News and Analysis
Consumers Widely Frustrated by Business Messaging
Consumers are seeking easier ways to connect with businesses. For businesses, offering a phone number is no longer enough to maximize conversion opportunities when connecting with local customers searching for their products and services. But few businesses are prepared to meet consumers’ demands for quick, convenient communication.
Commentary
5 Tips for Growing Affiliate Programs Through Social Channels
According to a recent study by the Performance Marketing Association (PMA), the affiliate marketing channel is expected to grow to over $6 billion by 2020. A Mediakix study found that US influencer marketing spend on Instagram alone is expected to grow $2.3 billion by 2020. The PMA study also indicated that content, bloggers, and social media accounted for 40% of ad spend by affiliate type in 2018, and that number is surely going up. All of these numbers support the idea that influencers and social media bring an incredible monetization opportunity to affiliate marketing.
Let’s look at five ways that brands active in the partner and affiliate channels can benefit from leveraging social media, and ultimately drive more revenue.
Follow the Money: Will Wearables Inflect in 2020?
Apple is far ahead with Watch and Airpods, which may have sold 3 million units since Black Friday. Google meanwhile acquired Fitbit to buttress its wearables play. Amazon and Microsoft launched wearables lines in the past quarter, and smaller players like Bose and Snap are planting seeds for a wearables future.
There’s an underlying driver for this activity that goes back to the perennial analyst exercise of “following the money.” This is all about extrapolating product roadmaps based on tech giants’ motivations. This is often to future-proof their core businesses or diversify revenue in the face of maturing products.
For Luxury Brands, The Possibilities of Programmatic Cannot Be Ignored
For luxury brands, creating customer relationships, and the revenues they bring, is everything. A $25,000 watch or $150,000 vehicle is rarely an impulse buy but instead a purchase achieved after many different points of engagement.
Programmatic advertising is taking an increasingly higher percentage of all ad budgets, and luxury brands and their marketing efforts need to hop on board with this trend. Digital advertising has the power to use contextual targeting and select first-party data to find the right audiences at the right times and in the right places, no matter how high-echelon the product.
Latest Posts
Location Targeting is Nothing Without the Facts to Back it Up
Doing location targeting right is no simple matter, and common claims about it require further scrutiny. Accuracy of a location through parcel targeting, a rapid refresh audience strategy, and reaching the right people at scale through IP and cross-device targeting will make a major difference in location-based campaign outcomes.
Survey: Multi-Location Brands Continue to Shift Digital Budgets to Local
Many multi-location brands still find some traditional media more effective than most digital tactics and focus their digital efforts on the corporate e-commerce site or company branding. But an aggressive group of budget shifters are increasing spending across a variety of digital advertising and marketing vehicles, often with a local focus.
Cheetah Digital Acquires Stellar Loyalty
The acquisition combines a comprehensive suite of digital marketing tools from Cheetah Digital with the loyalty expertise and huge repository of data commanded by Stellar, according to the release, allowing the pair to provide brands with a more powerful, all-in-one B2C marketing platform.
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