The Risk of Emphasizing Data Quantity Over Quality
The privacy movement heralded by January’s implementation of the California Consumer Privacy Act has shone a spotlight on the ethical issues surrounding data collection. But digital marketing insiders know that ethics is not the only issue plaguing data-driven business.
Ensuring the quality and accuracy of data is a major challenge for marketers, data brokers, and consumers. Drew Kutcharian, CTO and co-founder of audience platform DISQO, checked in with Street Fight to provide his vision of the data quality-quantity balance and how privacy legislation will affect it going forward.
Review Generation and Management Platforms for Healthcare
In healthcare marketing, it all comes down to the patients. Adding patient reviews to a healthcare organization’s website can improve its ranking in the Google algorithm, particularly when those reviews are filled with relevant keywords. Just as importantly, though, patient reviews have a positive impact on the way other people view medical websites. Practice websites with user-generated content, including reviews, score higher in reliability, expertise, and professionalism.
Here are six examples of review generation and management platforms aimed squarely at healthcare organizations.
Three Ways to Solve for Foot Traffic Attribution
What most ad platforms cannot tell you is how your ads drove foot traffic to stores and other physical locations you care about. If driving foot traffic to retail locations is your job, Google Ads and other digital ad dashboards can’t help you. When in-store foot traffic attribution is crucial, how do you solve for it?
In this article, we cover three ways to solve for attribution, ranging in difficulty from easy to hard. We look into easy options that are inexpensive but tend to be unreliable. We evaluate a medium option that has a moderate cost but is highly reliable and bypasses human error. And lastly, we look at a hard option that incorporates several tools and, while highly reliable, comes at a high cost and is difficult to scale.
The Data Protection Act: Dangerous Pitfall or Hope for the Future?
Though the Data Protection Act is in the beginning stages, 19 states already have similar regulations underway, indicating that these policies are part of a fundamental shift that will impact all Americans over the next decade, marketers included. Marketing leaders need to realize that this new commitment to customer privacy is not a passing trend and must prepare accordingly without wasting any more time.
How The Canucks Use Chat to Optimize the Fan Experience
Telephone surveys are notoriously unreliable. So are email questionnaires. When it comes to engaging consumers in two-way market research, companies are increasingly looking toward chat-based technologies as a potential solution.
Case and point: the Vancouver Canucks. The ice hockey team has started using chat-based technology to capture fan feedback in real-time during home games in the team’s Vancouver stadium.
10 Ways to Evaluate Text Message Marketing Solutions for Retailers
As the popularity of text message marketing has increased, so have the number of providers offering text message marketing software. What features do you need? What provider should you choose?
With so many product options available, it’s easy to be overwhelmed. On the surface, these options may look alike, but when you take a closer look, you’ll find some key differences.
Location Weekly: FCC Fines Location Data Purveyors; Adidas Taps WhatsApp for Mobile Marketing
In this episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association covers the FCC proposing hefty fines on mobile operators for selling location data, Apple turning your photo into a car key, Adidas tapping WhatsApp to reach consumers, KFC Canada integrating Google Maps and Assistant, Uber offering car-top signage for new driver revenue, and JCDecaux leveraging facial recognition for Yoplait in Australia.
Heard on the Street, Episode 46: Improving Road Safety with Your iPhone
Insurance is typically viewed as an old-school industry that’s not very sexy. But Cambridge Mobile Telematics VP Ryan McMahon thinks insurance gets a bad wrap in that respect. As the latest guest on Street Fight’s Heard on the Street podcast, his company is innovating actuarial work and safer roads.
McMahon’s firm accomplishes that by capitalizing on the powerful computer we all carry around (and drive around) in our pockets. Given all its sensors like GPS and accelerometers, the modern smartphone packs ample situational awareness. One of the things it can do is detect signals that indicate driving quality.
PUMA Goes Big with OOH Ad Campaign
With consumers today asking for more authentic, personalized experiences, the German apparel manufacturer PUMA recently launched an outdoor campaign that involved audience targeting, programmatic capabilities, and situationally aware screens with hologram technology. PUMA worked with Havas Media and the outdoor ad platform Firefly to design a weekend-long campaign during the 2020 NBA All-Star Weekend in Chicago. Together, the companies outfitted smart media displays with hologram projectors to display 360-degree images of PUMA’s newest sneaker on the roofs of parked cars in front of multiple Chicago landmarks.
Street Fight’s March Theme: Word of Mouth
One of the oldest and still most influential drivers of local commerce is word of mouth. Though that’s sustained at a high level, the delivery vessel for local chatter has evolved. Social channels like Facebook and Yelp now shape the reputations of brick-and-mortar businesses, not to mention the kingmaker authority of Google.
This month, we will delve into the latest trends and insights driving reputation management, taking Word of Mouth as our theme.
Consumers Split on Personalized Ads
In the year of the California Consumer Privacy Act, the data privacy movement is ascendant, and marketers are likely more aware of consumer concerns about tracking than ever before. But a fresh survey of 993 Internet users from audience intelligence firm DISQO suggests that marketers will need to continue navigating the trade-off between providing consumers the only type of ads they widely welcome — personalized ones matched to their interests — and transparently requesting consent for the kinds of tracking that make personalized ads possible.
Creating and Maintaining a Cohesive Digital Brand Image
Visual consistency is about perception. It’s the ability to pick out, recognize, and immediately understand something you see. Coca-Cola is a great example. You can instantly recognize the simple, iconic red and white colors paired with its cursive font anywhere and in any language. Even for its holiday campaign, Coca-Cola used its colors to its advantage. Remember the famously adorable polar bears wearing red scarves that stood out from its soft, white fur and snowy background? Classic.
This goes to show the power of strong, cohesive branding. Customizing the language, photography, color palette, layout, and written content of your brand’s digital marketing materials can go a long way. In fact, a recent study by LucidPress discovered that consistent brand presentation increases overall revenue and growth by 33%.
The Pitfalls and Opportunities of Screen-Free Customer Service
One vertical that has been able to integrate voice into customer service in a meaningful way is retail. National retailers like Best Buy, Walmart, and REI Co-op have created skills or teamed up with technology providers to connect with customers through voice-controlled assistants. Some retailers are accepting orders via voice, and others are doling out product information and reviews. What the most successful of these companies have in common is a defined strategy and plans to measure ROI.
Location Weekly: Puma Brings Hologram Ads to Car Tops
In this episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association covers Pearl Jam releasing a new single via AR over the Moon, Outfront’s Valentine’s campaign that blends Instagram AR and OOH, Puma bringing hologram ads to car tops at the NBA All-Star game, Uber letting seniors use their phones, Dwise partnering with Digital Element for ad targeting, and IKEA letting customers use time as currency.
4 Ways to Retain Customers with Event Marketing
Customer retention is usually faster and costs a lot less than acquiring new customers. By putting your customers through the funnel, you’ve already done the hard part. To keep the momentum going, it’s important to create a set of initiatives that increases customer value, encourages further purchases, and fosters brand ambassadors to promote your company.
Experiential marketing through events helps brands achieve these goals. The aim is to create memorable experiences that engender high degrees of loyalty. Here are four ways you can leverage event marketing to retain your customers.
Leveraging Voice: A Path for Brand Marketers
It’s important that companies can see who their customers are and what transactions are associated with each customer via voice assistants. This sort of knowledge is necessary for brands to make the channel a valuable part of an overarching loyalty strategy.
Given that voice is currently owned by just a few select companies, it’s important for brands to figure out how they will leverage voice differently from company to company or device to device. Will retail brands keep the same strategy with Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, or will they find unique ways to take advantage of these platforms across differences?
What Does Customer Experience Mean in a Voice-First World?
The trend of moving customer experience beyond the screen has been dubbed “conversational customer care.” It’s still unclear just how many channels are included under this umbrella or how the future of conversational customer care will look. Brands that are dealing with demanding customers can’t afford to sit back and wait for this to play out. Screen-free customer experiences could be the future. They could be just a single touchpoint in the broader context of customer experience strategy. Or, they could just be a passing fad.
But the chances that voice-first customer experiences are a fad seem to be shrinking.
This Election Season, Candidates Should Take Voter Data Privacy Concerns into Account
In the wake of Cambridge Analytica and privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA, the advertising landscape has changed, as have consumers’ perceptions about data collection and privacy. Candidates still need ways to reach their target audience effectively, and they should do so while being mindful of compliance issues and Americans’ privacy concerns.
The 2019-2020 advertising cycle will generate an estimated $6 billion in political media spending, $1.6 billion of which will be spent on digital video, according to Politico’s spending projections. This is up from $0.74 billion on digital video in 2018, so we are talking exponential growth. Many candidates will wash their hands of marketing decisions, entrusting their staff and partners to decide how to best use their campaign dollars. But candidates should use their advertising strategies to make a political statement—to show voters they care about ethical data practices.
CCPA and Beyond: Where Privacy Will Take Us in 5 Years
Although the language of CCPA leaves a lot open for interpretation, one thing is clear: The consumer data and privacy landscape has fundamentally shifted beneath the feet of today’s enterprises, and privacy compliance will forever be an important requirement for sustainable business going forward. But where exactly do we go from here? In a regulatory environment where there are currently more questions than answers, what do consumer privacy requirements look like in five years? Here are a few likely outcomes of current initiatives and momentum.