SMB Marketers: Small Budget? Small Team? Search and Social Are Key
With the barrier to entry lower than ever, third-party platforms have made inroads to make it easier for marketers to leverage search and social more effectively. These platforms have made it attainable for marketers—regardless of their team size or level of experience—to launch and optimize sophisticated, targeted campaigns, providing an ideal foundation to build upon as their capabilities and budgets expand. With that, here are five reasons SMB marketers should consider digging deeper into search and social right now.
Digital Signage Is All Grown Up Now, Speaking with the Consumer, Not at the Consumer
I’ve been attending Digital Signage Expo (DSE) in Las Vegas for quite a number of years, and now more than ever, the show organizers, Exponation, deliver on their promise: a highly impactful four-day event jam-packed from early morning to late at night. The show demonstrated that if content is king, context is definitely queen. Location is the new cookie, and all the out-of-home industry stakeholders are now finally aligned for much success in the years to come.
From Zero-Click SERPs to Rabbit-Hole SERPs
Mihm to Blumenthal: Answer Optimization and Zero-Click SERPs seem to be gaining traction as concepts in the SEO industry, but as you pointed out in our previous conversation on this topic, Google’s moving well beyond simple answers and into journeys. Cindy Krum highlighted several examples of these new search journeys, which as I saw her presenting struck me as “rabbit-holes.”
Going Rogue: The Value of Guerrilla Marketing
The appeal of guerrilla marketing for the entrepreneur lies in the creative freedom to express the essence of a brand that is not bound by the restraints of size, decorum or editorial slant of traditional advertising, as well as the option for a low-cost campaign with the potential to go viral. Guerrilla marketing can be a bit like rolling the dice on a five and turning it into thousands—if it gets picked up and goes viral, you’ve accomplished a national or even international marketing campaign for the cost of something local.
Here are some tips for crafting a low-cost guerrilla marketing campaign for startups.
Consumers Are Realizing the Value of Their Data. Here’s How Online Marketers Should Respond
It’s critical for marketers to invest in the right tools and technologies to abide by data-acquisition best practices that are not only compliant with regulations but also ensure consumer trust. At Blis, we conducted a study that digs into what extent consumers are starting to see their own behaviors, and predilections, as a currency. What we found is that marketers have a prime opportunity this year to rebuild trust and transparency with consumers.
The Ethical Stakes of Data Collection and Ad Targeting
With politicians and everyday political partisans on both the Left and Right peeved at Big Tech (the Left for tech’s role in economic inequality and election hacking, the Right for perceived anti-conservative bias, and thinkers across the spectrum for privacy concerns), it is time for Zuckerberg and his peers to get smarter about the arguments for and against data-driven ad targeting and the business models that rely on it. Facile paeans to relevance are not going to cut it—not with the scrutiny Facebook and the rest of the tech industry are now receiving. Tech executives should be as clear-eyed as their fiercest critics about the ethical underpinnings of their businesses. Only then can innovative, far-reaching conversations about the future of advertising, data collection, privacy, and Big Tech begin.
Interactive Marketing 2019: 4 Ways to Grow Your Audience with Innovation
There’s no denying that viewers today are fed up with plain advertising. It takes control of their digital activity and keeps them as passive witnesses to whatever is happening on the screen. Today, people expect a certain level of gamification from ads. Otherwise, the unit is typically shut down shortly after the ad begins or gets skipped quickly to the end. Enter interactive marketing.
How Will 5G Unlock Location Targeting?
5G goes far beyond just a speed boost. The quantitative advantages are joined by qualitative factors that will enable all kinds of new consumer use cases and content delivery strategies. This notably includes more precise location tracking/targeting and even some indoor use cases (think: retail). 5G-enabled phones will phase in over the next three years. Then, it’s off to the races.
Apple Strikes a Foreboding Tone with Big Ad on Privacy
Apple’s privacy-first policies should prove beneficial for the company and for the hundreds of millions of people who use its products. Still, the iPhone maker’s ad, light in tone as its soundtrack may be, strikes a decisively dark note representative of broader national anxiety about Silicon Valley and the danger of its increasingly unavoidable products. Beneath the ad’s veneer of levity, thinly constructed in the form of a small guard dog and man wary of using a urinal too close to his neighbor, the video sends a clear warning to smartphone users entrusting their private information to rival phone makers: The intimate details of your lives may already be compromised. Lean into your worries about your data’s theft and monetization, and fork over 10 Benjamins at the nearest Apple store for the sake of your own security.
Location Analytics Applied to the NFL
Nate Sterken: Location data generated from cell phones powers many of the ad-tech products with which we all work every day, from in-person attribution to targeting segments based on visitation patterns. Earlier this year, I got to work with data generated from a completely different source — professional football players.
No Matter What Business You’re In, You Are In The Business of Selling
Kendrick Shope: I coach a lot of entrepreneurs, many of whom are brilliant at what they do, have excellent people skills, and should be setting the world on fire. Unfortunately, they’re stuck trying to make ends meet when they should be doing seven figures in a year because they haven’t mastered the art of selling. It’s a skill like any other, and once you learn it and become really good at it, your business is going to change forever. If you really want to up your sales game this year, focus on these five selling strategies.
Increasingly, Your Brand Is Its Reviews
Mihm to Blumenthal: The famous Jeff Bezos quote comes to mind: “Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.” Increasingly, the room is not a physical place but a virtual one—and it’s not a place you own. Reviews really bring the need to run a decent business at your core into stark relief.
Four Keys to Ensure Your Brand Has Local Authenticity Online
Taking time to ensure that your brand is represented authoritatively and genuinely online helps build a solid connection with your audience. But how does your brand communicate that authenticity at a local level? Here are four essential ways to build local authenticity through your localized social marketing efforts.
Human Judgment, Automation, and the Future of Ad Tech
For now, I propose two major concerns—two challenges, even, for further thought—surrounding AI for the ad tech industry. The first is that the datafication of human experience that has allowed for precise ad targeting needs to be radically reconsidered, not just in terms of what can be done to obtain the consent of consumers for data collection, as the rising privacy movement has called tech companies to consider, but also in terms of what is lost and what is truly gained when the attributes of real people are transformed into consumer data. The second is that the human-machine hybrid decision-making model, while surely the best available in a hypothetical set that also includes human-only and machine-only models, will have to grapple with the bias and poor decisions of the humans who program the machines that will take on the task of regulating large platforms at scale.
Why Conversion Mapping and SEO Go Hand in Hand
Terry Cane: Search engine optimization isn’t just about on-page technical elements. Not anymore. These days, it’s as much about user experience as it is how well you can appeal to search engine robots. And a big part of that is conversion mapping—understanding the route your leads take from their first click to their purchase.
LBMA Vidcast: Alibaba’s FlyZoo Hotel, McDonald’s Acquisition of Dynamic Yield
On this week’s Location-Based Marketing Association podcast: Samsung’s “Refrigerdating,” PrivateAcre, Alibaba’s FlyZoo hotel, McDonald’s buys DynamicYield, Oreo + Target, Coor’s Light battles Bud with sound. Special guest: Ian Dallimore, Lamar.