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Category: Digital Marketing

  • How to Enhance Digital Brand Storytelling in 2019

    How to Enhance Digital Brand Storytelling in 2019

    The concept of one way press release and print advertisement is a way of the past. Today, it is the age of brand storytelling, and that seems to work wonders in generating engagement and driving conversions online. Any company or business that has to be successful online needs to go in for an effective storytelling procedure. This can be a challenging job because the company has to figure out as to what to say and howto say. Many of the B2B and B2C marketers are continuously thinking of rigorous, engaging content for their market. Here are some handy tips that can help a business owner to master the art of storytelling and work with a sound content strategy.

    1 – Capture the present

    Nowadays, companies have adopted a more journalistic approach when it comes to propagating their brand. In order to tap the crowd, they create news, personalise it, thus staying relevant, accountable and taking a stand to support their strategies.

    An idea or a concept will not sell until and unless it strikes a chord amongst the consumer’s mind and successfully capture his attention. One has to see things from the consumers’ point of view and then only can all the branding promotion be successful.

    2 – Effective publication

    A major constituent of any brand storytelling is technology. This helps in creating, curating and managing the content to make the consumer engagement quick and easy.  Every brand rightly needs a proper platform that will publish their content, amplify it and maintain the standards of its consistency.

    The right platform can help the business owner to optimise and analyse his content and modify it accordingly as needed. Thus, right from the initial stage of its origin right up to the results, technology plays a crucial part here.

    3 – Adapt to changes

    In today times, there are hundreds of public channels that are at the fingertips of the consumers, to stick to them or not. Therefore, sound branding should embrace changes and try to reach the right audience.

    If this is not happening, the business owner can try to deploy its storytelling concept across the various trending channels without letting the quality getting affected.  The fact that there are a vast number of channels makes it easier for business owners in reaching out to the right target. 

    4 – Rules about authenticity

    A good storytelling concept usually covers the details about the company and its mannerism of functioning. This greatly involves the right use of human emotions because, if people are positively affected, the sales will automatically be positive.

    It has been observed that due to an emotional attachment towards a particular brand, people still stick to it in spite of been given more attractive alternatives.  Such people go in for their favourite brands 32% more and tend to shop about 46% more than those who do not have any such preferences.

    Thus, the concept of storytelling is a boon for the trending brands, who are fishing for the right market to promote their services.

  • 5 Super Effective Ways to Boost Your Organic Video Results

    5 Super Effective Ways to Boost Your Organic Video Results

    These days, just making original content is not enough. Knowing how to effectively push it across so that it yields you the right results is also imperative.

    Original visual content has proven to be one of the most powerful tools in online content marketing. Videos provide a visually enchanting experience to the end user which compels them to make the purchase, which just blog post would not.

    Video content has more potential to grab the eyes of the customer and this further leads to higher brand engagement and consequently leads to escalating profit charts. Don’t just go by words, as Forbes evinces, through extensive study in this arena, that by 2019, video content will account for almost 80 per cent of global consumer internet traffic.

    To get onto the bandwagon, here are some effective steps about how you can enhance your organic video results.

    1. Understand What You Got
    You need to understand the importance of sorting out here. See if all your videos are identified, categorised and optimised. This is to be done in steps.

    a) Analyse the portal you choose to post on. See what works there, and what does not.

    b) Analyse the video content you would be pushing out, and conduct a thorough keyword research to find ways to optimise your videos.

    c) Analyse the SERP (Search Engine Result Page) and find the videos that would be displayed for relevant keywords. Though this would be a time-consuming effort to begin with, it definitely would pay you off in the long run.

    2. Know the video gaps
    Find out what sells online, in the sense what are the popular queries and compare those keywords to your current video library. This will give you an understanding of what videos you really need to put out.

    This is basically providing what the audiences want. If you have a video on how to use certain software, you’d be surprised to know that your audience is rather interested in knowing how to install the software first.

    3. Expanding SEO Keyword focus through videos
    Videos offer you the opportunity to expand your SEO focus. It gives you the leeway to target more keyword variations in your video titles and descriptions.
    Example: Usually videos are focusing on processes and procedures. Adding those words in the titles helps your content reach out to a larger base.

    4. Adding Optimised Links
    Uploading videos with no links that lead to the parent page create a shady impression. Optimise your videos with links to the website in the descriptions section.

    5. Surviving the Competition
    Viewing the competitors’ videos would give you an idea of the keywords they are using, and the kind of audience they are targeting. This would give you some ideas on filling in the content gaps, or even give you newer video ideas.

    Using these strategies gives you the formula to make videos serve you well. Not only your sales improve, but also you manage to create a community that will look forward to the content you put out.

  • Power up your holiday season deals with Chatbots

    Power up your holiday season deals with Chatbots

    Chatbots are offering a lot of advantages as the new age AI-based customer support weapon for modern brands. It has proven its efficacy in the form of better outreach at the right time with the right customers, and round the clock accessibility.

    Here are some reasons why the retail sector can find chatbots to be a capable customer support executive during the holiday season:

    1. Better gifting recommendations

    A significant portion of retail shopping is taken up by users who want to gift something to their near and dear ones. Here, they find it difficult to get a right fit gift. With chatbots, however, narrowing down to the right gift and saving time in the process becomes easy. With an interactive line of questioning like ‘who is the gift for?’, the chatbot can get maximum information about the persona of the recipient and accurately suggest recommendations for gifting.

    2. Better wish lists

    Chatbots can prod the shoppers to build a wish list well ahead of the season where availability is not a problem. If they do this successfully, the buyer can be prompted to pick multiple items from the assortment for gifting family members, friends, or clients. With proper call to actions, redirects, and sharp images, this pointer can be driven for successful outcomes.

    3. Better open rates

    As compared to a measly 5-10% open rates for emails, the story is quite encouraging for Facebook messenger based bots. These command a staggering 75% open rates. This means that chatbots are a proven marketing enabler for your brand. It helps improve your outreach efforts with phenomenal efficacy in local marketing endeavours. A chatbot can intelligently sense past behaviour on the site that didn’t lead to conversion. It can push for a 5% – 10% discount to sweeten the deal and make the prospect to convert faster.

    4. Shipping intelligence

    Shipping has an unfortunate relationship with the holiday seasons. With no proper information presented, the buyers may remain in the dark about crucial details. Here a chatbot can step in and help out with various factors like express deliveries, same day deliveries (for last minute orders), limited deliveries to particular zip codes, expected delivery timelines, and charges (if any). It can go one step ahead and share the order tracking process for the buyer’s peace of mind. They can also come to know about the product return policies and steps in case they want to return the same.

    5. Post holiday marketing boost

    It is interesting to note that your chatbot can deliver value even after the holiday season is over. Unused inventory can be sold easily with personalised notifications to past buyers based on their shopping history. This way you can give a fillip to post-holiday sales and marketing for your online retail brand.

    Chatbots are a great way to enable online retail traction during and after the peak period. These tactics will come in handy when you need to go that extra mile to entice customers to buy from your brand in the upcoming holiday seasons.

  • How to create consistency in co-created storytelling for brand narratives?

    How to create consistency in co-created storytelling for brand narratives?

    The famous Coca-Cola campaigns are a testimony to how storytelling impacts different consumers in different ways depending on what narrative they hear (or experience). For example, you may start seeing a new campaign on YouTube as a video. Next, you might see TV commercials or outdoor ads for the same. When you visit a store, you may see the product placed well into prominence in the overall assortment. Once you have experienced the product, you may visit social media pages to see the various comments coming in from other users.  It is interesting to note that the storytellers for different campaigns work towards one particular larger narrative that fits well into all types of ads served or experiences had by the customer.

    Four principles of story worlds that work right for your brand

    Story worlds are nothing but the different pieces of stories created by various experts like advertising agencies, TV commercial production houses, bloggers, video creators, and social media management experts. It is difficult to help them stay aligned to a singular narrative, but these principles should definitely help:

    1 – What is the brand purpose?

    Your first step would be to have a clear brand purpose that informs the users about the values of the brand. This will ensure that the different branches or ad serving mediums will have consistency in how they connect with the customers.

    2 – Is the brand purpose correctly applied to consumer psychology?

    The company’s larger picture purpose has to resonate with the different offerings. For instance, MasterCard allows its customers to gain credit via cards to meet their needs. This works on customer psychology when they view a MasterCard ad and are prompted to go for a card as they can create a unique experience of their own.

    3 – Is the customer involved enough?

    Take the case of Doritos. It sought users’ participation in the form of the Doritos Super Bowl ad contest. Here the users were tasked with filming creative ads and sending it to Doritos. The best ads were then rewarded with a whopping $1 million and obtain a 30-second spot aired at the time of the Super Bowl tournament.

    4 – Listen to what they say

    Being responsive to the users’ opinions and views goes a long way in enhancing your brand visibility. For instance, MasterCard dropped its ‘Goal for meals’ campaign after a public outcry. Dubbed as the ‘Hunger Games’, the ploy was to donate meals based on the number of goals scored in a football match. MasterCard listened to the public sentiment and donated a million meals without tying it up to any marketing campaign. This allowed the card processing giant to depict that they listen to their customers and thus gain their trust.

    These pointers will help you get the collective storytelling prowess of co-creators of different stories within the overall brand narrative. What other examples have you seen of various lines of storytelling in place? Do write to us and let us know.

  • Google Maps Introduces ‘Follow’ Feature For Businesses

    Google Maps Introduces ‘Follow’ Feature For Businesses

    Facebook’s growing clout among advertisers has been a source of concern for many leading players. One such giant is google. It has been following Facebook’s steps in various areas of business pages display and format. In the latest news, we see that the search engine pioneer has introduced a ‘Follow’ feature for Businesses in Google Maps.

    With this feature, Google Maps has been steadily evolving into a well-rounded social platform rather than just a channel to find locations or get directions. Some of the recent additions include group trip planning, ETA sharing, and music controls. Today we will take a look at how the ‘Follow’ features adds value to businesses across the globe.

    What is this feature about?

    When users click on the ‘follow’ button for a business, they can track the company more effectively. Users get to see an expanded coverage about a brand – for e.g. the latest news, upcoming events, ongoing deals and other discounts. Users can view this in the ‘For You’ tab on the Google Maps site.

    To take on rivals in effective business advertising it has now started to display an in-depth view of the business such as offers, deals, and events. Google has a definite source for taking this information. It gets this intel from Google My Business posts. These small updates of around 300 words present in Google Business Listing help the search engine to curate content that is worthy of displaying to people who are following a brand.

    Companies can also utilise Google Maps to reach more leads before they are actually open to the public. They can showcase their opening date which will begin displaying up to three months before the opening date.

    This profile will show the opening date in orange text. It will be positioned just below the business name. Users get the option to save the business to their lists. They can also view all the regular information such as address, website, photos and contact details. This helps build sufficient buzz around the store and improves your pre-launch marketing efficacy.

    Though the feature has been in the beta phase and was rolled out among a select set of brands, the official announcement came in only last week. The first OS preference will obviously be Android with a provision for extending to other OS’s later on.

    The brand new “Follow” feature is going for a phase-wise deployment strategy. In the initial phase, it is targeting some 150 million places already present on Google Maps. The button will be shown to users to seek out these businesses and help them know the brand better with useful snippets of information.

    The level of adoption by users in the future will give a glimpse of how effective the feature will be in helping Google overcome Facebook’s business page dominance. But Google is sure to keep evolving its ecosystem to make it more effective for brands and more impactful for users.

    What are your thoughts about Google Maps’ new feature? Do write to us and let us know in the comment box below.

  • Ways to Augment Digital Campaigns with Offline Ads for Best Outcomes

    Ways to Augment Digital Campaigns with Offline Ads for Best Outcomes

    The last decade saw a massive shift of those involved in print and billboard advertising to digital mediums. However, we are now seeing a reverse trend where digital marketers are increasingly coming to grips with the nuances of offline advertising (TV, print, and OOH ads). The reason behind this transition is not very hard to fathom. Digital consumers are increasingly demanding a seamless online-offline experience. Irrespective of the device they use to consume content, the delivery should be uniform and uninterrupted.

    Why is this change interesting today?

    OOH and TV are rapidly going the digital way. TV will eventually be bought programmatically to enable better impact among a select audience. It is no surprise that even startups and emerging businesses are placing their trust in OOH and TV ads to expand their brand awareness across the nation.

    The evolving tech landscape too has made it possible for marketers to allow these media channels to be more targeted, drive better inventory buying, and enable insightful performance monitoring. This gives off positive signals for marketers of multinational companies and startups alike.

    How to integrate both?

    You need to plan your strategy around a solid framework. We trust the purchase funnel to be a viable ecosystem around which we can plan the online-offline integration strategy. Right from base level awareness about the brand to eventual conversion, all milestones of the purchase funnel can be programmed to integrate online and offline.  There is no set rule which dictates which idea to use at what stage.

    A wise approach would be to create a successful customer journey that targets the offline-online touchpoints at the right time. It also delivers ads that complement both mediums for a great omnichannel experience.

    We see that offline depicts the below characteristics:

    1 – Low cost per thousand

    2 – Wider reach

    3 – More expensive to run due to elements like banners, TV commercial slots

    On similar lines, online channels depict the below characteristics:

    1 – Higher cost per thousand

    2 – Narrower reach

    3 – Much less expensive to run

    With these characteristics in mind, we can have the below approach:

    1 – Use offline for upper-funnel activity (i.e. promoting reach and brand awareness)

    2 – Use online for lower-funnel activity (i.e. for acquisition, conversion, and brand loyalty)

    Why timing plays a key role?

    The duration of your ad campaigns has a bearing on what type of channels you use for brand promotion. If you need quick results in a matter of months then it makes sense to roll out both offline and online campaigns at the time.

    For e.g. you can start off with an OOH campaign to promote brand awareness, followed by intense paid search campaigns that target the online channel. Optimising the ad spends in both channels via carefully thought out campaigns will be a wise thing to do. You will see a direct impact on the cost per acquisition (CPA) or campaign impact when this is done.

    What are your thoughts about closing the gap between the online-offline divide in the world of marketing? Do share your unique experiences with the world by commenting in the box given below.

  • Google Comes Up With Two Brand New Feature Updates

    Google Comes Up With Two Brand New Feature Updates

    As the most popular and largest global network, Google has again managed to grab eyeballs and how! The platform has come up with brand new advertisement formats for advertisers as well as retail store owners. By leveraging these innovative ad formats, marketers will have the opportunity to reach out to potential consumers. Termed as ‘Shoppable Image Ads’ and ‘Shopping Showcase Ads’, these two formats are tailor-made for brand advertisers. They can simply leverage ‘Google Image Search’ or ‘Google Search’ and gain access to an extensive customer pool.

    Decoding the updates

    ‘Shopping Showcase Ads’ contains video that’s used to display the advertisers’ video assets. Since this new update is a part of ‘Google’s multi-image shopping’ style, it helps advertisers link videos to images within similar search networks. Google states that advertisers will now have the opportunity to extend video footprints by placing such content prominently on landing pages.

    What’s new in ‘shopping showcase ads’?

    Whenever users click on the link, they will be directed to the landing page hosted by Google that essentially features the product descriptions as well as promotions. The entire advertisement video will play and that too right at the top, thus displaying the list of offerings from the brand’s product feed. Here are some of the highlights Google has to share about this particular format:

    • Brand-specific: This particular feature can be used for broad category promotion as well as brand publicity.
    • Top-of-funnel marketing: Compared to average and general click-through rates, this particular format proved to be a stronger vehicle for bringing in customers. The traffic rate derived by users is almost 3.6 times higher than the average.
    • Increased conversion credit: With the first click, advertisers can earn 20% more credit than before.

    Comprehending Shoppable Image Ads

    Whenever a potential consumer looks for images on websites or ‘Google Image Search’, it is the ‘Shoppable Image Ads’ that can capture their attention. This particular ad format features product images with price tags. You will come across a ‘sponsored’ tag on these units as well as a ‘shopping’ icon will appear in the left corner. Customers can also view these updates on 3rd party sites and the format will come up with a range of product listing advertisements. Check out some of the notable updates by Google in this context:

    • Get products upfront: Eager and enthusiastic shoppers always check images before finalising their purchase process. This particular update will help them do that in a better and innovative way.
    • Expecting more mileage: As of now, not many are using this particular update by Google. However, the platform expects the numbers to pick up rapidly and numerous marketers will be leveraging the format quite soon.

    Google has been rolling out exclusive features and innovative updates for quite some time now. As two popular promotional channels, both these ad formats will help advertisers make the most of their resources. Shopaholics always look for the right inspirational avenues when it boils down to gaining inexplicable shopping experiences. With Google’s updates, marketers, as well as prospective customers, have some great news to enjoy!

  • Leveraging B2B For Increased Sales Opportunities In Your Venture

    Leveraging B2B For Increased Sales Opportunities In Your Venture

    Targeting potential prospects and helping them navigate through the purchase lifecycle is an integral part of the B2B sales process. Your ability and power to engage targeted buyers turns out to be the determining factor in the sales process. A majority of marketers and brand advertisers struggle to gain optimum momentum from their B2B marketing approaches. It also becomes difficult to measure the ROIs and its impact on the sales funnel.

    It’s here that brand advertisers need to adopt a completely different approach. Developing ABA or ‘account-based advertising’ strategies is crucial. If you are planning to make it big in the B2B sector, here are three most crucial considerations that will help you generate increased ROIs, strengthen the sales team, as well as reach out to targeted purchasers.

    1. Identifying key accounts

    Developing targeted campaigns for B2B advertising and laying a strong foundation for business marketing is imperative. You have to tailor marketing strategies according to your key buyers, and that’s exactly where you need to identify the major accounts. Some of the key approaches include:

    • Create effective lists: Most of the sales team have vertical accounts that help them gain a strategic advantage over competitors. This existing list will help marketers develop innovative ways to kick-start their advertising projects.
    • Rely on existing data: The CRM system will have a comprehensive record of targeted accounts. You can leverage the existing datasets and pull those user accounts directly.
    • Merging marketing approaches: The perfect way to gain increased traction for your sales team is by complementing intuition-based advertising and data-based marketing. It is highly crucial to merge both the marketing approaches for exceptional outcomes.
    1. Advertising to key buyers

    Reaching out to key accounts is an important thing to do. You have to look for high-value accounts and create marketing strategies accordingly. Precise approaches will prove to be the key and not traditional advertising approaches. Here’s how to do it:

    • Narrow down to targeted accounts: Leverage IP-derived information thus narrowing down to the right set of audience.
    • Leverage real-time data: Intuition or intent-based marketing can work wonders. You can rely on and leverage these data sets to identify early buying signs.
    • Reaching out to buying committees: Account-based advertising can also help you reach out to targeted buying communities.
    1. Measuring at account levels

    Click-through-rates and other means of measuring advertising metrics will fail to gauge the actual scenario in the B2B landscape. You have to get the hang of the real situation and measure the actual ROIs. The parameters for this calculation will be as follows:

    • Number of accounts engaged
    • Closed revenue
    • Closing rates
    • Cost-per-engaged-buyer accounts
    • Account-reach level metrics
    • Measuring short-term campaigns
    • Assessing the long-term revenues

    It’s always imperative to keep a tab on the impact of your marketing campaigns. Right from awareness and audience engagement to revenues and growth impacts, quite a few factors demand careful consideration. To derive maximum momentum from your B2B campaigns, you have to measure the marketing strategies as well as focus on creating segmented plans. That will help you strengthen the sales team and ensure a successful B2B promotion plan.

  • Positive News Stories Now Made Available by Google Assistant

    Positive News Stories Now Made Available by Google Assistant

    The occurrences of depressing news stories is a way of life we surely want to avoid. Google too feels the same way and has made efforts to empower its tech solutions towards the same. Its voice-based Google Assistant will now dole out feel-good stories that will make you feel good and positive all around you.

    How does it work?

    Google Assistant users will have to request ‘Ok Google, tell me something good’ to get their daily dose of motivating stories that look on the bright side of life. The stories are curated from Solutions Journalism Network, a US-based non-partisan organisation that collects uplifting and feel-good news from across the globe. The not-for-profit organisation helps train journalists on enabling better coverage of how people are responding to problems and how their efforts are leading to motivating results.

    The results link to stories that come from diverse media sources like NY Times and BBC. The tech giant maintains that the organisation is a great fit to get started as it empowers and energises journalism and thus, helps to tackle negative news fatigue.

    When you say “Hey Google, Tell Me Something Good”, you get a stream of good news like how more volume of voluntary health information is aiding research on Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s or how Utah managed to reduce its homelessness by 91 per cent.

    Why the need for this move?

    Talking about the new feature, the Creative producer of Google Creative Lab, Ryan Burke said that the users need to have a well-balanced media consumption diet. But currently, the scale is heavily skewed towards bad happenings and depressing news stories. The need of the hour was to rectify this skew and have users get some good stories as well that help inspire and motivate people all over the world. This is how the feature of receiving daily good news wad conceptualised and implemented. This new feature comes on the heels of steady expansion of voice-tech device range offered by Google.

    From another angle, it may also have some positive impact. Psychologists are of the opinion that such uplifting news stories would have a great effect on mental health, bring down stress, and reduce anxiety in some cases. They commented that there is a better scope for improvement in case the readers come to know about the emotional angle of the stories they present.

    Try it out now

    Currently, the service is in a trial but may be expected to reach Google Home devices soon. Even phones that have this technology (for example Android phones) will be able to use this new roll-out.

    Check out the official Google announcement here.

  • How to Overcome the Menace of Fake Social Media Accounts?

    How to Overcome the Menace of Fake Social Media Accounts?

    Fake social accounts are proving to be a daunting challenge for marketers today. Right from fake voters providing loud opinions on political orientation, or obsessively re-tweeting about a single theme, there are serious implications around fake accounts. As per stats, there were 11% more fake accounts in 2016 as compared to 2014. This shows that the issue is escalating with every passing year.

    Reasons for the increase in fake accounts

    Sometimes, there might be a genuine need to create an alternative social media account. For instance, when a doctor wants to keep his personal life separate and doesn’t want to be inundated with ‘friend requests’ from patients. However, in such cases, there is no danger to anyone, and the intent is not negative. The real issue comes when fake social accounts are created with negative intent.

    There are two key reasons why someone would take the effort to create and promote a fake social media account from an institution or a known influencer like a company CEO –

    1 – Damage brand reputation

    Disgruntled former employees or even angry relatives (like an ex-spouse) may create a fake profile on major networking channels to tarnish the person’s professional image. The scamsters use three key channels – Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, to do the damage.

    2 – Extract money via dishonest means

    Unscrupulous people put up new fake accounts representing the chief executives of a renowned bank or financial institutions and then request for cash or wire transfers. They might even set up a fake website and re-direct users to the fake social media channels integrated within the site.

    What can be done about this?

    It is never easy dealing with this menace. There may be reactive measures applied upon discovery of the fake profiles by someone in your known network. However, a true measure of its effectiveness will be in proactively detecting these profiles and taking timely steps to counter this issue.

    So while tips from employees, stakeholders, or family network might uncover the issue, the damage would’ve already been done by then. Experts recommend using intelligent cybersecurity automation tools like IntSights. You may see a site like “The HDFC Bank” or “HDFC Banks” which mimic the front page of the original “HDFC Bank”. The tool can detect duplication of a logo, visual imagery, and text searches to sift the real one from the fake ones.

    Also, actual behaviour on the profile detects its genuineness. So, if you see a profile that has a large number of followers, but very less degree of engagement then it is most likely to be fake. Another telltale sign is racking up an insanely high number of followers in a matter of hours or days. These are red flags that bring out a fake social media site to the fore.

    If there is a website that accompanies a fake social media profile, the genuine brand can intimate the domain registrar to cancel the fake site’s registration. The genuine brand will have a valid reason that the fake site infringes on its reputation and hence needs to be taken down.

    As evident, the ramifications of fake social account are huge, especially when you are a marketer dealing with the accuracy of the data being tracked for monitoring marketing efficacy. These steps might alleviate the problem to some extent.

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