insights and some Nielsen data, brands can better learn who their customers are, what they love and what they don't love. This is key information in designing a vital, relevant message. In simplest terms, a brand must know its audience. The marketing needs to reflect what the audience is interested in, not what company leadership is interested in.

From there it's only a matter of iterating and optimizing. The great thing about digital advertising is that you get feedback instantly. You can iterate a campaign to make it better. Simple tweaks in copy, reframing key ideas and A/B testing can help make your campaign truly great.


Otherwise you run the risk of a mediocre campaign and a wasted media spend. No one wants to hear that sound.

Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com/
Image credit: Dennis Fischer Photography | Getty Images

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3 Secrets Behind Maximizing Advertising Spend

As a small business owner with big goals, you’re willing to spend money to make money. But you still make it a priority to spend smartly, so investing in something like advertising takes consideration. Once you make the decision to advertise, you’ll want to make sure you’re getting the best results for your money from your advertising spend.

When your marketing and sales pipelines are running smoothly and you know your customers, online ads are a great way to accelerate customer acquisition and revenue. Research from Wordstream indicates that Google search ads drive average conversion rates of around 3.75%, so the opportunity is indeed real.

But if you don’t know what you’re doing and aren’t willing to learn, these campaigns can be a quick drain on your marketing department’s resources, from ad spend to work hours wasted tweaking campaigns with no hope.

Success in online advertising involves multiple factors. You need to optimize how much your advertising brings in, how much it costs and what other resources it consumes. And you need to juggle this all consistently, all at the same time.

How do you balance and improve all these factors in tandem? The following advertising spend tactics will help you in multiple areas. Consider prioritizing them in your ad strategy.

Retarget Warm Leads

One of the best ways to make the most of your advertising spend is to retarget people who’ve already interacted with your brand. This could be audience members who have interacted with but not converted from other ads, website visitors referred by your social posts, or anyone else who’s visited your pages or clicked on your links, depending on the ad platform.

This gives you a second opportunity to win over leads who are warm but haven’t converted. It often takes more than one try to bring someone into your sales funnel, and retargeting provides your second chance, third chance and so on.

Depending on how you accomplish your retargeting, you can use ads for a variety of different goals. For example, it’s an effective way to get a paid campaign back in front of someone who didn’t convert the first time and maximize its ROI. But it can also be used with platforms such as Facebook ads and custom audiences to show your existing website or social media audience a paid campaign.

Retargeting is an especially great use of your ad spend because it helps you focus on your best prospects, those who’ve already shown some interest in you. Think of it like Pareto’s Principle for advertising.

By focusing more of your advertising spend on higher potential prospects, you can get a higher return. This is how Lumension was able to increase lead volume by 81%, even while cutting their PPC budget by 30%.

Track Your Entire Funnel

If you’re testing multiple points in your marketing funnel and retargeting people to bring them back into it at multiple touchpoints, you’ll need to be able to accurately track that impact on your business.

Yes, you have your ad campaign data, but that’s not enough to understand how the conversions play out long-term. For example, if a lead generation campaign involves a follow-up sequence once an email lead is generated, you’ll need to tie the results from those email marketing efforts to the PPC campaign that originally acquired the lead.

Once a customer is in that state between having clicked on an ad and fully becoming a customer, you need to look to other tools to get a better view of your audience in the whole process of becoming a customer.

With Google Analytics, you can easily set up goal tracking and a conversion funnel to watch the bigger picture performance from your ads. Because they’re both Google products, it’s easy to aggregate your AdWords performance data to Analytics. But what about Facebook, Bing and other platforms?

By using a data consolidation tool (like SuperMetrics), you can save time managing the metrics of it all by automatically updating all PPC data in your Google Analytics reports. Supermetrics offers several data consolidation solutions, including integrations with Tableau, Excel and Google Data Visualizer, but if you’re already used to comparing your referrer data in Analytics, this is the way to go.

Look at how all your marketing channels work together here to get the best understanding of how different channels like advertising contribute to the whole. Double down on what’s working well, and kill what isn’t.

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Test Your Campaigns

One of the easiest ways to start improving your ad campaigns and capitalize on your advertising spend consistently is by testing new changes, methods and strategies often.

Always having a test going means always seeking ways to improve your campaign, getting better results. That might mean a lower ad spend, it might mean higher click-through rates or conversions, and it often means both. That’s why testing is so important to prioritize.

Running A/B and multivariate tests in your marketing allows you to try out new tactics in a controlled manner. Basic A/B testing focuses on testing two versions against each other, while multivariate testing looks deeper at different combinations and variations of campaign elements.

They’re an opportunity to continuously fix underperforming campaigns and turn them around, or even find new opportunities for improvement inside already successful funnels.

You can test virtually any element of your campaign, from audience targeting and ad copy through to your landing page or an offer’s post-conversion page. The closer a test is to the conversion, the quicker you may be able to see results. For example, ComScore was able to increase conversions by almost 70% by testing product pages directly.

With so many ways to test, you can start with the areas of your campaign most in need of improvement to make the biggest impact. Once improved, move on to plug another leak.

Get the Most From Your Advertising Spend

When you get serious with your advertising spend, you won’t want to set campaigns live and just let them be. Instead, to get maximum results, you’ll want to improve your chances of converting any way you can, from testing for improvements to retargeting warm leads.

Source: https://smallbiztrends.com

Image Credit: Shuttershock



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Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is a business organization focused on providing our members and guests with an extraordinary networking experience, bringing business professionals together for the sole purpose of generating new relationships and developing new business opportunities. Not a member, learn how you can become a member and join this awesome group of professionals to connect and grow your business.

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What is the Difference Between Advertising and Marketing?

The difference between small business advertising and marketing is that advertising is a paid media placement to promote your business, i.e. buying an ad. Advertising is a specific technique and one part of marketing. Marketing in small business is a much broader set of activities to promote your product or service.

Advertising might be a TV commercial, a radio spot, a quarter-page magazine ad, a newspaper classified, a billboard or an Internet display ad.

Marketing in small business includes social media, free business listings, strategic product pricing, publicity, email marketing, content marketing, search engine optimization and more. It also includes advertising.

While advertising shares similarities with some other forms of promotion, advertising is usually more within your control. Small business advertising may better drive the results you need. Small business advertising also amplifies the impact of other forms of marketing, by making sure more people see your messages.

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Advertising and Marketing

Here are scenarios to illustrate the difference between small business advertising and marketing in a small business:

Advertising: You develop a creative advertisement about your new product. Then you pay to place that ad where you’d like it to appear. You have complete control over the message of your small business advertising. You also have control over where it appears.

PR and publicity: You announce a new product with the help of a publicity agency. A media outlet covers it. Unlike with small business advertising, you have no control over where or whether your story will appear. Nor do you have control over what they write in response to your press release and interview.

A sales event: You run a special sales promotion in your store for the new product. You carefully craft the promotion and pricing to make it seem like a good deal. But you still are faced with getting the message out about the special sales event. This is where small business advertising comes in — to better drive results. So you create ads that draw attention to the sale, to get people to the store to ask for your product. Without advertising to highlight your event, it may not be as successful.

Social media: You put the word out about your new product through your social channels such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. However, only your followers and a limited number of others see your social updates. Those who see the update love the authenticity and some buy the product.

Content marketing: You write and publish content on your blog or on other sites, as a method to develop thought leadership, develop a personal brand, highlight your company brand, improve your position in search engines and develop a dialogue with customers.

Marketing in Small Business

The above five scenarios are all part of marketing in small business.

Often it’s not a case of advertising OR marketing. Rather, you can get better results by combining advertising and other types of marketing for a one-two punch.

Here’s an example of how content marketing and social media combined with advertising will bring a bigger impact. You write an awesome blog post. You share it on social media to get visibility there. But sadly, only a handful see your social media update or blog post. So you decide to promote your social media post. You boost or promote your update (i.e., place a social media ad) to get your message more widely seen by thousands, get more social shares and drive more sales.

Small Business Advertising

Some refer to combining advertising with other content marketing techniques as a “POEM.” POEM stands for Paid, Owned and Earned Media. In a content marketing setting, owned media is the blog post you write. Paid media is the boost for the social media post. Earned media refers to the sharing others do after seeing your social media share more widely. See more examples of using Paid, Earned and Owned Media.

Do you now see the difference between advertising and marketing in small business? And do you see how small business advertising can amplify other marketing techniques?

Source: https://smallbiztrends.com

Image Credit: Shuttershock




ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is a business organization focused on providing our members and guests with an extraordinary networking experience, bringing business professionals together for the sole purpose of generating new relationships and developing new business opportunities. Not a member, learn how you can become a member and join this awesome group of professionals to connect and grow your business.

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10 Facts You Didn't Know About Facebook Advertising

What works today may not work tomorrow.

Facebook ads are one of the trendiest online advertising tools because of their wide reach and relatively low cost. However, right when people believe they have figured it out, Facebook is going to surprise them with something they didn’t know and that might change their strategic approach.

Let’s have a look at 10 facts about Facebook advertising:


1. Facebook bids are extremely sensitive to seasonality.

The whole Facebook algorithm is built on a bidding system that determines a price of an impression based on multiple variable factors. The amount of accounts bidding on a specific target is one of the factors that influences the price the most. The more people bid on a specific target, the more expensive an impression will be. This is why Christmas, Black Friday and other busy days usually have a higher cost per click.


2. Facebook offers a click to chat ad option.
 This is not something new, but it certainly is one of the least used functions on Facebook. Click to chat campaigns can be great for customer service, and they can be set up using the click to website campaign type. Click to chat campaigns work very well with users who have already visited a website because they are familiar with a product or service and might have questions before committing to a purchase.


3. Facebook placements need different ad strategies.

Facebook currently offers an ad platform that encourages you to create ad sets that advertise across multiple devices automatically. However, different devices have different ad requirements and customer behaviors. I recommend you breakdown your campaigns and ad set by device to maximize performance.


4. The amount of text in the image influences delivery.

The more text you have in an image, the lower your delivery will be. Facebook prefers posts with images with little or no text. This will be rewarded with a higher distribution and a lower cost per impression. Facebook is currently classifying the image text ratio as ok, low, medium and high, which are explanatory units of measure.


5. Refreshing ad creatives is extremely important.

Most Facebook campaign types don’t give advertisers control over the frequency of ad delivery to the same user. This can easily create some discomfort in potential customers and drive them away from a potential purchase. Facebook advertisers need to change the content and creative of the ads quite often to avoid this issue.


6. Audience insights are a great source of targeting methods.

Using audience insights with conversion data can be a great source of information for any campaign. It provides additional ways to target users based on their online behaviors, purchase habits, housing situation, income and much more. Finding additional ways to communicate to targeted users will likely help expand the reach of a campaign and generate better performance.



7. Facebook has a pre-selected similar reach targeting option.

This option allows Facebook to show ads to audiences that are similar to the ones that you have selected and that are likely to generate extra conversions at a lower CPA. This option helps businesses expand their overall reach and visibility. This function works similarly to lookalike targeting, but it differs because it is based on data that comes from Facebook and not from the ad account manager.


8. Facebook allows you to limit the exposure on the audience network.

Many advertisers consider the audience network not a great ad placement because it doesn’t generate quality traffic. Facebook understands these concerns and developed two options to solve this issue. The first issue is to exclude specific website categories from displaying ads such as dating and gambling. The second option is to proactively upload a list of websites to exclude. This is going to boost performance by limiting the amount of clicks from placements that will never turn out to be a conversion.


9. Video ads don’t generate a great direct response.
 
If the goal of a company is to generate most of its business through video ads, Facebook is not the way to go. Video ads are great to communicate a message, but they aren’t necessarily the best option when it comes to website clicks. Videos are so engaging that the cost per impression needed to generate a click to the site will boost due to people taking other social action on the post, such as commenting and liking it.


10. The same bid won’t work forever.
 
Considering how Facebook bids are sensitive to changes in the marketplace, one strategy will not always be effective. Something that was working perfectly today might become unprofitable in a few days. This means Facebook bids require much more maintenance and constant tune ups.


In conclusion.

Facebook is a great advertising platform, and there are many changing elements in it. It is very important to always be alert and learn more about its recent changes and to take advantage of them before the competition to gain a first mover advantage.

Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com

Image Credit: Getty Images


ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is a business networking association dedicated to helping small businesses and entrepreneurs develop, expand and grow. We offer affordable opportunities to help create a positive impact and advancement in your business interests and personal quality of life to take you to the next level.
Stay Connected with WNFP!

3 Advertising Trends That Are Revolutionizing Offline Marketing

Advertising tech trends you need to know in 2017.

Technology radically changed advertising. You do not even have to look as far back as the television ads of the 1960s to see the significance of those changes. Advertising technology has raced forward every year for the last decade to become one of the most futuristic industries there is today.

Ten years ago, advertising was just finding its legs on the internet. There were banner ads, pop ups, and endless email distributions. It was an era of blind advertising where companies treated the online space like the real world. Advertising was about as targeted as billboards: if there was a high volume of traffic, that was all that mattered.

But in the last ten years, technology has empowered advertisers to become incredibly specific with how they target potential consumers. They can aggregate search data and social media data to paint incredibly precise pictures of who people are and what they want to buy. Gone are the days of blind advertising online. But while advertising technology raced forward online, it stalled in the real world.

Billboards became digital, but they never became smart. Physical store locations still hang signs in their windows to lure customers in, but have no idea who the customers are. Advertising in the physical world is ready for modern technology, and it may finally be getting it. These are three advertising trends that are revolutionizing offline marketing:


    1.    Targeted Digital Out of Home

Billboards project a static piece of marketing to the crowd of people that can see it. Whether that crowd is Generation Z kids in a mall or Baby Boomers stuck in traffic on a freeway, the ads they see are not customized to them. But new technology is allowing advertisers to aggregate a huge volume of data in real time about the people who are in close proximity to billboards and that is changing everything.

The technology is called targeted Digital Out of Home (DOOH) and it is effective because it can capture smartphone IDs when they ping wifi routers. Those smartphones are then matched to existing advertising IDs that catalogue online search and social media data. The result is an immediate profile of a whole crowd.

"Maybe the crowd is primarily millennials, or spanish speaking soccer moms, or people shopping for a new car of a certain household income; the digital signs can immediately serve an ad that best fits the demographic that is actually looking at it," explains Jonathan Frangakis, co-founder and CEO of DOOH targeting company Mira. "This all happens in near real time. More specifically, aggregation, scoring and ad serving happens in less than a second, so the digital billboard is always adapting to aggregate crowd profiles."

This technology does not mean that billboards will suddenly begin to serve ads based on your specific profile, but it will aggregate your profile with a crowd of others. That is a huge opportunity for marketers who have not been able to target demographics in real time in offline environments until now.


    2.    Online to Offline

As good as online marketing is at targeting customers, it does have a blind spot. A huge percentage of total commerce still takes place "offline", meaning at physical stores. That does not mean that the ads are not effective, just that it is hard to track their actual success.

New advertising platforms in the online to offline (O2O) space are bridging that gap. There are a litany of platforms and none has emerged as the clear leader, but the concept is that users would connect their credit cards to the platform and then continue browsing the internet and shopping like normal. What changes is that when the consumer uses their credit card at an offline store, it can be traced back to an ad that they saw online.

Connecting online ads to offline sales has been called a trillion dollar idea and it makes sense why. If advertisers could only pay for ad impressions that turn into sales, then they would functionally have a guaranteed ROI.

    3.    Offline to Offline

Okay, so connecting a specific sale to an online ad is great for marketers, but what about the $7.3 billion spent on offline marketing? How can advertisers calculate the effectiveness of those marketing expenditures?

New technology is working to unravel that mystery, too. The space is new and is not technically called offline to offline, but the attribution model effectively does just that. Companies offering this service use algorithms and data captured from online searches to calculate the likelihood a consumer saw a TV commercial or billboard prior to making a purchase.

While not as proactive as targeted DOOH or Online to Offline technologies, it is nonetheless a critical piece in connecting offline advertising to actual revenue. Marketing in the modern era requires actionable data, so efforts to retroactively establish what inputs drove a particular purchasing decision are becoming more important. "

The offline world is getting the technology treatment that the online world has had for years now," says Frangakis. "Advertising offline is not becoming obsolete, in fact in the coming years it could see substantial growth as advertisers begin to adopt these new technologies and data strategies."

Source: http://www.inc.com/
Image Credit: Getty Images



ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is a business networking association dedicated to helping small businesses and entrepreneurs develop, expand and grow. We offer affordable opportunities to help create a positive impact and advancement in your business interests and personal quality of life to take you to the next level.
Stay Connected with WNFP!

Offline In The Digital Age: Why Traditional Advertising Isn't Dead

In today’s crowded marketplace, businesses (both B2B and B2C) are fighting to get their brands noticed. Marketers have a plethora of tools to choose from, whether they decide to use a solely digital strategy or incorporate a blend of both traditional and digital tactics. More importantly, brands need to begin thinking like their customer and understand how their target markets are accessing information and consuming content.

Digital marketers are obsessed with pay-per-click models, but that doesn’t mean companies should forget about offline marketing strategies. While it is much more difficult to specifically measure offline marketing such as billboards and paper ads, it is a good way to increase your brand’s awareness, and it brings your brand into the real world.

The challenge many businesses face is finding the creativity to craft compelling ads that not only capture people’s attention but also communicate an informative message in a short amount of time. For example, a billboard advertising a film needs to find space to include the movie title, release date, and a catchy tagline if possible. Such a billboard is likely to be placed along a stretch of road where drivers have only seconds to read and digest the message. And traditional marketing is often a one-way street because advertisers using traditional methods of marketing are making impressions on consumers by talking to, or at them. Contrast this with social media, where marketers can foster a dialogue between brand and consumer through mediums like Facebook and Twitter.

Some businesses are warning against completely writing off traditional advertising. The key is finding ways to incorporate digital tracking methods into offline billboards to verify that the message is effective. Marketers like StickerRide are using mobile apps to track their campaigns and unique domain URLs to measure online impact. “The out-of-home (OOH) advertising market in the United States is $7.3 billion and growing,” says Mikhail Marchenko, CEO and Co-Founder at StickerRide. “Consumers have multiple encounters with OOH advertising every day, so for brands it is important to target in order to receive nationwide coverage and to increase brand awareness.” Drivers sign up to place campaign stickers on their cars and brands can track car-specific metrics to see how their campaigns are doing. Not only does this help a brand get the word out about their campaign, a car-centric campaign also creates brand ambassadors and loyalty. Drivers can pick and choose which campaigns they drive around for, providing an opportunity for fans to connect with their favorite brands.

Another brand, Melissa’s Cupcakes, understands the value offline advertising can bring. With so many marketers focused on creating the ideal digital journey for customers, businesses tend to forget that customers are looking for offline touch points, too. A business like Melissa’s Cupcakes benefits from having a traditional marketing strategy to ensure consumers, both online and offline, are taken on an ideal journey that comes with multiple touch points. And retailers who do have both marketing strategies in place may need to take another look at what types of ads they’re creating. If the offline and online campaigns don’t complement one another, marketers miss the opportunity to educate their customers and create a cohesive experience.

Building a holistic marketing campaign involves finding creative ways to digitally track traditional advertising, which is made all the more possible thanks to smartphones and mobile apps. If you decide to hand out business cards, consider including a QR code that can be easily scanned on a smartphone or has a trackable coupon code. Lyft and Uber are just two companies that distribute thousands of business cards every day with referral codes giving riders money off their first ride, and those coupons are unique and easy to track.

Some people will argue that traditional marketing is dead, but there are several benefits to including offline advertising in your overall marketing campaign. Combining both offline and online campaigns can help boost your brand’s visibility, and help it stand out amongst competitors who may be busy flooding the digital space. And the rapid rise of smartphones and other tracking tools has made it possible for brands to begin tracking various offline campaigns, a feat that was previously unattainable. If the goal of businesses in today’s crowded marketplace is to differentiate and get noticed, it makes sense to use as many channels as possible, both digital and traditional, to attract your target market.



Source: http://www.forbes.com/

ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is a business networking association dedicated to helping small businesses and entrepreneurs develop, expand and grow. We offer affordable opportunities to help create a positive impact and advancement in your business interests and personal quality of life to take you to the next level.
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Traditional Advertising Is Dying a Slow and Painful Death. Here's What to Do Instead

The proof is in the pudding. How many times have we heard that? However, when comes to building a brand it holds true 100 percent of the time.

When companies have social proof of repeated positive interactions with their customers it builds trust in the marketplace which increases conversion rates of new customers.

Traditional advertising efforts are declining in their effectiveness. Consumers have been marketed to so profusely that they have become resistant to almost all claims made in advertisements.

I received yet another phone book on my doorstep over the weekend. Like millions of others, I immediately recycled it. Studies show most millennials don't even watch tv. Newspaper subscriptions are down across the country, rendering their ads far less effective than they once were.

There is simply so much noise that consumers have largely shut down and tune out commercials. They simply don't place any value in the claims made by marketers unless they can be validated from actual proof from within the marketplace.

Credibility is essential to building a brand and consumers simply would prefer to find out what others are saying rather than placing faith in what advertisers are telling them.

Here are several simple yet highly effective ways marketers can leverage social proof to increase conversion rates:

• Create case studies from successful customers. Demonstrating how existing customers have benefited from a brand's services establishes credibility. Share them to your website and social media

• Write blogs that tell the company's story, demonstrate industry thought leadership, document success, highlight talented employees, and create engagement.

• Encourage customers to leave online reviews and publish them to the company website. The sales team should seek recommendations from existing customers via LinkedIn that can be displayed on their profiles.

• Ask influential existing customers to give a testimonial via a quote. Create a graphic with the quote prominently displayed and share it via social media.

• Prominently feature awards, mentions in the media, or any other positive rankings or ratings via social media.

• Leverage numbers when possible. People are far more likely to take a certain action if they know others have already done it. If a company has 75,000 subscribers to their e-Newsletter making that known lends credibility and encourages new users to sign up as well.

• Encourage your sales reps and account managers to get LinkedIn recommendations from existing clients. Then, make the recommendations part of the sales pitch to prospects. I have 37 LinkedIn recommendations and have used them as a closing technique for years, "don't just take my word for it, see what my clients have said about me."

To get business, blogging has been the only advertising I've done for my startup. When I was in the corporate world and before blogging, it was always me who was doing the reaching out to companies (calling, emailing, messaging on LinkedIn, etc).

Since I began blogging and left the corporate world, I found that giving away just enough free information via my blogs attracts interest in my business. Blogging helped me convert from a 100% outbound marketing strategy to an inbound one in which people reach out to me.

When I meet with companies about their social media, one of the biggest fears I see is negative reviews online. They are hesitant to go all in on social because they fear that by doing so it will give their customers more opportunities to voice a negative experience.

What many don't realize is that these negative reviews are likely already happening to some degree with your company. The best way to offset a negative customer experience online is to share and highlight positive outcomes from customers that show the real benefits of your products and services.


Once a company has an understanding of how to leverage their social proof, they become truly influential within their industry. The key to marketing is what others are saying about a brand, not what the brand is saying about itself.

Source: http://www.inc.com/
Image Credit: Getty Images




ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is a business networking association dedicated to helping small businesses and entrepreneurs develop, expand and grow. We offer affordable opportunities to help create a positive impact and advancement in your business interests and personal quality of life to take you to the next level.
Stay Connected with WNFP!

16 Basic Marketing Tools Every Single Company Should Know

Modern marketing involves seemingly endless amounts of data generated by a smorgasbord of digital channels. In fact, the ocean of marketing data available is so vast that it's hard to know what to focus on, particularly when a company is young. Fortunately, a wealth of inexpensive and easy-to-use cloud platforms exists to help sift through and make sense of all the noise. Take some pointers from Nikhil Hasija, CEO of Seattle-based Azuqua, a company helping businesses like General Motors, GE, and Starbucks connect cloud apps and data, doing things such as linking Twitter to Marketo to Salesforce to Zendesk to Jira. Here are his words regarding the best digital tools any company should start with.

Website Content Management System (CMS)
Every company needs a website, but it's amazing how many companies create a website without a content management system. There is absolutely no reason to waste precious resources updating website copy. I use WordPress because it doesn't require engineering talent, there is a huge community of users to tap for help, it offers millions of themes to choose from, as well as a huge ecosystem of consultants, agencies, and developers.

Web Analytics
For most startups, the free tier of Google Analytics is enough. However, once you have more traffic, you may want to try advanced, yet more expensive, tracking tools like Kissmetrics, Mixpanel, Omniture, or Webtrends. No matter which tool you use, web analytics is absolutely critical for running experiments, and improving the impact of your content.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
If you have leads coming in, you need to start managing them. Salesforce is the most common CRM system, but it has grown bloated over the years, to the point where it is actually pretty difficult for a startup to get it up and running. The good thing about Salesforce is that every sales and marketing person knows how to use it. The downside is that it's more complex than it needs to be. I'm a big fan of Pipedrive as an alternative.

Marketing Automation
Once you start spending money on acquiring leads through things like paid media or events, you'll want to track and optimize your spend to ensure those leads mature and drive revenue. This means you need a system to create landing pages and gate content, send out newsletters, and create nurture campaigns. If you are focused on email marketing and newsletters, tools like MailChimp, SendGrid, and Constant Contact will suffice. However, they don't really generate leads. Marketo or HubSpot are much better for this. The biggest issue many companies have with marketing automation is that managing the tool becomes a full-time job. Azuqua--my company--addresses this issue.

Design Tools
Every marketing team needs design work. Marketing is inherently visual, especially in the digital age. While larger companies have design teams dedicated to marketing collateral or agency vendors focused on creative, small teams need to do much of this in-house. Many teams still use Photoshop, but Sketch is quickly overtaking Photoshop in popularity with startups because it's lighter, easier to use, and covers the functionality that non-design professionals need 95 percent of the time. I also recommend Canva to easily create social media creative and Unsplash to find free, high-res stock images.


What marketing tools are your favorites, and why? Sound off in the comments.

Source: http://www.inc.com/
Image Credit: Getty Images




ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is a business networking association dedicated to helping small businesses and entrepreneurs develop, expand and grow. We offer affordable opportunities to help create a positive impact and advancement in your business interests and personal quality of life to take you to the next level.
Stay Connected with WNFP!

Why Your Visual Advertising is Failing: Display Advertising 101

Do display ads work? If you’re going by the number of clicks, the answer is a deafening no. In fact, the average click-through rate for display ads across all formats and placements is downright abysmal, just 0.06 percent, reports HubSpot. A January 2014 study found that Millennials (18- to 34-year-olds) were far more likely to tune out display ads on social media sites and search engines than they were to ignore traditional TV, radio and print ads, according to eMarketer. Worse, half of all clicks on mobile ads are accidental, reports GoldSpot Media. At the same time, display ad spend is expected to surpass search ad spend in 2016. So, what gives?

The Internet is flooded with visual ads– and most of them are pretty subpar. Sure, we’ve moved beyond those flashy banner ads circa 2005 that screamed “Buy Me Now” in loud, clashing colors. (Right?) But even the most attractively designed visual ads can still fall short. Effective ads align simple, professional design with compelling messaging and smart backend analytic refinement. These ads leverage the channel in a way that makes sense for a business’s specific goals and the target market’s needs.

Could it be we’re actually over thinking display ads? The ABC’s of the perfect visual ad are not rocket science. Here’s how to get back to basics and fix your visual advertising problems.

Display Advertising 101
Keep It Simple

Bannersnack’s collection of the best examples of display advertising all feature simple designs that harness the power of brand elements (like logo and colors) to build trust with viewers and drive clicks. Great ads speak to users. The harness the power of empathy to understand the target audience, what makes them tick, and what elements they respond to. The Apple Music ads are the perfect example of simple design that harnesses brand recognition and trust with a clear call-to-action message. Apple has already created plenty of buzz around Apple Music. There’s no need to explain how the service works. Here, a simple “Available Now” CTA works best to drive conversions.

Create a Sense of Urgency

Today’s savvy Millennials are used to display ad retargeting with multiple offers. To drive click-throughs, you need to create a sense of urgency with your ads without sounding like spam. Adobe’s display ads for Creative Suite are the perfect examples. The ads use compelling visuals to draw on what Adobe is already best known for – amazing photographs via Photoshop – and then add simple CTAs with limited time offers. The blue “Join Now” or “Get Started” buttons visually contrast with the darker backgrounds, subtly drawing attention to the CTA without being in your face about it.

Focus on One Offer at a Time, A/B Test for the Most Effective Message

Businesses like Amazon and eBay offer a host of services and products. But their ads are completely streamlined. They never cram too much information into one display ad. But just because you’re making one offer at a time doesn’t mean that you can’t have multiple ad iterations. Check out what Amazon Prime did with the company’s Prime Video display ads. While the text is the same in each of these four ads, they vary design elements (background color, CTA button color) for A/B testing. Changing too many elements between ads can make it difficult to determine which element truly is responsible for the boost (or fall) in clicks. By focusing on one offer at a time and only varying background color and button color, Amazon is better able to determine which subtle design difference have the biggest impact on click through rates.

Design Ads Specifically for Retargeting

Users who are retargeted are 70 percent more likely to convert, reports Digital Information World. To maximize the effectiveness of your retargeting ads, align design with strategy: what does the user need to convert? For Asana, this meant building greater awareness around the app’s benefits, reports Bannersnack. For Marin Software, their goal is a bit different: rather than promoting benefits, they promote reports with information that’s relevant and timely for their audience. For Moz, the strategy is even simpler: try Moz Pro for free. All three of these strategies have been effective because the companies understood what prospective users needed to see to convert. Don’t assume what works for Company A will also work for your business. Learn what moves the needle for your users and align your ad messages accordingly.

Bottom Line


Display ads are most effective when great design aligns with brand strategy and user needs. Understand what makes your users click on an ad: is it a sense of urgency to sign up for a trial offer? Is it out of curiosity to learn more about a new product or service? By getting back to basics, you can maximize the impact of your display ads.

Source: http://smallbiztrends.com/
Image Credit: Shutterstock




ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is a business networking association dedicated to helping small businesses and entrepreneurs develop, expand and grow. We offer affordable opportunities to help create a positive impact and advancement in your business interests and personal quality of life to take you to the next level.
Stay Connected with WNFP!

How to Beat Your Competition in the Advertising Game

It’s often said that competition is good for your business. It pushes you to be your best. Think Coca-Cola vs. Pepsi, Visa vs. MasterCard, Xbox vs. PlayStation, or Apple vs. Microsoft.

Of course, part of the fun of rivalry is stealing customers from your rivals. You can do that with the help of advertising!

Competitive Advertising Strategies

Today you’ll learn five brilliant competitive advertising strategies you can use to get in front of your competitors’ customers and (with a little work) turn them into YOUR customers instead. *Evil laughter*

1. Target Facebook Users Whose Interests Include Your Competitors

Facebook Ads doesn’t offer keyword targeting for your ads and you can’t specifically target people who have liked your competitors’ pages. However, Facebook offers something called interest-based targeting.


On Facebook, interests range from extremely broad (e.g., business or entrepreneurship) to very specific. In this case, your competitor’s name is the specific interest you want to target, because Facebook allows you to choose to target people based on, among other things, brands and products they like.

Type in your competitor’s website URL. Or, if that doesn’t work, you can type in your competitor’s brand name or try a few keyword combinations to figure out best option for reaching their target audience – which is now your target audience!

Make sure your Facebook ads are awesome and your competitive campaign will be off and running.

2. Disrupt Your Competitors’ Videos with YouTube Ads

Recently I was on YouTube searching for an AT&T ad. Before I could watch the ad I was looking for, I had to sit through another ad – I know, that’s modern life. But the genius part was that this ad wasn’t for AT&T, but for its competitor, Sprint.

In this ad Sprint explained why it is a better provider than AT&T and highlighted an offer to switch carriers, before I could even see the ad for the brand I had searched for.

To execute this competitive advertising strategy for your own campaigns, create the most watchable TrueView ad you can, adding in how much you’re willing to spend.

There are many targeting options to choose from (e.g., demographics, interests, keywords, remarketing). But today we’re feeling competitive!


You want to target your video ads so that whenever someone searches for the YouTube videos of your competitor that they’ll see your ad first. If you play it right, they might not even watch your competitor’s video!

For best results, make sure your video ad is memorable.

3. Use Your Competitors’ Emails Against Them with Gmail Ads

Another brilliantly sneaky competitive advertising tactic you should start using now is targeting people who have recently shown interest in the things your competition sells.

With Gmail Ads (those ads that appear at the top of the Promotions tab of users’ personal email accounts), you can do keyword targeting on your competitors’ brand terms.

As you read this, people who are in the market for your competitor’s products are getting emails from your competitors – and those emails mention your competitors’ brand terms. For example, if you were competing with Sephora, you could target its brand name as part of a Gmail ad campaign so that every time a Sephora newsletter arrives in someone’s Gmail inbox, your brand ends up in its inbox as well. Obviously, your email should tell Sephora subscribers all about your great competing site and product and why they should check your out.


So if you want to try to steal some sales, target the trademarks of your competitors. Make sure you use an email subject line that will have users clicking your Gmail Ads in droves. Use only the best-performing subject lines, the ones with the highest open rates – your unicorns. As an added bonus, because these people are already in the market for a competing solution, it’s likely that more people will click on your ads, which reduces your costs.

4. Reach Your Competitors’ Audiences through the Google Display Network

Google has some great display ad technology. But if you want to beat up on your competition, you need to use Google’s custom affinity audience feature.


Affinity audiences let you target a predefined audience, one that should be more receptive to seeing your ads.

To make this work brilliantly, and avoid wasting your ad budget, you’ll want to target the home page of your competitor. AdWords will then figure out the brand trademarks and the behavior of the people who visit and are interested in that domain name (or search for content on related topics).

Let’s use MailChimp as an example: MailChimp is a publication that’s geared toward businesses doing email marketing. So if I’m running a similar business geared toward email marketers, MailChimp visitors would form the basis of our “ideal customer” we want to reach with our own display ads.

This will start the process of getting the right people familiar with your brand and the products or service you provide. And hopefully, with the right message, you’ll start stealing business away from your competitors and experiencing breakout growth.

5. Download and Target Your Competitors’ Twitter Followers

There are tools that allow you to download a list of every Twitter follower for any account, such as BirdSong Analytics. You can use these to download a list of all your competitor’s Twitter followers. Costs generally start around $35 and go up the more followers the account has.

Once you have your report, you can use those Twitter handles to create a list that you’ll then upload to Twitter Ads. Make sure to select the option to “add tailored audiences.” Uploading the list will take about 3 hours to process.

You can then create ads to get your business in front of the Twitter users who are already following your competitors and are likely in the market to buy or switch to a similar product or service. Genius, right?

After setting your budget comes the real fun. It’s time to get creative and compose your tweet copy. Here are some quick and (relatively) easy ways to produce creative for your Twitter ad and make it stand out from the crowd.

Don’t Let Your Competitors Have All the Fun!


Remember, all these competitive advertising strategies are putting your business in front of users who are interested in your competitors, which means they’re much more likely to be in the market for your product/service. You just have to show them that what you offer is better than what your competitors do!

Image Credit: Shutterstock
Source: http://smallbiztrends.com/


ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is a business networking association dedicated to helping small businesses and entrepreneurs develop, expand and grow. We offer affordable opportunities to help create a positive impact and advancement in your business interests and personal quality of life to take you to the next level.
Stay Connected with WNFP!

Three Big Myths About TV Viewing And Advertising

It’s become a popular notion that “digital is going to make TV obsolete,” and in some circles it’s cool to say “I don’t watch anymore.” But is it true?

You certainly can’t be blamed for thinking it is, given all the headlines about the growth of Internet properties. They sound so big. For instance, Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg has repeated the phrase “We have the Super Bowl every day on Facebook Mobile” so many times it’s taken as truth in certain circles.

But is it? The short answer is no. It can only be made to seem that way because the Internet and TV report audience in different ways – ratings, views, streams, etc. – which by themselves are incomparable. We looked at Internet and TV through the lens best applicable across them for a new report, Any Given Minute, and found that the average audience in a given minute on Facebook Mobile is more than 4 million people, vs. 95 million people for the Super Bowl. In fact, in any given minute, Facebook would only rank as the 161st largest TV show.

As a common currency enabling true cross-media comparisons, average audience exposes three big myths about TV:

TV is dying. The reality is that in any given minute, 95% of video viewers are watching TV. And twice as many people are watching TV as doing anything on a computer or mobile device. We’re actually in the platinum age of TV. There are more great shows than ever, and more kinds of people are engaging with TV content every way they can. When TV networks pull together the far-flung numbers on activity across digital platforms, they invariably find the audience for their popular programs is up.

Millennials don’t watch TV. The numbers simply don’t bear this out. TV is 88% of what Millennials watch in any given minute. No wonder they average five hours/day. Last year, after reports that its Millennial ratings had fallen, ABC added up all the digital viewing of its shows and found its younger audience had actually grown significantly.


Cord cutting is eroding TV. Consider that 80% of adults prefer subscription TV while cord-cutters predominantly stream TV content, and streaming becomes an and rather than an or proposition. It gives viewers flexibility, programmers distribution, networks revenue, and marketers (ultimately) new engagement options.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/


ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is a business networking association dedicated to helping small businesses and entrepreneurs develop, expand and grow. We offer affordable opportunities to help create a positive impact and advancement in your business interests and personal quality of life to take you to the next level.
Stay Connected with WNFP!

Promote Your Business (Even On A Tight Budget)

The steps leading to a startup launch sometimes happen under the radar. Behind closed doors, you research the competition, define your target customer, figure out finances, enlist assistance, and padlock intellectual property with patents, trademarks or copyrights.

But as you draw closer to launching your business, it’s time to abandon stealth tactics and build a plan to etch an indelible mark on customers’ consciousness. Having a clear strategy to promote your business will set you apart from competitors.

Wait, you say. I can’t afford a flashy promotion campaign.

You’re not alone. But without promotion, the business you’ve worked so hard to establish is more likely to stagnate and be ignored than to grow and find customers.

So let’s go back to the basics and review proven, foundation-level promotion strategies that have power to help new or existing businesses break through the marketing chatter without spending a fortune.

Build a website Have one already? Great. Review and update it regularly. Keep the content fresh, interesting and engaging. But if you’ve put an Internet presence on the back burner because you can’t afford web-design assistance, search online for information about “creating a website” to discover templates and tools that enable anyone to create a basic site at little or no cost. A note of caution – for many of your potential customers, your website is the first impression they have of your company. It is wise to invest appropriately in a well-designed site that accurately portrays your image and company.

Begin your site content with a concise description that introduces your business and sets it apart in the marketplace. Then detail your products and/or services, experience and results, endorsements and testimonials and, of course, your contact information. Plan to add content as your business develops.

List your business in search-engine directories, and reward customers who post reviews When potential customers hear about your business, they will turn to Google, Yelp or other sites to learn more. Ensure your entries on those sites are accurate and include links to your website.

Consider offering customers a discount coupon if they post a review of your products or services. Incentives encourage reviews and also can lead to repeat business.

Create or improve business cards and stationery Don’t underestimate the importance of these tools, which help define your business, show prospective customers that you are a professional, and help them remember you. Search online for information about “creating business cards” to find affordable services that walk you through creating everything from business cards to brochures. Always list your web address and social media handles on your business card, letterhead and promotional materials, and keep a stack of business cards with you.

Network For entrepreneurs, networking is a way of life. But your time is precious, so think quality versus quantity by networking in organizations that attract your target customers or people active in the entrepreneurial space.When you meet someone, restate their name to embed it in your memory, and don’t forget to exchange business cards. As soon as you politely can, jot notes on business cards to remind you about your conversation with each person. Following those conversations, send a handwritten note to each new contact to help them remember you.To become even more well known, offer to be a speaker for industry conferences, volunteer organizations, libraries or local business groups. Speaking engagements can boost your name recognition, build your prospect list and gain publicity for your business.

Create business profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter, Pinterest and/or YouTube … and use them to build your credibility Determine which of those sites your target customers frequent, and begin your efforts there. As with your website, ensure your online profiles include a compelling description of what your company does and what distinguishes it from the competition. Then position yourself as a source of expert information by blogging, tweeting, sharing and posting about topics relevant to your industry.Liz Bohannon, CEO of Sseko Designs and a graduate of the FastTrac^® NewVenture^TM program, uses her company’s Facebook page to feature new products and to share stories of the college-bound young women of Uganda who make them.

Email services help you manage your contact list, and send professional-looking e-newsletters or offers. It’s important to request permission before sending email, but you often can build a permission-based contact list by giving something away — perhaps an e-book or a tip sheet about how to do something related to your business.Rob Oyler, a FastTrac^® TechVenture^TM graduate who is president and founder of WANRack, is building his company’s email list by offering a free white paper, “E-Rate Changes Put Private Fiber WANs Within Reach for K-12 Schools.” The paper helps the company’s target audience of K-12 school administrators recognize the benefits of and federal funding options for private, fiber-option wide area networks. Those digital networks provide the bandwidth schools need as they switch to digital learning tools — and those networks are WANRack’s specialty.

Capitalize on opportunities to publicize When you launch a new product or service, send a press release to local media outlets. And also be aware that organizations with which you are affiliated may be ready and willing to publicize your business. For example, my colleagues at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation FastTrac program publish success stories about select program graduates in a print publication and on a website, both of which have broad distribution. The graduates submit information via an online form, and a professional writer crafts the stories, which are revised and approved by the entrepreneurs before publication.

Promoting your business isn’t rocket science. It’s about reaching out to people to share how your business can help or serve them. Grabbing opportunities to share that news could be a key to you

source:http://www.forbes.com


ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is an organization consisting of professionals and entrepreneurs which focuses on the success of our Members. We help our Members establish lasting relationships and generate new business opportunities towards the growth of their business.
Stay Connected with WNFP!