The B2B buying process is notably different from the B2C process. The influencers change in number and roles, the sources of research referred to before a B2B marketer makes a purchase are different…take a look at this appealing infographic to know about these factors and more on the B2B buying process.
Today much of marketing has a social hue to it. Marketers are flocking to social media platforms for leads/customers – basically, revenue either in a current or deferred form.
Here are some statistics to demonstrate just how significant a trend this has become:
The ease of use and immediacy of social media make it an invaluable tool for small businesses. Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) are using social media to grow their businesses and 25% of SMBs have planned to increase their social media spend in 2014.
LinkedIn has long been considered the ideal social network for businesses and professional engagement. However, when it comes to SMBs, social networks other than LinkedIn are also doing well.
The numbers above reiterate the fact that LinkedIn is not ‘the’ most preferred social media site when it comes to SMBs. Twitter, which is not necessarily a business networking platform, is close behind LinkedIn.
According to BIA/Kelsey, with 24.3% SMBs active on the site, Twitter has achieved a fair degree of traction with this audience. Twitter has beefing up its ads API in an effort to attract more brands and the effort seems to be paying off.
Through continuous efforts to strengthen its advertising portfolio, Facebook has managed to cater to brands’ marketing needs. 52% SMBs surveyed by BIA/Kelsey are active on the site and recent statistics released by Facebook shows that it has 25 million active SMB pages. That’s an impressive number.
Facebook is definitely doing things right to have these many SMBs using the network for marketing. A recent study by MediaPost stating that 83% SMBs use Facebook re-emphasizes its dominance.
SMBs are really gearing up to drive high growth rates with aggressive marketing particularly on social media platforms. In order to push up growth better, SMBs need to do the following:
Do you have anything else to add to this? Let us know!
Image Courtesy: BIA Kelsey
Yahoo! Launches Gemini Platform for Mobile Search and Native Ads
Yahoo! has recently introduced Yahoo Gemini, a unified marketplace for mobile search and native ads. This is Yahoo’s latest attempt to try and lure more marketers to its advertising business.
Yahoo Gemini has:
The recent surge in mobile web traffic is the key to the increase in demand for mobile ads.
Yahoo’s share of the digital advertising market in the US is expected to come down to 5.4% in 2014 from a share of 5.9% in 2013. And Yahoo still has a lot of catching up to do in 2014, with Google commanding a 40% market share, Facebook (7.4%) and Microsoft (5.7%). The launch of the Gemini platform and its recent unified approach to digital advertising are Yahoo’s attempts at increasing that ad market share.
When Google, Yahoo and Microsoft step up to improve their search and ad market share, it is the digital marketer who benefits. The companies release new features and tools in their competition to cater to marketers’ needs the best. Marketers can make optimum use of these tools and derive more ad revenue out of online campaigns.
Image Courtesy: Yahoo!
Five month old start-up SlickLogin has been acquired by Google for their work on sound-based verification capabilities. Post its debut at TechCrunch Disrupt, September 2013, Israel-based SlickLogin released its product in closed Beta.
How it works
Users need to have the SlickLogin app installed on their smart phone. Adding five lines of code to an existing app will enable the app. When users want to login to a website enabled by SlickLogin, they need to click the login button and hold their phone in front of the computer.
SlickLogin will then verify the phone’s position using technology such as, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Near Field Communication (NFC) or Global Positioning System (GPS). The website would then play a unique sound generated, through the computer’s speakers, which is picked up and analyzed by the phone’s app. A signal is then sent to the site’s server confirming the user’s identity.
User Security Concerns
SlickLogin seems to have its finger on the pulse. Each uniquely generated sound is tied to that moment. No one can record a signal and play it later to hack into an account. The phone would not have the required login credentials and these details are not embedded into the sound also. If anyone tries any of this, they may only be logging that user into their own account!
This acquisition will help Google strengthen its login security beyond the current two-step process.
The social network has opened its publishing platform, LinkedIn Influencer to more members.
Now, the posts published by LinkedIn users will be made a part of their professional profile, shared with their professional network and can spread out to a large group of professionals. Users can now not only follow other members who are not in their network, but can also build their own follower group.
The opening up of LinkedIn Influencer gives professionals a great chance to:
LinkedIn has added more influencers to the existing list and will also be monitoring them to maintain high quality levels and engagement. The capability has been extended to 25,000 LinkedIn members currently and will be expanded to include all members in multiple languages in time.
There will be more of user-generated content on LinkedIn henceforth, which can draw more people to consume content on the site. LinkedIn can soon be a major hub for quality content by professionals. Brands can now begin to turn to LinkedIn with more focus for their content marketing strategy due to a surge in high quality content generated. If your brand’s executive is a LinkedIn Influencer, it means better brand reputation and more exposure.
In case you had read about it, we recently wrote about Yahoo!’s ambitions for developing better ‘contextual search’.
Appears to be true, seeing the $10 million given to Carnegie Mellon University.
Yahoo! does not mention the term ‘contextual search’ explicitly. But, a read of the company statement gives a sure signal of an improved version of contextual search being built.
Though Google is already a player in the game, the possibility and consequences of a better contextual search by Yahoo! is an interesting development for the search world.
What is your take on these updates?
Images Courtesy: The Sydney Morning Herald, LinkedIn, Mashable
4.22 billion people worldwide are expected to use smartphones in 2014.
But, most marketers still don’t understand how powerful smartphones are when it comes to influencing online product/service purchase decisions. Here are some stats that are sure to raise a few eyebrows and can compel marketers to include mobile in their planning in 2014 and beyond.
According to a report in eMarketer, mobile phone adoption worldwide, seems to be slowing down. As western nations reach a saturation point, new users from developing regions such as Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa will continue to drive growth. Between 2014 and 2017, mobile phone penetration will rise from 63.5% to 69.4% of the worldwide population.
It is expected that in 2014, 49% of the world’s mobile users will go online via mobile browsers or apps monthly. By 2015, it is anticipated that the global mobile phone internet audience will cross well over the 50% mark.
Smartphone users surpassed the 1 billion mark globally in 2012 and this is projected to total 1.75 billion in 2014. A recent study by eMarketer reveals that 38.5% of mobile phone users will use a smartphone in 2014 and the usage is expected to reach one out of two mobile users by 2017. As devices become cheaper, users are quickly switching over to smartphones with 3G and 4G networks.
How exactly can you leverage the information we just provided?
Recently, Google certified Nielsen to conduct a study on the online purchase behavior of mobile users. The study revealed that 74% of mobile consumers use a search engine during the purchase process and 83% of mobile users intend to make a purchase within a day’s time.
With all these indications on how mobile phone usage is going to dominate online businesses, marketers need to channelize their SEO strategy to meet these expectations.
Before listing down the essentials for a successful mobile SEO strategy, we would like to point out that any mobile strategy that is developed should be directed to provide a better user experience and improve engagement on the website. It is important to remember the following points:
Hence, a smartphone user more often looks for local businesses near them and could have very high purchase intent.
Contributed by Rahul Banerjee, Head – SEO, Position² Inc.
Sources:
A few months ago, Google opened its doors to Nielsen to place measurement tags on YouTube ads. This move was to help marketers get a better handle on the performance of their video ads and also increase the credibility of Google’s ad ROI data.
Advertisers take many factors into consideration when it comes to choosing a website to advertise on. Quality and accountability are two main factors and Google is working on delivering both of these.
comScore is no stranger to Google. It was one of their first partners in the area of audience measurement through application of its Validated Campaign Essentials (vCE) solution on YouTube.
And now, in an effort to draw more marketers into buying ads, Google has signed a new deal with comScore. This deal will allow real-time ad performance measurement in different formats, across the web on Google’s DoubleClick ad server.
Here are a few important aspects you should know about the deal:
The main advantages of this development are:
Initially, these capabilities will be available in the US for desktop-based display and video ads. It will be expanded to include mobile devices and cross-platform measurement later.
With this development, Google has shown that, though late, they do listen to marketers and work on making advertising on their network beneficial for the latter.
What do you think of this Google-comScore tie-up? Do you think it will deliver all that it is promising and entice more marketers to buy ads?
Image Courtesy: Campaign India
Looks like the micro-blogging site has been busy sculpting its new profile design…
Twitter is testing out a new profile design that looks a whole lot like a Facebook profile page.
The main picture and the bio on the page have been scaled to the left and the header photo has been given more screen space. Twitter has also tweaked the look of its tweet stream, focusing more on photos and content cards along with a departure from the vertical timeline.
Twitter has also implemented a few features reserved for users with verified accounts, such as, the option for the stream to display ‘Tweets’ and ‘Tweets and replies’.
User profiles with the new design can view other profiles in the same way even if the new design has not been implemented in the profile being viewed.
Twitter, however, has not confirmed this story.
Is the company looking at implementing contextual search?
It appears so from CEO Marissa Mayer’s comments at a Goldman Sachs technology conference this Tuesday, where she said that she is excited by contextual search.
Contextual search is where users see customized results based on variable user factors, such as, location, time and earlier behavior. It also looks at factoring in details other than these.
For example, with contextual search, a user looking for a store that sells specific models of printers can see results that include stores nearby that sell the particular model along with relevant ads and cool deals.
Contextual search is a major step in search and Google has already begun incorporating some of these contextual elements into its search. However, there is plenty of room for improvements in contextual search and this is the space Yahoo! is looking at for a share.
Once search engines begin stepping on the gas to build better contextual search abilities, it gets more serious. Businesses need to start working on more deals and coupons for web users to redeem.
This kind of search has more of an impact on local brick and mortar businesses. Users looking for restaurants with their favorite cuisine can benefit more from contextual search. Restaurants can look forward to better business if they have relevant coupons to display in online search results when users look for them.
Do tell us what you think about these two updates…
Images Courtesy: Mashable, Fonts In Use
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Do a lot of bloggers want to write for your site? The phenomenon of guest blogging has caught web writers’ fancy and how!
The benefits cut both ways…
It was considered an honor to be a sought after guest blogger or a website so big that many credible guest bloggers wrote to you asking you to consider their articles.
Guest blogging owes this popularity to bloggers and brands alike. Both were lured, in part, by the SEO benefits it offered. Some of the benefits of having a guest blogger are:
Link building tactic
For the guest blogger, it is a matter of pride to have posts on a reputed website. He also benefits from the back links to his blog. The website too benefits from the traffic arising via the back links of the guest author’s blog.
Increasing engagement
Guest bloggers offer different perspectives that may lead to their posts being liked, shared or commented on, all of which improve reader engagement and the blogger/website reputation.
A way of content generation for websites
Having guest bloggers write for them helped websites in reducing the pressure on their content development teams. It also gave them the chance to offer readers variety in their content by featuring different writers.
Helps build a reputation for thought leadership
Guest blogging aided websites and guest bloggers build their individual reputations as thought leaders in their industries.
The enormous benefits of guest blogging eventually led it to being overexploited to the point of becoming spam. Many websites and bloggers began hosting and writing guest posts to gain links without focusing on quality. So much so that, this practice led Google to make a move to end the practice of blogging for SEO.
Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team recently announced on his blog that guest blogging exclusively for its SEO benefits, must end. So if you were in the habit of accepting guest posts only to build links, you should stop doing that. Or, if you are a guest blogger writing for websites regardless of their credibility, you would be hurting your own reputation.
Matt Cutts has called an immediate stop to the practice of accepting guest blogs that only serve the purpose of SEO. He gives the example of an email he received that actually hinted at offering links, which would pass PageRank! These kinds of practices would definitely not endear you to Google.
So, unless you want to attract Google’s wrath and be penalized, stop guest blogging purely for SEO and do it for all the other benefits that it offers.
Guest blogging for SEO is not going to work!
So, what should guest bloggers and websites who accept guest posts do?
Do you stop guest blogging altogether? Or, should you continue it by following certain rules?
Of course you should continue. It is, after all, only the misuse of guest blogging that is under the scanner and not the practice itself.
Here are some rules that you can follow when it comes to blogging for your website:
What are your thoughts on the current scenario in guest blogging and Google’s stand?
