Engaging the Modern-Day Consumer
At a time when consumers are ruling the roost, advertisers find it challenging to attract tech-savvy, on-the-go prospects. Customers don’t want to spare their precious time viewing advertisements that simply don’t make the cut. People expect succinct, precise, and exciting information at the right time. Today’s consumers are an unforgiving lot. A bad experience with a brand is enough to storm social pages with negative reviews until it bows down. There has never been a tougher time for companies to make their presence felt. That is why they need solutions that can delve deep into consumer behavior. The modern-day challenge Modern-day shoppers can be a mystery to marketers. Tech-savviness, social media involvement, and ever-changing demands are a lethal mix. Buyers don’t want to simply purchase products. They want to be part of certain lifestyles. Products don’t guide them to purchase. It is a heady mix of variables like alternatives, overall brand experience, peer reviews, social status, and state of mind that matters. Emotions play a major role and greatly influence and even determine consumer decisions. The AIDA (attention, interest, desire, action) model, which in many ways was the ‘go to’ model for advertisers, seems to have lost its sheen. With solutions like transactional ads emerging, consumers often jump from attention to action. The span of attention is now less than 30 seconds and within this tiny window, brands have to struggle—not just to capture attention, but drive positive action from consumers. Relevance and action Staying relevant, precise, concise, and targeted is of prime importance today. Ad-tech programmatic solutions are bringing to the fore technologies like ad-server solutions that help companies automate their content and ad-exchange processes. These solutions help in customer profiling, targeting, and proliferating the right messages in a small window of time. That implies getting the job done with automation. By implementing ad-tech tools, companies are able to circumvent labor and focus on important aspects like targeting and metric tracking. The digital landscape often throws a curve at marketers. To add to that are finicky customers and the job of offering relevant and updated content at the same time. That is why programmatic solutions make life easier. The days of ‘spray and pray’ marketing are long gone. The modern-day tactic is taking care of customers and approaching them with the right information at the right time, all the time.
Making Sense of A Media-Fragmented World
Technology is evolving in leaps and bounds. What was innovative yesterday is obsolete today. With traditional channels like OOHs and TV slot ads fast being replaced by CMS and media planning solutions, all media channels have become fragmentized. The internet is possibly the most splintered of them all. While technological advances are the prime consequence of the ‘digital era’, they also pose a challenge to marketers. Consumers have become early adopters. They seek activities that can add value to their lifestyle. This being the mantra of today’s tech-savvy generation, marketers need to invariably work on new products and services. Added to that is the evolution and fragmentation of the media world. Companies need to keep pace with emerging channels of communication. Only then can they deliver device-agnostic, exciting content to touch base with audiences. Reach out and resonate Here are the top 5 ways how businesses can stay relevant in the market and resonate with their prospects in a media-fragmented space: Target audience: Companies need to understand who their customers are. Segmenting and selecting ideal customer groups is no longer simply based on demographics. Brands need to understand their audiences on psychographic and behavioral levels. Content rules: Customer engagement is the key to marketing success. At a time when prospects don’t want to be spammed with unnecessary advertising, marketers need to focus on engaging, and more personalized marketing collaterals. The need of the hour is creating fresh, relevant content to drive in-bound traffic. Go social: Firms need to incorporate social media strategies relevant to their business. Social media plays an integral role in shaping opinions, behaviors, and perceptions around brands. Social media is a great way to remain connected with their audience in real time. Think mobile: With websites soon to be phased out, firms need to start going mobile. Mobile internet and programmatic solutions will dominate the digital age. Big on big data: Companies need to make use of raw data to come up with business-relevant information that can result in effective marketing campaigns and increased ROIs. Have something to say about this blog post? Share it with us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
Inventive Mobile Apps are Keeping Audience Glued to Content
5 Secrets to Make Your Mobile App More Engaging Right from the way we peruse the morning news, to how we catch up with friends, technology has entirely transformed the way we do things. One of the channels of communication that is gaining a fair share of attention is mobile. Its presence has become all-pervasive. Most of us will accept, without our smartphones, we do feel less able. Mobile applications have become an integral part of our lives. According to Nielsen, people spend close to 30 hours a month on their mobile apps. This figure reveals the high marketing potential apps have. They play a key role in building sustainable relationships with brands. When used with the right CMS and programmatic tools, mobile apps can combine the brand’s offline and online efforts into a powerful marketing solution. Together with mobile websites, they’ve become important to both, consumers and marketers. Try these five ways to build an engaging mobile application: 1. Enhance the mobile experience Developers need to think how they can make apps interesting, easy, and compatible with all devices. It’s a competitive market out there, and so, it’s of utmost importance that the app stands out from the rest. Amplifying mobile experience should be a priority for businesses looking to jump in the mobile marketing space. 2. Advertise on social media With thousands of users logged into social networking sites, investing in social media is a good idea. Businesses can segment and target special clusters of customers and send them individualized messages. 3. Explore mobile payment Mobile payment is an area that has immense scope for exploration. Brands can reach new heights of innovation by working on solutions that can ease out online purchase and make payments simpler for customers. 4. Digital messaging Another way by which apps can have high customer re-visits is through digital messaging. Push messaging is an effective way to reach users who have already expressed interest in receiving updates from a particular brand. Businesses should make use of customer data and send regular communication to inform and remind people about new app enhancements, products, offers, etc. 5. Content is king A good app is defined by the kind of content that it offers to the user. Marketers should strive to present engaging, personalized content to users to keep them glued to the app. Interactive videos and vines are taking the app world by storm. Consumers, new and old, will keep flocking to an app that is content rich and engaging. The idea is all about creating what people need. Although they may not feel the need, it is the developer’s job to identify how lives can be improved and people can be delighted. That is how every successful business idea begins to take shape.
Leveraging Multiple Channels to Build Engagement in the Digital Ecosystem
The digital decade has revolutionized the marketplace. With a plethora of products, brands, and companies, consumers indeed have the last say. And it is becoming increasingly tough for marketers to attract them. Content is weaving consumer behavior every second. With a host of channels at their disposal, consumers are depending on smartphones, laptops, and tablets to remain connected. Marketers need to continually renovate and innovate to satisfy their customers. Leading enterprises understand the importance of keeping customers engaged. This means companies must strive to offer fresh content to their prospects and keep them informed and engaged, even as they move from one channel to the other. The need of the hour is a content management system (CMS) that offers richer and broader range of capabilities to manage and optimize visitor experience across all channels—including the web, mobile, and social networks. Is engaging over multiple channels a must? Over the last couple of years, the internet has undergone a mammoth change. It’s no more about just disseminating information. The demarcation between online and offline has vanished. The immersive Web 3.0 has given birth to an “always online”, more participative era. The web has become increasingly social and personalized, and smartphones are conquering the laptop and computer space. Users sometimes log in to social networks for making purchasing decisions. Mundane advertising doesn’t excite them. They seek interesting information, visuals, and infographics. They seek personalized, coherent, consistent content and customer experience regardless of whatever channel they use. Today’s customers are smart and always on the go. They want brands to inform, engage, and excite them 24/7. To effectively tackle this challenge of serving the audience with real-time ads and encouraging participation, enterprises require relevant tools to help get the job done. They require CMS tools that allow companies to create, manage, and deliver dynamic and targeted content across various online channels. Features that CMS tools should incorporate: The tools should allow delivering of targeted, personalized, consistent content and services across various channels to drive meaningful conversations. It’s critical to incorporate a mobile-first strategy. The tool should leverage responsive web designing and take advantage of the capabilities of HTML5 and CSS3. The tool should allow publishing content in all channels so as to facilitate and engage in conversations across all channels. The solution should provide robust integrated web-analytics capabilities to capture feedback and measure response. Closing thoughts Selecting the right tool for CMS is crucial for organizations trying to engage and respond. By selecting the best-of-breed tools that combine advanced software and professional expertise, companies can manage vast amounts of content, become innovative, more agile, and deliver consistent messages across a host of channels.
Selecting the Right CMS Platform for Your Business
Today, a website is no more a static page. From informative and e-commerce websites to blogs and social media, they have become a reflection of the brand and business. Creating a website requires expertise but it is equally important to keep it sparkling fresh with regular updates and engaging content that will keep attracting traffic. Maintaining a website requires knowledge on coding. This can become quite a task for businesses. One cannot expect content developers to become HTML experts too. This means keeping techies handy 24*7 to make even the smallest of updates. This is certainly not feasible. That is why investing in Content Management Solutions becomes a great choice for businesses. Nowadays, content management agencies are surfacing in every corner. It can be overwhelming for businesses to sift through the flimsy ones and partner with the best CMS provider. So how do you choose the best CMS for your specific business needs and goals? These are the top 5 questions to ask: 1. Do I know my business? Businesses need to define in clear terms what they expect out of their CMS platform. Decide ahead of time what you can do without and cannot. This is the first step towards choosing the vendor that suits business requirements. 2. What functions do I require in the CMS? Businesses need to assay important criteria like the number of people using the platform, ease of use, flexibility and customization. Be proactive in taking inputs from all concerned internal stakeholders as they would be the ones working on the platform 3. Is the CMS mobile responsive? It has been a lightning transition. Desktop-based use of websites is diminishing fast, giving way to devices of multiple form factors. In this context, it is crucial to choose a vendor that provides a mobile responsive CMS platform. A mobile responsive website has become the basic necessity these days. 4. What about scalability & security? To keep consumers engaged, regular content and design updates would need to be done routinely. Hence it’s imperative to choose a CMS platform that is enterprise-ready and can be scaled up easily. Also, CMS platforms should be built with strong security features to counter malicious attacks. Multi-level firewalls and authorizations should be embedded. Attacks on digital assets have increased and businesses need to put in place strong security measures to protect their websites. 5. Does it make financial sense? Don’t forget to factor in the budget. Evaluate whether it would make sense to employ a CMS solution and how it be a value-add for the business. Now you know Choosing a CMS platform can be a long-drawn-out and complicated process. However, it all boils down to asking the right questions. This will indeed make the procedure simpler and help you in choosing a smart CMS platform to meet all your business goals.
How Do You Know If Your Content Marketing Strategy Is Compelling
The talk of the town is how consumers and content have come to rule the market. For a business that wants to break through the clutter and attract the right kind of prospects, it’s essential to develop intriguing, actionable content. That’s easier said than done. Content is often confused with elaborate sales messages. If that’s how you define content, you seem to have missed the point. Content involves a whole gamut of activities, whose purpose is creating a network of engaged prospects—who can turn into revenue generators. At a time when consumers are resorting to methods to block unnecessary advertisements, businesses have to come up with innovative ways to put their message across to their consumers. “How do I promote my brand?” This one question seems to baffle even the most seasoned marketer. The answer: Provide the right information in the right format at the right time, and of course, to the right people. Creating a compelling content marketing strategy: it’s time to ask the right questions! 1. What gives you the edge? To begin with, companies should chart out their strategies, list down their goals, and analyze everything that makes them different from their competition. That way, it becomes easy to build a content marketing strategy that trumps competition, aligns with business objectives, and is customer centric. 2. What kind of content do my company and consumers need? Understand your target audience and evaluate all that makes them tick. At the same time, analyze the kind of content that can best define your brand and all that it stands for. It lets companies strike the perfect balance between identifying the correct cluster of consumers and offering them engaging content that adds value to both, the company and the consumers. 3. Have I made the right investments? Zero in on the right mix of in-house and external content. Invest in a content management agency that provides niche content marketing services. By involving an expert to handle all content requirements, the business can gain that added advantage and at the same time, allow focus to remain on its core competencies. 4. What about analytics? Big data and analytics play major roles in building brands. Companies already feel the need for intelligent systems that measure and map important metrics. With millions of data points, companies can gather crucial information on prospects, campaigns, impressions, and ROI. The business can thus take timely and relevant decisions. To summarize Building a successful brand requires businesses to offer enticing, value-adding material. The days of traditional advertising are numbered. Brands will stand out only with effective, coherent, personalized messaging. Now is the time for companies to make an effort and devote time to content strategies that can push audiences to react, act, and convert.
How CMS Capabilities Can Power Your Business
Eons ago, a website was a static page containing some tidbits. It was an online brochure of sorts with nothing but plain, mostly dated messages, a couple of pixelated images, and a contact address. That was it. Today, the website has evolved from being a mere online pamphlet to an effective business tool. In the digital age, when brands need to invest in innovative content creation to make their presence felt, businesses are extensively using their websites as a prime engine to create brand awareness, drive conversation, and generate revenue. Today, more and more companies are using content management system (CMS) as a solution to build and maintain their websites. A CMS makes content creation smarter and more powerful. It helps publish and modify content from a central interface. Websites thus stay fresh and also SEO friendly. Investing in an apt Content Management System can take your business a notch higher. Here are my top six reasons for investing in CMS: 1. A centralized repository: Without a CMS tool in place, content is prone to duplication. A CMS solution stores all data in a central database, facilitating content sharing, reducing redundancy, and enabling tracking. 2. Secure content: A major advantage is CMS solutions have firewalls installed and only authorized users can access back-end material. 3. Modifications and publications made easy: Approved users can easily add, delete, edit, and publish content. An integrated workflow facilitates better content management. 4. No complex coding: Gone are the days of hiring developers for minor website changes. With its easy interface, a CMS lets even non-techies tweak content as and when necessary. 5. Mobile ready: A CMS can automatically scale the website to be compatible for tablets and smartphones. 6. Search-engine friendly: CMSs can optimize websites for browsers to easily find your information through internet search engines. One of the biggest advantages that CMS solutions offer is control. Today, content developers need not worry about complex coding, laborious manual updating, and security. In a couple of clicks, they can update the website without hassle. CMS is a groundbreaking tool that combines features like automation, easy interface, and mobility. With the right CMS, developing, tracking and monetizing content is just a piece of cake!
Of Ad Blocking and Online Marketing: How to Counter the Threat
Today’s consumers are on the lookout for experiences that add value to their lifestyles. They are tech-savvy, demanding, and wary of marketers. Just pithy sales messages and cheesy one-liners are not appreciated. Annoying advertisements are immediately shut out. It’s certainly no big deal for customers, but a huge loss for the brand. Chances are the numbers can be huge. The reason being that consumers simply do not like marketers encroaching their personal space with irrelevant messages. The threat of ad blockers is looming and marketers need to act, fast. Who’s blocking ads—and why According to research conducted by Adobe and PageFair, people within the age groups of 18-29 are most likely to use . Gaming sites have the highest ad-blocking rates followed by social networking. There can be several reasons as to why people block ads. Users can find pop-ups to be an irritant especially when they are irrelevant. Ads also affect device speed. Other reasons why ad blocking software is rampantly used are prevention of cookie tracking and sometimes, to improve bandwidth or battery life. Dealing with ad-blocking: marketer’s perspective 1. Advertisements, with their sounds and animation, can be a distraction for users. Spraying ads that hold no relevance to viewers can also lead to ad blocking. To counter this, digital marketing firms should focus on creating individualized ads and sending them to targeted clusters only. Programmatic solutions are gaining ground. This will not only stop ad blocking, but also lead to higher impressions. Increasing the level of relevance and personalization will make it harder for customers to completely ignore advertising. 2. Native advertising and transactional advertising work great to deter ad blocking. Native advertising allows ads to appear in the same format as the page they are on. Transactional advertising serve as single touch points for making purchases. 3. Marketers, in order to not encroach upon consumer space, now have taken to permission marketing. They gather approval from consumers to allow sending promotional material. This way they are able to reach out to their consumers only with their consent. I feel it’s time for advertisers to educate consumers that all ads are not entirely noise. To achieve this, content developers should focus on delivering creative, value-adding content. This will act as a double-edged sword—not only deterring ad blocking, but also leading to more engagement.
Using Business Intelligence in AdTech
At a time when the world has gone programmatic, it simply doesn’t make sense for companies to stick to traditional ways of carrying out ad requirements. There is no point in spending valuable resources to carry out repetitive, inane tasks associated with today’s chaotic ad world. Leading brands realize that shooting in the dark, in hopes of getting new customers onboard, will get them nowhere. It’s, in fact, time to invest in technologies that provide exhaustive and intelligent inputs, which can basically help companies make relevant business decisions. Business intelligence is all about identifying complex operational, marketing, and analytical problems and, offering practical, scalable solutions that can take businesses to the next level. The concept of business intelligence or machine learning isn’t exactly new to advertisers; it has been in play in for some time now. Leading companies that understand the significance of business intelligence are quick to leverage it to reach out to the right consumers at the right time in an effective fashion. With brands proliferating exponentially and giving rise to a hugely competitive landscape, there is a strong need to continually think out of the box. Engineers and data scientists are striving to reinvent, innovate and bring to the table newer intelligent tools that can comprehend, predict and offer methodologies and solutions that can change the way businesses are run. This is a huge step in the right direction for advertising firms. Very soon, armed with such technologies, ad firms would have the capability to tap into not only upfront and latent demand but also create and foresee new needs and trends. Disrupting the AdTech space Here are a few important points that reflect how business intelligence can disrupt the adtech space: Advanced business intelligence software can help companies gather, interpret and even react to bouts of real-time data. The software can enable companies to analyze consumers, take instantaneous decisions based on market forces, predict campaign success and even point out alterations. With the software, advertisers can automate and seamlessly connect disparate sets of activities in the ad publishing cycle. By connecting silos, companies can create more effective campaigns and marketing strategies. Business intelligence software can bring together media buying and audience targeting on a single centralized platform, which can enable personalized and customized adverts to clustered groups, thus leading to impactful advertising The Future of Business Intelligence The programmatic landscape, in order to address the expanding needs of the cluttered market, has to be integrated with powerful business intelligent technologies. The day is not far when advertisers will have access to advanced intelligent tools that will combine statistical estimation of big data with human knowledge and expertise. Such tools will collect and analyze live data coming in from a variety of channels to instinctively guide programmatic advertising. The robust platform will enable companies to better segment, profile, and target consumers, by offering individualized content; thus leading to better profits and higher return on investments.
Data Management Platforms: Enabling Better Business
Data is at the core of all marketing and advertising operations today. Without it, companies would have no direction, let alone any edge over competition. They all know it, but only a few understand. For others, there are data management platforms (DMP) to help marketers and publishers make sense of it all. A data management platform is like a data warehouse software that houses and manages information (for example, cookie IDs) to assist in tasks such as generating audience segments and targeting clusters. Advertisers today communicate to a number pf publishers and buy media across a huge range of sites. DMPs collate information on all those activities in a centralized location and use them to optimize future media buys and ad requirements. Essentially, using a DMP is all about better segmenting, profiling and targeting customers. An enterprise DMP can scale millions of data points and offer marketers insights on a host of market and campaign variables. What do DMPs offer? The benefits: Prospecting: DMPs seamlessly integrate with third-party customer data. This way, they help in achieving higher accuracy and scaling better with targeted campaigns. Re-targeting: Businesses can analyze buying records, browsing behavior and customer profile, among others, using DMPs. Using online and offline variables, they help in implementing customized re-targeting campaigns. Audience segmentation: DMPs allow marketers to create several granular as well as broad segments. This way, marketers are able to reach out to audiences with the right message at different stages of the purchase cycle. Optimized site content: By using third-party data, DMPs gauge customer profiles and offer personalized content to users when they visit the brand’s site. Analytics: With DMPs, companies need not maintain cumbersome excel sheets. DMPs have inbuilt dashboards that provide measures and compare campaign performance across channels, give insight into audience interaction, etc. These reports help marketers optimize and channelize marketing efforts in the best possible way. Of brands, customers and ROIs New brands are growing by the day, and making the marketplace even more cluttered. So much so that consumers are now developing a ‘blind-spot’ for advertisements. Hence, it is of supreme importance that marketers channelize their efforts in a way that the right message reaches the right people; people who have a high possibility to earn value by investing in the brand. DMPs help marketers effectively analyze all their disparate audience and campaign data, allowing them to make better media buying decisions, target prospects, and offer personalized content leading to higher brand awareness and conversion. With DMP capabilities, brands can judge the effectiveness of marketing efforts and optimally alter and implement them. Such platforms also help brands to better connect with consumers by setting in place a platform to reach out for quick customer service. All in all, it is a win- win situation for marketers; with access to valuable business insights, they can reduce wastage of resources, scale operations and ultimate earn a higher ROI.