Category: Digital Marketing

Google Now Supports Regional Video Structured Data: 4 Things You Should Know
Adding structured data is one of the most effective ways to improve the readability of your web page for search engines like Google, ultimately leading to improved SERP rankings. The structured data is a type of standardized information markup format that works as clues for search engine bots to better understand what a web page is about.

Google has recently introduced ‘regionsAllowed,’ a new type of structured data that can be used by websites for specifying the region where they want the search results of their website video to be available. Take a look at four of the most important things about this new data structure–

1. What is the New ‘regionsAllowed’ Data Structure?

The VideoObject structured data format enables websites to let search engines know that a particular data script is about a video. Until now, there was no way to specify the regions where websites wanted the search results of their videos to be available. With the new ‘regionsAllowed’ structure, this is now possible.

For instance, let us assume that you’ve used the new video data format to limit the availability of a website video to the USA. Based on this information, Google will restrict the display of rich results of that video to the USA. The rich results for the video will not be shown in other regions. If any video has no ‘regionsAllowed’ mentioned, its search result will be shown everywhere.

2. What Types of Search Results Support the New Video Structure Data?

As per the latest SEO updates, the ‘regionsAllowed’ data structure supports different types of search results, like-
- Organic Search Results
- Google Images
- Video Search Results
- Google Discover
3. Is It Mandatory to Use ‘regionsAllowed’ Property?

When it comes to structured data formats for search results, like featured snippets, there are two different categories- Required and Recommended. The Required properties are ones that are mandatory for featured snippets, like-
- datePublished
- bestRating
- worstRating
- name
The recently introduced ‘regionsAllowed’ is not a Required but a Recommended data structure property for SERP results. In other words, you can use it only if required. Irrespective of whether or not you use the new video data structure, your VideoObject structure will still be validated.

4. Who Should Use the ‘regionsAllowed’ Property?

The ‘regionsAllowed’ property is ideal in cases of websites that have different versions of a video for different regions. In such cases, you can use this new data property for limiting the regions where you want to show rich result of a particular video.

If the video is not targeted towards any particular region, you can avoid using ‘regionsAllowed’ property.

Control How Google Uses Your Data with the New Regional Video Structured Data

The recently introduced ‘regionsAllowed’ video structured data is an excellent way for websites to control how their website videos are displayed in search results, especially if they have video targeting specific regions. While it is not a recommended data structure property, it can help boost video SERP results if you are targeting a particular region.

Consult a reputed digital marketing company to take advantage of all the latest SEO trends and improve your rankings in local and global search results.
September 29, 2020
Has COVID-19 Pandemic Given a New Direction to Digital Marketing?

With COVID-19 aftereffects disrupting the way we live our lives and run our businesses, it is no wonder that the space of digital marketing has gone through its own disruptions in the past couple of months.

Businesses across the globe are trying to find new and innovative ways to bring their brands back on track while remaining connected to their consumers.

This sudden need has forced businesses to adapt to the rapidly growing digital world. While the marketing budgets have dwindled drastically, consumer engagement has shifted too, and dare we say, gotten better?

Let’s look at some of the post-pandemic disruptions that marketing geeks all over the world are leveraging.

Organic SEO is Winning Over PPC, Once Again

Pay Per Click or PPC had become a favorite among brands. So much so that brands had started weighing it more than the good old organic Search Engine Optimization or SEO. However, with brands willing to spend lesser on ad campaigns due to poor ROIs, organic SEO is back in the game for many brands as they focus on establishing a long-term relationship with their audience.

Content Marketing Is the “In” Thing

Content marketing has been an integral part of SEO for most brands. However, some have ignored it due to its long-term effect on the bottom line. With consumer behavior changing post-COVID, marketers are increasing their content marketing budgets. Marketers realize the importance of establishing effective connections with their audience by providing them value through their content.

Social Media: The Hot Cake

With lockdowns and work from home options for people all over the world, screen time has increased drastically. People are spending more time than ever on popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Not just this, it has also given rise to a number of new social media platforms, although some of them have run into troubles in the recent past leading to their bans in a few countries. Moreover, due to the low marketing budgets of most companies, the ad rates have also decreased for many industries. This has made it possible for marketers to run paid and organic social media campaigns to drive attention to their brands. Not just that, customer engagement has gone up.

The Rise of OTT Platforms

While OTT platforms have seen a consistent rise since a few years now, the COVID-19 and the lockdown has certainly given it a big boost. With screen time increasing and theatres and cinema halls shut down, marketers are taking OTT advertising rather seriously. All the major OTT platforms such as Netflix, Amazon, Roku have seen a surge in their subscriptions, providing a great opportunity for marketers to tap into the segment.

E-commerce Marketing: A Must Now

With e-commerce sales increasing as people shop online from the safe confines of their homes, e-commerce marketing has become an important wheel of the digital marketing strategy. While consumers are ready to pay more for convenience, brands are also faced by fierce competition owing to new entrants and old biggies revamping their strategy. This calls for a well-rounded e-commerce marketing strategy that focuses not just on conversions but also on increasing engagement from its consumers.

Technology Driven Digital Marketing Strategy

Although technology has spearheaded the digital marketing campaigns for big brands, smaller ones have often ignored it owing to its R&D and set-up costs. However, with technology such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) gaining more ground amidst the pandemic, marketers from brands, big and small, are finally taking notice. With the rise in popularity of Alexa and Google and voice searches going up, AI and ML have taken precedence over the traditional approach.

An Integrated Digital Marketing Strategy – The Future

While the COVID-19 can be blamed for these disruptions, many experts would call this as a much-needed correction that prompts marketers to focus on building a value-driven long-term relationship with their consumers. Brands would need to use an integrated approach to come out winners in the challenge – an approach driven by results that are measurable and key to growth of consumers and marketers.

September 17, 2020
Social Commerce: The Future of Marketing

In July this year, for the first time, more than half of the world’s population (3.96 billion) started using social media according to this report. While many experts do say that the lockdown is to be blamed for this feat partially, the truth is social media is consistently rising.

And while people are using to connect with their friends, families, and personalities, brands have been using this medium for a long time to drive more visitors to their site. However, off-late marketers and brands are also using it to increase their e-commerce sales. Integrating social media with e-commerce, social commerce is fast capturing the attention of marketing geeks as the future of marketing.

Let’s check out how.

Reach to the Global Market

Social media platforms connect individuals beyond countries and boundaries. In this way, taking your brand presence overseas generates much more leads and increases your client base. While regional e-commerce platforms can keep the domestic sales going, your social media presence will give you a platform to connect with prospective customers in other countries and even continents.

An Appropriate Representation of Newer Brands

New brands and niche brands often tend to struggle to gain significant market representation. Their catalogue gets easily overshadowed by the presence of big and established brands on regular e-commerce platforms. However, backed by their own social media presence, the e-commerce marketing of these brands can have a far deeper cut into the market.

Also, platforms like Facebook Shops that are intertwined with a recognized social media platform- Facebook, level the field for smaller brands. Their sophisticated and updated search algorithms offer appropriate brand representation to newer brands and companies. Moreover, consumers love it too. In fact, consumers in some countries such as the USA prefer buying directly from the brand rather than multi-brand retailers.

Build Long-lasting Brand Loyalty

Brand loyalty is a crucial aspect to keep your business thriving in the long term. Marketers have found that social media can help you to generate a likeable image amongst the netizens. Effective engagement of your social media handles with individuals can keep your brand in eternal limelight.

Merge Influencer Marketing

Also, marketers point out the crucial contributions that influencers can make towards your social media marketing. Established influencers command a deep loyalty and support amongst their following. By roping in influencers that believe in your brand, you can convert their loyal followers into your loyal customers.

The Successful Relationship Between E-commerce and Social Media So Far

Social media helps to form the desired perception of your brand in the market. Research shows that social media has had a prominent impact on e-commerce marketing strategy so far. As per a survey by North American e-commerce agency Abosuletnet, 30% of customers expressed their desire in making purchases directly through social media platforms.

Asian continent to tends to support the research since nearly one-third of e-commerce transactions in Thailand were traced back to popular social media platforms. This calls out for a thoughtful and well-vested social media marketing strategy.

What’s in Store for Brands?

Social commerce acts as a cost-effective method of marketing owing to its free nature. Marketers show that by keeping your content on social media handles updated; you can create a community of your own in a quicker way. Also, the results of social media campaigns can be instantaneously generated by integrating it with your e-commerce strategy. Each platform comes with its own analytical insights that can guide you on what is working for your handle. This can help you revamp your own strategies and adapt appropriate measures that can widen your community and increase your e-commerce sales.

The Challenges of Social Commerce

One of the biggest challenges faced by social commerce is going to be to make people transact on the platform. For instance, Facebook Shops lacks behind in terms of quick payments. The cumbersome process of entering the details each time deters people from going through with the transaction. However, if brands can win the trust of their community to enable them to go through with the transaction, social commerce can create a win-win strategy for both brands and their customers.

September 4, 2020
Digital Marketing Strategy during COVID19: What Should Brands Do?

COVID-19 has completely redefined crisis with unprecedented effects on almost every industry. Businesses are no exceptions. As corporations have started facing the fact that the effects may be long-term, marketers are gearing up to invent new strategies to keep up with the sudden influx of new platforms and competition or lack of it in some cases.

From erratic changes in buying behaviour to decrease in consumer spending in most industries, marketers have to grapple with unique challenges.

Thus, marketers need to focus on building trust with their customers and rework their marketing strategy as per re-defined KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) based on new goals. Some strategies and ideas are listed below for marketers to strengthen their further approach.

Change your Business Goals

Brands, all over the globe, are having a hard time coping with the overnight shift in the market dynamics. Reviewing the basic and advanced goals of the company and adjusting them accordingly to make them more meaningful and valid might function as the company’s road to recovery. Keep in mind to reflect the changes in the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) you use to measure the performance of your digital strategy effectively.

Communicate Responsibly To Your Audience

While the negative effects of the pandemic are far too many to count, it is also true that the online viewing time has increased dramatically. The increased screen time also opens up a lot of opportunities for marketers to communicate effectively during these times.

Although it is important to communicate with your audience, being sensitive is the key. When many brands are chiming in seeking an opportunity, most of them are doing it wrong. For instance, outbound messages need to be segmented as per the buyer’s journey. Make sure the communication is relevant and valuable.

Consider the Shift in Buying Needs and Behaviors

Brands need to consider the shift that has impacted its target audience. The buyer personas have transformed due to the pandemic situation and its after-effects. Preferences, priorities, interests, budgets, and mental well-being have shifted. Social distancing, lack of social interaction, and remote working conditions have impacted consumer choices and drifted them towards essentials. Hence, investing time to study and analyze the buyer personas and their buying behaviour becomes an important aspect of the new pandemic-friendly marketing strategy.

Focus on Creating E-commerce Strategy

While e-commerce has been rising steadily since the last decade, the pandemic has surely given it an added boost. Thus, it is essential to create an effective e-commerce strategy that complements a good email marketing, content marketing and video marketing strategy to create a rich consumer experience. From photos, instructional videos, to case studies, and Google Ads, marketers will need to use both paid and organic media to attract the attention of consumers to its products and services.

Creating a Long-term Strategy

The pandemic will not last forever, but the effects may. However, brands need to create an effective long-term strategy rather than focusing on short-term effects. Keeping the brand identity intact while adjusting it to meet the renewed KPIs is going to be a key challenge for all the marketers.

While there are a lot of data and insights that show how the dynamics are changing, no one knows for sure what would be the post-pandemic scenario. Thus, brands need to redefine their digital marketing strategy while keeping their end goals and brand ethos in mind.

September 1, 2020
6 Aspects Of Digital Media Buying That You Need To Know
If there is one field that made pioneering use of AI and machine learning, it’s Digital Marketing. The sector has gone from investing in print ads that reached a generic audience, to contextualising every ad that a digital user comes across.

That’s the power of digital media buying that every digital marketer worth their salt is leveraging. Whether it is social media advertising or display ads, investing in media buying is an effective strategy.

As technology and trends keep evolving, so does the state of buying media online. Here are 6 aspects of online media buying that every business owner and digital marketer holding should be aware of:
- Optimise your target audience
With programmatic advertising enabling nuanced audience targeting, it has become easier to reach the “right” set of digital users. Ensure that as a digital marketer you set the most appropriate parameters when targeting a particular set of online users. Not only will it increase brand awareness but also lead to more conversions. Discuss with your marketing team the pros and cons of investing in RTB or direct programmatic advertising. Your needs may change, and so will your strategy. Like a good scout, be prepared for any change!
- Be cautious of brand placement
Imagine your ad for baby clothing appearing on pharmaceutical websites promoting contraception. Not only will this mixed messaging put off the website visitors but also prime their minds to think negatively about your fashion brand. To avoid such an embarrassing and counterintuitive scenario, it is best to reduce the number of layers in your media buying process. Also, insist on procuring a white-list and a black-list from your publisher. These contain a list of ‘acceptable’ websites such as those that use bot filtering tech, post genuine news, have authentication processes in place, etc. You certainly wouldn’t want your ad to be placed on a blacklisted website that is known to publish fake news, would you?
- The prevalence of ad fraud
Thought your ad was going to be displayed on www.thehindu.com but ended up being on www.thehindi.com? One of the unresolved pitfalls of programmatic advertising is the lack of awareness of where the brand’s ads will appear. Thankfully, there are tools such as ads.txt that help media buyers identify only authentic digital sellers.
- Call for standard metric for performance
While one digital marketer talks about the impressive CTCs they have been able to garner with their campaign, another might focus solely on conversions, while a third will rave about the impressions. While there are tens of metrics to measure performance of an online media advertising campaign, the need for a consistent metric has become more pronounced in the last few years. In spite of the Internet Advertising Bureau delineating metric guidelines, many digital marketers use their own metrics. With the growing call for consistency, it is about time all stakeholders reach a consensus and follow the guidelines.
- Growing in-house media buying
As we mentioned earlier, having fewer layers in the media buying process helps avoid fraud and maintain integrity. An in-house media buying team equipped with the latest technology can effectively collaborate with the digital design team to produce a far more creative campaign that teams working in silos. It also helps to keep an eye on the budget.
- Consider ad space before creation
It is important to know the nature of ad space your brand will get; is it a landscape or portrait display? Advertising bathroom fittings will work much better on a portrait ad than otherwise. Hence, knowing the context and nature of your ad placement is crucial before embarking on creating an ad campaign.

Get the best out of your digital media buying by keeping in mind the aforementioned pointers.

Stay updated on the latest trends in digital media buying by reading here!
March 13, 2020
Third Party Cookies Have Crumbled: What’s Next for Display & Native Advertising?

The impending death of the third-party cookie on internet’s most popular browser, Google Chrome, has left many digital marketers scratching their heads. After all, for the past few years, these third-party cookies were what advertisers used in order to target their potential consumers.

The new Chrome update, the EU’s GDPR guidelines, ad blockers, and the already existing third-party cookie blocks from Safari and Firefox collectively limit the efficacy of display ads and native ads. Digital marketers used third-party cookies to gather data and build behavioural profiles of online users which it used for programmatic advertising.

Without third-party cookies, this programmatic advertising seems to have lost its strongest pillar. So, what’s next for digital advertisers? Will it crumble without the support of the cookies or will it evolve and use other resources to thrive? Let’s take a look at the options and potential next steps for digital advertisers as the eventual death of the third-party cookie looms over…

Leveraging Privacy Sandbox

Google hasn’t left advertisers in a complete lurch. It has suggested a Privacy Sandbox which allows the advertisers to use 5 different APIs to gather data about conversions and attribution. For example, Google’s conversion API will allow the advertiser to know if a particular user bought the product or service after clicking on its ad. The advertiser cannot track the user across all channels. Earlier, a digital marketer could track the whole behaviour of the user right from when they first saw the ad to when the finally made a purchase. With the new API, the marketer will now only know that a certain number of users have made the purchase or clicked on the ad, without knowing which user it is and being able to track them across the digital world.

Unlike third-party cookies which were stored on the user’s hard drive, the user data received after the Chrome update will be stored on the browser itself. This will ensure the privacy of the user and restrict the unprecedented access to user behaviour that third-party cookies allowed for.

However, Google hasn’t revealed the nitty-gritties of how the APIs will function, so we are yet to fully understand the implications of these APIs for digital marketers.

Leveraging first-party data for contextualised advertising

The online community and lawmakers have no qualms regarding first-party data and its usage. After all, the user has made an informed decision to provide their information to the publisher/website. It is this data that digital marketers will need to leverage for their advertising strategies.

One of the man advantages of using first-party data is its quality. Since it comes directly from the horse’s mouth (so to speak), it can be relied upon. Data such as user’s behaviour on the website, social media profile, answered surveys, subscriptions, CRM are good quality first-party data that can be leveraged.

There is no question that display advertising and native advertising are great avenues for building business. However, to keep the momentum going, digital marketers need to shift their focus on acquiring quality first-party and second-party quality data. They need to establish the trust needed with premium and mid-range publishers in order to get first-party data to improve their contextualised targeting.

If there is one thing the digital marketing is known for, its their creativity and resilience. Our bets are on the industry reinventing itself and taking the effort to find the next big thing.

Keep an eye on this blog to know how the digital industry is handling this cookie-less world and next steps.

March 3, 2020
4 Different Types of User Behaviors You Should Definitely Track on Your Website
“Your Website is the Most Important Component of your Digital Footprint”

The ultimate goal of most digital marketing initiatives is to bring more and more people to the website. Once on the website, they need to be encouraged to take action that could be monetized.

While larger brands have professional teams just to monitor and improve their websites, the same is not true for most others. It is, at best, a small team handling the entire operation.

And finding time to monitor user behavior on the website amidst an already stretched schedule is challenging for many. The most that marketers could do in such cases is to rely on their abilities and basic knowledge to try and find meaning in how people are using their website.

But tracking and understanding user behavior could hold the key to how the website could be improved further for providing an enhanced experience to the visitors and generate more revenue.

So, what are the different types of user behaviors that marketers should track on a website? Here is a list of top 4-

1. User Experience

Many marketing experts believe that user experience impacts all the different types of user behaviors on a website. But tracking and measuring the same often requires positive collaboration between the website designers, marketers, and developers.

Once this collaboration is achieved, it is worth tracking behaviors like-
- Scroll depth
- Site speed
- In-page clicks
- Mouse movements
- Navigation patterns
The data can be used for making effective decisions with regards to retaining visitors, content personalization, and improving website navigation.

2. Content Performance

Online marketing is all about content. The success of any digital marketing strategy abundantly depends on the quality of your content. Needless to say, you’d definitely want to know how your website visitors are engaging with the content.

The behaviors that can be tracked include-
- Engagement
- Social media engagement
- Sharing
- Popularity
- Bounce rate and exits
The data will help you understand the type of content that works with your visitors. In the future, you can use the findings for your refining your content strategies.

3. Engagement

Every individual visiting your website will not convert. Moreover, an individual might visit your website multiple times before finally converting. Your job is to provide all the assistance and encouragement to the visitor for higher conversions.

The engagement related behaviors that you can monitor are-
- Chatbots/AI
- Live chat
- Other modes of customer support
The queries or the data that you will collect from your AI and chat tools will help you understand common user queries, the point at which most visitors bounce, and even problems with regards to the user experience or conversion process.

All of this can be used to fix the inconvenience and resolve common visitor queries, eliminating the need for your visitors to contact you for a solution.

4. Conversion Rate

In the end, it is all about conversions. No matter what your conversion goal is, you need to consistently work on the conversion rate (conversions/website traffic) to achieve your business goals.

With regards to conversion, the path that leads a visitor to the final step of conversion is critical. The steps in this path should be regularly measured for their ease and effectiveness.

You can consider tracking-
- Checkout process
- Funnel
- Form testing
- Variable testing
The data can be used to fine-tune the steps leading to conversion, helping you improve the conversion rate.

User Behaviors and Its Impact on Your Website

Irrespective of what strategy you are currently using for bringing traffic to your website, user data will continue to hold its dominance. It is by thoroughly understanding how visitors use your website that you could improve it further to generate more traffic and probably a better conversion rate.

Even if you lack a specialized team to track and improve your website, there are now many different tools that can be used for tracking user behaviors. Look for such tools to effectively collect user data and use the same to gain valuable insights.
February 21, 2020
What Does the Google BERT Update Mean for Marketers?
To provide more relevant answers to user queries, Google needs to understand what people type in the search bar as accurately as possible. The BERT update launched in October 2019 is a significant step in this direction.

BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) is a Google algorithm update to help the search engine understand the intent behind a user query rather than just the words that people type. In simple words, the BERT update has made user intent more important than ever.

So, what does this update mean for marketers? How will it impact the marketing agencies? Here are a few changes that marketers could expect from the BERT update-

1. Organic Search will Continue to Diversify

In the official BERT update, Google has clearly mentioned that the update will help the search engine algorithms understand long search queries, especially ones that are ‘conversational’ in nature. The statement points towards the increasing popularity of voice-enabled devices such as Alexa and Siri.

As such devices will continue to grow in popularity, even the way in which users demand information will continue diversifying. With BERT, Google wants to make information retrieval smarter by integrating granularity at a scale like never before. Conversational AI will drive this transformation, simultaneously diversifying organic search.

2. Intent-Based PPC

PPC ads have mostly been keyword-based in the past. But with the BERT update, marketers now also need to focus on the intent of the ads. With BERT, Google now uses encoders and decoders to analyze the contextual relationship between all the words in both the directions of a sentence.

So, apart from setting PPC goals, budget, and other metrics, marketers now also need to set the right intent for each ad. Only ads that are relevant to a search query will get higher rankings.

3. Creating Helpful and Detailed Content

Even with regards to content, keywords have lost their significance. While they still play a crucial role in how Google ranks your website, marketers need to focus more on long-tail keywords and creating helpful and detailed content. The old technique of increasing the word count and stuffing keywords will not work anymore.

Marketers should first understand their target audience and what type of queries they generally type in the search bar before creating content that is relevant and specific to the queries.

How Does BERT Help Marketers?

BERT is nothing like most past algorithm updates like Panda or Penguin. The new update does not affect how Google judges a web page and rates it positive or negative. In other words, a website cannot be optimized for BERT. It has changed the core algorithm of Google to help it better understand user queries.

But while there are no direct implications of BERT, it again reinforces the primary message of Google that is to create relevant content, in every possible format, which the target audience finds useful and valuable.

Digital Marketing in Post-BERT Era

The only way in which BERT can impact you negatively is if you resort to the unethical techniques of stuffing irrelevant keywords for ranking higher. For improved ranking in the post-BERT era, content creators and SEO specialists need to work together and take an approach that is user-centric and not search engine-centric.

Here are a few tips for marketers-
- Target the top of your funnel acquisitions by creating content that answers questions that are highly relevant to your brand, products, or services with as much clarity as possible
- For targeting the bottom of the funnel, make sure that your target audience is not required to visit any other source for finding information with regards to your brand, product, or services
The BERT update is definitely great news for the entire search landscape as it adds more relevancy to search results. While ranking higher in the post-BERT era could be a time, resource, and effort-consuming affair, as long as you are following the best practices, you are sure to succeed.
February 17, 2020
No More Third-party Cookies On Chrome

The world’s most used web browser, Google Chrome, is getting a major ethical update. Google has taken action in reply to millions of users across the continents who objected to their website usage being tracked using third party cookies.

Third party cookies are essentially bits of data that get stored onto the user’s hard drive once they visit any website. These cookies have long been used by third parties such as marketing agencies on behalf of brands for ad targeting and building consumer profiles. Although legal, third party cookies are seen as a concern for two reasons:

1. Invasion of users’ privacy

2. Mismanagement of cookies by the website leading to security issues for the users.

What is the update regarding third party cookies?

To combat these two concerns, Google has made significant updates to the latest version of its browser- Chrome 80. According to Google, the Chrome update is a step towards remedying the problem albeit over the course of the next 2 years.

One of these remedies revolve around the SameSite protocol. Essentially, a website needs to attach a SameSite tag to each cookie in order to share that with a third party. The website will need to tag the cookie as ‘SameSite=None’ which means the cookie can be sent only to securely encrypted HTTPS websites. If it isn’t tagged so, Google will automatically delete that cookie which means it won’t reach any third parties. This will also prevent any potential cross-site request forgeries.

By the end of 2022, Google aims to completely do away with third party cookies which means digital marketers have a lot of thinking and innovating to do on their part.

What are the implications for digital marketers?

Until now, digital marketers leveraged Customer Data Platforms or Data Management Platforms to control data and gather insights about web users- potential customers for brands. These cookies helped them track user behaviour such as time spent on a particular website, products and services added to cart, preferred time to browse online, etc. Without these cookies, digital marketers will be left in the dark without any tangible assets to depend on.

With Chrome now being in the same league as Safari and Firefox when it comes to its policy about third party cookies, marketers will need to evolve and adopt new technologies to keep building strong marketing campaigns for their brands. There will be new vectors that would be tapped into to maybe gather user data or maybe informed consent forms to collect data will become the norm rather than the exception.

For now, the task for digital marketers is clear: adapting to the changes and creating a safer user experience. Marketing agencies and websites have to work overtime to label their third-party cookies using the SameSite protocol, and as quickly as possible so as to not lose whatever marketing momentum they have going.

Keep watching this space to know more about how digital marketers will deal with these ‘crumbling cookies’, and how will the industry evolve.

February 13, 2020
Betting Big on Orchestration Can Drive Customers Online in 2020
While automation was the buzzword for the marketers in 2018-19, orchestration is expected to rule the roost in 2020 for driving customer and revenue generation.

Automation is one of the biggest revolutions in the world of marketing. From improved sales productivity, workflow automation, better revenue, customer retention, to reduced marketing overheads, the benefits of automation are too big to avoid. Especially, in this age of cut-throat competition, marketing automation is something that could help you have an edge.

But the extensiveness of the benefits or the popularity of marketing automation has reached to an extent where every other business is now using the tools, solutions, platforms, and services that could help them automate their marketing endeavors.

In other words, between 2018 and 2019, marketing automation has somewhat lost its novelty. While businesses are still abundantly investing in automation to achieve their marketing goals, the results would mostly be not as impressive as what they would have been a couple of years ago.

As a result, several modern marketers are now moving towards orchestration for driving customer and revenue generation in 2020.

Why This Shift from Automation to Orchestration?

Marketing automation mostly relies on a set of rules. It is based on these rules that the marketing tool or platform selects the message or content that needs to be sent to a particular contact. But these pre-set rules pose two significant challenges-
1. Inadequate understanding of complex buyer journeys- The abundance of data and information has made buyer journeys more complex in the last few years.
Buyers now have a plethora of options and easy access to unlimited information to help them make the buying decision. This complexity in the buyer journey is what makes the pre-set rules of automation systems inadequate.
1. Changing contexts cannot be readily adopted- Marketing automation is not adaptive in nature. Once the rules are set, and the system is initiated, it will continue working on the same set of rules unless you manually deactivate the system, make changes, and activate it again.
With buyers, their needs, and interests consistently evolving, this inability of automation systems to readily adopt the changes impacts the outcome of the marketing initiatives.

How Can Orchestration Help?

While orchestration too, has automation at the core, it takes it a significant step further with the help of advanced intelligence. Rather than focusing on delivering individual or standalone campaigns, orchestration optimizes cross-channel interactions, which, when combined, can help deliver a personalized experience to the buyers.

Marketing orchestration does not require you to adopt newer tactics or strategies but rather optimize the ones that are currently being used by adding new levels of intelligence. Some popular orchestration strategies used by marketers are as follows-
- Data unification to improve activation and engagement across the current marketing channels
- Using machine learning and AI for programmatic and predictive marketing
- Creating connected experiences to offer a unique personalized experience to the buyers
Marketing and Orchestration in 2020

It is with the help of orchestration that marketers can create a marketing experience that effectively represents their brand, product, or organization in 2020. With the buyers evolving continuously, the traditional automation methods are no longer as effective as they used to be.

But when combined with orchestration, the same automation tactics can help marketers find new customers, retain the existing ones, and generate better revenue.
February 10, 2020

► Necessary Cookies Always Active

Necessary cookies enable essential site features like secure log-ins and consent preference adjustments. They do not store personal data.

► Functional Cookies Remark

Functional cookies support features like content sharing on social media, collecting feedback, and enabling third-party tools.

► Analytical Cookies Remark

Analytical cookies track visitor interactions, providing insights on metrics like visitor count, bounce rate, and traffic sources.

► Advertisement Cookies Remark

Advertisement cookies deliver personalized ads based on your previous visits and analyze the effectiveness of ad campaigns.