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Business services, Digital Marketing, Trends & Insights

Digital Marketing For Corporate: Understand The Trends & Leverage The Ones To Impact You The Most the Right Way

Let’s take a look at 10 important trends affecting the digital landscape:

Digital Advertisement 

1) We will be seeing different types of ad solutions. This study found that “nearly 73% of those who regularly stream video say that they have watched ad-supported [OTT media], while 45% report that they watch ad-supported OTT the most.

2) TikTok is gaining traction with users and advertisers. Last year Ralph Lauren rolled out a new campaign tied to the 2019 U.S. Open tennis tournament on TikTok. Ralph Lauren used the sponsored hashtag challenge dubbed as #WinningRL and the platform’s shoppable posts which let consumers buy products within the app, called Hashtag Challenge Plus. It was the first time for a brand to run a dedicated campaign (and the one that’s specifically tied to a sporting event) on TikTok. Brands like Mtn Dew, Hyundai, and Chipotle are using TikTok for the Super Bowl.

3) There will be concerted efforts towards making the ad tech ecosystem more private and safe. Facebook in November last year rolled out a slew of features that gave advertisers a lot more control over where their ads appear. Last year in February, Disney, Nestle, McDonald’s, and AT&T pulled its ads from YouTube over child safety issues. Then we saw YouTube taking additional steps ( such as the rollout of an updated machine-learning “comments classifier”) to protect minors and prevent brand ads from running next to objectionable content. It’s been more than a year since the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect. It’s the single largest legal framework that gives consumers control of their personal data collected by companies and till date, it continues to spawn other legislative efforts in other parts of the world such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). The state-level law requires, among other things, that the companies notify California residents of their right to opt out of online ad targeting.

4) Retailers like Amazon, Walmart, and Target want to squeeze out more digital advertising dollars from Google and Facebook. They are selling more ad space on their websites and are trying other ad solutions, such as Amazon launching video network on Amazon.com called Amazon Live which is a live-streaming video version of home shopping network. It also has been working on growing ad business across its properties, including IMDb and Amazon Video, and is talking to clients about new ad types, including video.

Customer Engagement 

1) Consumers want more than great products or services. They want the brands to engage them with meaningful experiences. This study found that 76% consumers would rather spend their money on experiences than on material items. 63% of consumers want to be part of an experience where they learn something new.

2) As per this survey, 56% respondents said that poor customer service is one of the reasons they unfollow a brand on social media. The same survey found that 45% of consumers said that they’re more likely to research a product when an employee shares it.

3) When it comes to challenges, this study found that marketers around the world struggle with engagement tools. They also experience significant challenges when it comes to demonstrating the ROI of consumer engagement.

Channels 

1) Email remains a powerful tool for businesses looking to connect with people. However, a study by Toluna and Movable Ink found that half of the consumers (54.4%) say they delete at least 50% of brand marketing emails without opening them. Brand emails with no sense of personalization are often not opened and are deleted. This study found that emails with personalized message bodies have a 32.7% better response rate than those that don’t personalize their messages.

2) Apart from email and social media, businesses are embracing new channels such as messaging apps to interact and engage with their customers.

“Messaging with businesses is on the rise, with over 2 billion messages sent between people and businesses – including automated conversations – each month…Messenger offers businesses new ways to engage with their community and potential customers. Whether it’s raising awareness for a brand, enabling transactions, acquiring new customers, or delivering superior customer service, Messenger can be a core part of business solutions.” –

Kemal El Moujahid, the product manager for Facebook Messenger

This report will help you understand how Sephora Assistant, a bot for Messenger, reduced booking steps by more than 60% and increased in-store bookings by 11%. Another example of a brand taking customer service to the next level is  KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. The brand responds to 130,000 mentions via social media per week. And the number rose as they introduced WhatsApp as a service channel to meet customer demands. In fact, KLM was the first airline to expand its service to WhatsApp. You can get useful insights here on how AI is helping KLM offers customers 24/7 service in 9 different languages.

3) Last but the least, as marketers invest more on social to generate sales, this report finds that offline conversations drive twice the sales impact as online.

Do you wish to train your team to optimize effort and spend on digital marketing? Get in touch with our Digital Strategy Advisors. Click here and get in touch with us today.

Credits: techshu.com/apple

GeoTargeting – 4 Proven Strategies to Improve Conversion in 2020

The chances of getting a SALE improves by multifold if you show relevant ads to your potential customer at the right time and place. 

Let’s discuss this further and understand how ‘geo’ concepts can help marketers improve their communication more aligned based on the behavioral aspects of the customer.

By definition, “Geotargeting is the practice of delivering content to a user based on his or her geographic location. This can be done on the city or zip code level via IP address or device ID, or on a more granular level through GPS signals, geo-fencing, and more.” (source – geomarketing.com)

Many of us get confused between Geotargeting and Geofencing. Let’s break it down. 

  • Geofencing – sets up a geographical fence that triggers certain ads to display only when users pass by
  • Geotargeting – triggers ads only for a specific set of users who are in the vicinity of a geolocation

The core idea behind Geotargeting is primarily to leverage user behavior in realtime or from the past location and push them a useful and more relevant message. For example, a customer visiting a cake shop is likely interested in buying a bakery product, showcasing them offers or bakery catalog from a nearby cake shop can be a great strategy and chances of getting a conversion is higher.

Let’s look at the top 3 strategies to engage with a potential buyer immensely using Geotargeting.

Recommending Nearby Products

Direction to a nearby store or opening and closing time of the store is quite easy and Google Business helps with that beautifully. However, using Geotargeting can be further personalized by matching a product’s location with a buyer’s location and behavior.

For instance, personalized email and website content to display products available in the user’s nearest store, on the basis of location and time of browsing can help improve the user experience and makes the engagement more aligned to the need.

How can this be done? Mapping customer data with the product information to push product recommendations will indeed be a great method to reduce the time a user would take to explore and buy a product otherwise. 

Geotargeting is also helpful for launching merchandise at a location where users were not aware of the store.

The concept is not limited to retail only, this even helps users to get personalized information on flights, nearest airports, events that they might wish to attend based on their historical behavior.

Attracting Customers to Visit Local Store

Over the years, the Mom-and-pop stores have evolved and the business owners are more informed about online methods to attract customers. In fact, a survey reveals that 85% of people still prefer to physically purchase products in-store, despite the convenience offered by online shopping.

Considering the given scenario, Geotargeting, if implemented and experimented in the right way by the marketers can improve the store footfalls to a great extent. Incorporating the nearest store information on the web pages and in the email campaigns can be an effective way to drive footfall in-store.

Furthermore, awareness about a particular store and even help with the word of mouth engagement with the user’s friends and acquaintances.

Engaging Customers Based on the Influence of a Specific Location

A customer can be targeted at multiple locations for different purposes based on their buying behavior. Consider this, while leaving home to the workplace, a user might drop at Starbucks for coffee and while they are at the office, visit Burger King for lunch. Since the buyer prefers to have coffee from a place in close proximity to their house can be a valuable data point.

Similarly, the time and location for lunch can be used to engage the customer with offers and new product launches. The customer experience can be improved tremendously if the data points are updated on a frequent basis. The fresher the data, the better is the experience of the buyer with a store.

Keeping shoppers up to date about their favorite store isn’t the only usage scenario when using geofencing, however. Savvy marketers can also engage consumers within the geographical vicinity of competitors. Burger King famously took on McDonald’s using this approach, where customers within 600 feet of a McDonald’s were given the opportunity to order a Whopper for a lower cost and then got directions to their nearest Burger King to collect their food.

Marketers can not only engage with their own buyers but can also target consumers within the geographical vicinity of the competitors. For example, Burger King took on Mc Donalds using this strategy, where customers within 600 feet of a McDonald’s were given the opportunity to order a Whopper for a reduced price and then received directions to their nearest Burger King to collect their meal.

Location Specific Landing Pages Can Be Useful

Having a location-specific landing pages takes you even closer to your customer. Providing content at the right time and place along with the well-defined offers adds tremendous value in the buyer journey. A customer clicking on your ad published for a specific location landing on a page that has standard content and offers can leave a bad impression. Hence, it’s a good practice to have customized landing pages for each location, based on the profile of the target customer.

As marketers continue to explore the possibilities of luring the customers based on location – realtime & historical and combining it with the behavior, consumers will likely see communications that are truly relevant for them and as a result, the business can expect better sales.


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Digital Marketing

A complete List of Digital Marketing Tools | Must Know for every Digital Marketer in 2020

Digital Marketers on a day to day basis use a plethora of tools to execute the Digital Marketing Campaigns. It can be mind-boggling to select the right set of tools to be used. There are so many different online marketing tools that it’s hard to know where to start. Each new tool requires an investment of your time and money, and choosing the wrong one now and then switching to another later can be a hassle.
Here is a comprehensive list of all the “Must-Have & “Must-Know” tools that we use on a day to day basis. Want to know HOW the world’s leading marketing consultants and agencies are using these tools? Bookmark this page as we will be adding more tools as and when we explore and validate their functionality. 
The list of tools is sequenced in order of a complete Digital Marketing Campaign execution process.

#1. Know Your Market

#2. Market Research – Spy on your competitors

#3 Find The Right Keyword

  • Google Search Suggestions
  • Keyword Planner
  • SEMrush / Ahref
  • Competitor Target Keywords
  • Competitor PPC Ads
  • Tags & Keywords of Top-performing YouTube Videos in your niche
  • Tags & Keywords of Top-performing Quora Q&A, Medium & LinkedIn Article in your niche

#4 Find the Right Content

  • Buzzsumo
  • Answer the public
  • Feedly – Find top-performing articles
  • User-generated content platforms – Quora & Medium
  • CopyScape – Plagiarism detection service that checks whether similar text content appears elsewhere on the web.

Grammarly > Check Your content for Plagiarism and Spells. Google hates duplicate low-quality content. And google searches auto-correct misspells. So better use dictionary words and correct spells.

#5 Build Your Blog or Website or Ecommerce Shop

Web Design has become so much easy and empowered with Front end design tools. IN 2020, you have access to tools and plugins that literally can get you a site in a few hours without much of a programming hassle.
  • Blogger: Free content publishing platform powered by Google (You are reading this article on blogger))
  • WordPress: Similar to Blogger
  • The monetization platform for Blogger is Google Adsense. For WordPress blog (free) it is WordAds
Custom domain: You can purchase the domain from Godaddy, Bigrock etc. This is the web address for your website. Eg. www.example.com
Hosting: This is the web/cloud space where your website files will be saved so that anyone searching for your website at any point of time 24/7/365 days can find your website.
Payment Gateways:

#6 SEO to make your website appear in SERP

#7 Social Media Marketing Tools

#8 PPC Ads

#9 Analytics & Tracking

#10 Email Marketing

#11 Visual Communication Design

    • Canva
    • PostermyWall
    • Photoshop
    • Freepik
    • pngtree
    • pexels
    • Google Images (Settings to copyright-free)
    • Filmora
    • Adobe Premier Pro
    • Animoto
    • Adobe After Effects

#12 Digital Marketing Project management

    • Google Suite: Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Forms
    • Collaborating on a project with other marketers on your team? Google Suite is a collection of some great collaboration tools you can use in place of typical software on your desktop. Here they are:
    • Google Docs for Word documents.
    • Google Sheets for Excel spreadsheets
    • Google Slides for PowerPoint presentations
    • Google Forms for easily collecting simple survey responses
    • Google Calendar – Schedule your tasks and meetings
    • Project management tools like Trello & Slack

Wish to learn how to use these tools efficiently? Join Digital Marketing Career Building Course just at ₹950, Click here for the details: https://dmu.digitalmarketinguniversity.com/p/digital-marketing-career-building

alt="20 Books Recommended by Successful Marketers for 2020"

20 Books Recommended by Successful Marketers for 2020

20 Books Recommended by Successful Marketers for 2020

Whether you are a marketer or a business owner, we believe that your key objective for 2020 is to build awareness around your brand, grow sales or both. Whatever be the reason, it is essential to set the guiding principles before you enter into the growth path for 2020. Our team of expert marketers has curated a list of books that have added immense value for them to achieve excellence in digital marketing in the past couple of years.

Brand Identity Breakthrough – Gregory V. Diehl

Every company has a story to tell. But does your company have a story that makes it stand out? If you wish to tell your business’ story, then this is the book that you should lay your hands on. The best part about this book is that instead of dishing out recommendations, the book presents real examples of companies to follow.

The 1-Page Marketing Plan – Allan Dib

If you are planning to make a marketing plan for your company but don’t know where to start from, then this is the book for you. The book literally explains the step-by-step process of making a marketing plan. By the time you will finish you will have a one-page marketing plan in your hand. This is one actionable book that every entrepreneur and every marketer should read. One nugget of wisdom that we would like to share with you is from the Chapter titled Crafting Your Message.

Unleash Possible – Samantha Stone

There are several books on B2B marketing available. However, very few would compel you to practice the tactics mentioned in the book. While many marketing books tell you what to do, this one by Samantha Stone tells you how to do it. So when you read this book, make sure to make your notes.

The Design of Everyday Things – Don Norman

Written in 1988, this book remains relevant even today. Be it product design or marketing, this book is crammed with wise words for designers and marketers. It advocates an approach that bears usability and user-centered design in mind. One nugget of wisdom we would like to share with you, in particular, is taken from the Chapter titled Design Thinking and gives us an insight into how good designers look at a problem.

Originals – Adam Grant

Every business starts with a new idea, no matter how absurd did it sound in the early stages. The ones who took the ideas forward are the ones who kept their fears and doubts aside. The ones who chose to go ahead with the idea even when it didn’t conform to the traditional ideas are the originals. A must-read for those who are just starting out, especially with a novel idea. There’s a very interesting Chapter titled The Other da Vinci Code which dwells on procrastination on how it might be conducive to originality. We read about the data gathered from a Korean furniture company.

UN Marketing – Scott Stratten

Are you tired of playing by the rulebook? Do you think traditional marketing strategies are not working for your business? If yes, then it is time to unlearn the old tricks and learn some new ones. This is what Unmarketing is all about.

Crushing It! – Gary Vaynerchuk

If you want to up your social media marketing game, then this is the book for. The book dwells upon every social media platform that matters. It gives practical and clear advice as to how not to just get your marketing right on these platforms but also nail it the best.

Social Media ROI – Olivier Blanchard

If you are looking for an A to Z guide on social media marketing, then there is no better person other than globally renowned brand strategist and marketing executive Olivier Blanchard to give you insights. From defining metrics to earning followers, everything that you need to learn ace your marketing game, this book has it.

Marketing 4.0 – Philip Kotler

In this increasingly noisy social media world, it is difficult for a brand to get heard. This book not just acquaints you with the changing marketing dynamics, it also tells brands how to grab attention and create a customer base that is loyal.

Influence – The Psychology of Persuasion – Robert B. Cialdini

Successful marketing is about understanding the psychology of the consumer. Full of case studies, this book dwells the universal principles of persuasion. The best part is that the book also dwells upon the subject of how not to fall for psychological tricks.

Zig Zaglar’s Secrets of Closing the Sale

The deal is closed. Every marketer wants to hear these four words. With more than 100 case studies of successful closings, this book is for everyone who wants to master the art of closing deals. There are 700 questions that can prevent your sales conversation from meeting a dead end.

Words that Sell – Richard Bayan

Do your sales pitch sound the same every time? Are you looking for new words that can make your pitch better? Then this is your guide to strike a conversation that will yield results.

The Power of Habit – Charles Duhigg

Whether it’s about losing weight or achieving success, habits play a pivotal role in it. While forming habits is easy, it may not be easy to break them. Whether you want to make your mornings more productive or you want to kick a bad habit, this book is for everyone who wants to believe in the possibility of change. The book has a dedicated chapter on organizational habits. In one of the parts, the author gives us an insight into the powerful effects of willpower and how it can improve employee performance. There’s a powerful example of how Starbucks developed self-discipline into an organizational habit.

Hug Your Haters – Jay Baer

As a marketer, you can’t ignore criticism. With an increasing number of social media users and social channels, there are more complaints than ever. How are you supposed to deal with them? Dealing with complaints may often seem to deal with negativity. However, this book tells how to deal with complaints and use them to your advantage. Complaints, according to the book, give ample opportunity to improve customer service.

Contagious – Why things Catch on – Jonah Berger

What makes something go viral? This is one question that marketers cannot fully answer. Brands spend a lot of money to create a buzz. However, only a few get it right. What different are they doing? If you want to know that, then this is the book for you. The book gives you six principles that you can use to create campaigns that are useful, engaging and will help your product or service to increase social influence.

The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding – Al Ries and Laura Ries

How products become brands? If you want a definitive answer to that question, then you need to read this book. This is the ultimate book on brands and branding.

Marketing Rebellion – Mark Schaefer

With the advent of technological changes, marketing and advertising have also undergone a sea change. The way brands are telling stories is changing. Branding has moved from being just about the products, it’s about the brand’s voice and the customer’s journey. Grab this book to the new-world branding rules.

This is Marketing – Seth Godin

It is a straightforward book that tells you to build a connection with the consumers. If you believe that attention-grabbing ads are momentary while making a connection with consumers will long last, you are going to enjoy this book. In the Chapter titled Semiotics, Symbols, and Vernacular, Seth Godin candidly explains what a brand stands for.

Building A Story – Donald Miller

Many businesses find it difficult to convey their brand story to consumers. The book is crammed with useful insights on how to create messages that connect with your customers. The book advocates simplifying brand messages so that your customers can understand and relate to it. From creating effective messages for customers on different platforms to help customers understand the benefits of your products, this book equips readers with universal story points that all humans respond to.

Instabrain – Sarah Weise

There is no doubt that the millennials engage with brands in a totally different fashion than their previous generations. Then, why do you think that traditional marketing strategies will work for the millennials? A generation that is born in the age of digital technology needs a different style of storytelling. From using social influencers in your marketing strategy to choosing the right social media platform, this book is the ultimate guide to learn how you can tailor your brand story for the millennials.

Are you looking for a Digital Marketing Strategy building program? Get details here – https://www.digitalmarketinguniversity.com/digital-marketing-strategy-course