Category: Paid Search
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Get Your White Paper Noticed with EVA
If you are like most of the movie going population, you choose the movie you see. That is, you probably watch a trailer shared by a friend on social media. If you like what you see, you might read a review, or check out a film review site like Rotten Tomatoes. When you actually choose to watch the movie the choice you make is informed.
So what about your last IT purchase? Does the same informed choice analogy apply? The supplier went to a lot of trouble and great expense to provide a white paper extolling the virtues of the product and the company. Did you read the whole thing at one go before deciding to buy the package?
Probably not. Who has time to read anymore, especially white papers?
If you read the white paper that lead to your buy-in it was probably preceded by googling some work-related material and coming across an info graphic or a video summary that made the white paper seem worthwhile. The equivalent of a good movie review.
If this experience sounds familiar, congratulations, you’ve successfully encountered the amazing process called Enterprise Visibility Accelerator (EVA).
So, what is EVA?
Your horde of white papers have terrific details about industry trends, the facts and figures, the company’s capabilities, all laid out in a way to make successful business happen. You could email a note to prospective buyers suggesting they give the document a look, but how many people would even notice? For your message to reach far and wide it needs to be more accessible than its white paper format, much more appealing to your target audience. You have your white paper on one side and the entire Internet on the other. The trick is pushing the two together for maximum impact, and then making it accessible and comfortable on the mobile phone platform.
Enter Enterprise Visibility Accelerator, or EVA. You might think of it as the lever in leverage. It is the process of breaking down a long and too often dreary corporate white paper into a succinct and easy to understand format, then sharing that on social media. If you make your white paper exciting in social media, you will reach the right people and they will in fact respond.
Here are the different ways you can leverage your content:
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Video
At Position2, we use information visualization and story-telling techniques to produce white paper-based videos that act much like a ‘trailer’ for a feature film. The video focuses on the highlights of the technical white paper, or content from the white paper is summarized and told in a story format that grabs attention and creates awareness about the company and what it offers. It’s all about seeing is believing.
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Infographic
Busy managers like their data served in bite-size chunks. So we pick valuable information buried in the white paper and put it in a graphical chart in eye-catching icons, text and numbers so the message gets communicated in a matter of seconds.
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PPT
Well written and designed PPTs can be the graphical equivalent of story telling. We reduce the white paper to a single slide deck and post it on social media platforms like SlideShare, where the content is consumed and shared by the readers.
Each EVA asset is designed to provide enough data to pique the interest of your target audience. Every asset has the same CTA (Call to Action): ‘For more information, see the full white paper here’. Your target audience arrives at the white paper ready to read, or arrives at a landing page specially created for the white paper ready to learn more.
How can EVA broaden the reach of your content?
By its very nature EVA gets ‘shared’ on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, SlideShare etc. There’s no telling how far you will be able to reach, particularly if your content reaches and interests the “influencers” in a big way.
The impact of EVA is quantifiable::
- 33% increase in referral traffic in just 3 months
- 8X increase in search listings
- 40X increase in asset visibility
- 3X increase in visits to landing page
Still not sure of why EVA is important for you?
Click here to check out the EVA Infographic!
You have produced an elaborate white paper or a technical document or an industry leading report. You know you have a great story, but the trick is connecting with your target customers in a way that convinces them it’s a worthwhile expenditure of time to read your report. This is where EVA comes in to help you win the game. Those white papers gathering dust in your archive? Handled properly, leveraged appropriately, that’s all gold.
Contact Position² to make your B2B brand go places with Enterprise Visibility Accelerator!
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F8 Facebook Developer Conference 2015
The recently concluded Facebook F8 Developer’s Conference had a little bit of everything: workshops, product demos, digital luminaries waxing eloquent on the main stage. Facebook’s product experts freely traded geek info with the technical community. The big shout out was all about Facebook’s determination to be a ‘mobile first’ platform for all its products.
Major Announcements and the Key Takeaways for Digital Marketers
Messenger as Platform
- Integrating features from Messenger into other apps: Content created in-app with dynamic conversations in Messenger folds brands into the conversation
- Users connect directly with businesses: With streamlined Messenger business users connect with brands, build relations and receive business value
- Express yourself with 40 new apps plus audio, video, GIF and photo: The tight integration of the Messenger UX with on-the-fly creation and deployment of app-created content within a message stream
Embedded videos
- Now embed Facebook videos across the web: Content creators can now upload videos directly to Facebook
- Mobile videos mark the way forward: Facebook users daily watch 3 billion videos, 65% on mobile devices.
- Upping the visibility of Facebook videos going forward: Embedded videos watched in more places with greater ease enhances brand visibility
360° videos
- Spherical 360 degree interactive videos coming soon
- Will also play on the Oculus VR platform
Security and Infrastructure Stability
- Security ranked high on Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote address
- “Move fast with stable infrastructure”
- Better security practices emphasized for all aspects of Facebook operations
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Pinterest Launches A Shiney New Algorithm Called Pinnability
Pinterest is beginning to poise itself as a search engine, or what they call a “discovery engine”. Taking cues from Facebook, Pinterest is now serving up what they call a “home feed”. This feed is powered by Pinterest’s Smart Feed algorithm that was launched in 2014.
So what is Pinnability? It’s a collection of machine learning models that allows Pinterest to serve a smart feed on a Pinterest user’s homepage. Pins used to be in chronological order, but now it’s the job of Pinnability to order pins based on a relevance score, or more specifically, a personalized relevance score. Pinterest states that filtering by chronological order isn’t enough to help Pinterest users see pins they really want to see.
Pinterest has a Pinnability diagram on their blog to show the logic of this machine learning model.
Machine learning models have always played a significant role in the development of Pinterest. Pinnability is powered by smart feed, the technology that brings flexibility and control over the composition of the home feed. Pinnability and smart feed work together to estimate the probability of a Pinner interacting with a Pin, with pins receiving high relevance scores shown first. The personal relevance score includes all Pins that users follow as well as Pinterest’s ‘Picked for You‘ recommendations. The algorithm takes into account ‘training factors’ like Pin quality, historical popularity, authenticity, and relevance. The demographics and the activity levels of Pinners are carefully analysed and entered into the mix. And the result is a personal relevance score for each Pin. So in theory, pinner interaction improves because their feed is more interesting and useful due to the personalization.
Per Pinterest’s statement on the subject, “We continue to refine Pinnability and have released several improvements to-date. With each iteration, we’ve observed significant boosts in Pinner engagement, including an increase in the home feed repinner count by more than 20 percent. We’ve also observed significant gains in other metrics including total repins and clickthroughs.” Which means their accuracy of recommendation quality is still a work in progress.
For more information on Pinterest and social media marketing, Contact Position². We love giving free audits!
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74 Nambiar, Co-founder of Position2 wins Confederation of Indian Industry (Southern Region) – Emerging Entrepreneur Award – 2014
The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) has conferred its prestigious Emerging Entrepreneur Award on 74 Nambiar, Co-founder & MD Global Delivery of Position². Six emerging industrialists from across the southern states of India were awarded in recognition of their overall achievements.
The award was instituted by CII five years ago with the objective of encouraging entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. Over 270 companies were part of the screening process and the criteria included parameters like number of years in business, revenue, growth and also looked at softer factors like uniqueness of the business model and social initiatives.
Reacting to the award, 74 said, “It’s a proud moment for me and the entire Position2 team. Such recognition always encourages companies like us who are part of the growing digital economy. I would like to thank CII, my family, friends, all my Position2 team members – past and present – clients and partners. We function in an ecosystem where we all help each other!”
About Position2
Position2 is a demand generation firm, which provides solutions in the area of content marketing, lead acquisition and marketing operations. The company’s single-point-of-access service provides clients with streamlined and integrated solutions for all online marketing needs including creative, pay-per-click campaigns, search, web development, media, marketing automation and web analytics.
Backed by Accel Partners, the company has two offices in India and the US with an impressive client base focused on Fortune 500 companies and SMB companies in B2B technology, consumer products and Internet industries.
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Position2 jQuery Plugin for Form Validation
Without form submissions, a primary tool for extracting useful data that you use to generate leads and expand your business offerings, your website visitors would simply come and go. But building effective form submissions with flawless form validation processes can be a real struggle for webmasters and even web designers. To build a validation form from scratch that can pass all the checks and be market ready you simply need to have extensive Java Scripting knowledge and experience. A JavaScript developer with three to four years’ experience needs one to two hours to program a complete jQuery code for a customized form validation.
That’s why Position2 has designed a simple plugin to help you achieve the same task in less than ten minutes. All that you need to know is simple HTML programming and you are good to go.
You can customize the form to your specific requirements:
- form field validations
- custom error messages and error handling
- custom data entry patterns
You can download the plugin here. It’s free. The documentation is available here.
We hope you save time and enjoy working with the jQuery plugin for form validations.
Contact us if you have any doubts/feedback regarding our plugin.
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Mobile World Congress 2015 – Mobile Advertising
For the first time the Mobile World Congress (MWC), which just wound up in Barcelona in early March, anointed mobile marketing and advertising as a standalone entity. Talks were given that highlighted the finest work in mobile advertising. And a lot of new trends and technologies that will have a major impact on the mobile landscape took center stage.
Mobile Marketer’s Takeaway
Some of the important points for the mobile marketer to consider:
- The rise of social media
- The inevitable fragmentation of social attention
- How cross-channel attribution demands more attention
- The emphasis on data-driven creativity
1. The Rise of Social Media
In a world where more people own cell phones than toothbrushes, most major social platforms have transitioned to the mobile platform. Mobile ads now account for 69% of advertising revenue for Facebook. Tools like Facebook Atlas emerge. It targets people across multiple devices to support people-based marketing campaigns. It’s a customer tracking tool that does not rely on cookies and finds a lot of use in mobile advertising. This is a radical shift that paves the way for a holistic mobile marketing experience.
2. The inevitable fragmentation of social attention
The breakneck speed at which the social landscape expands and proliferates has given rise to dedicated messaging apps. As a consequence, dark social (which is social sharing that can’t be tracked using web analytics, because sharers are sending content off the social platform via email or IM, for example), may account for as much as 70% of social sharing on the Internet today. This is a challenge Mobile marketers need to size up and understand. Truly knowing what users are talking on social platforms supports better targeting.
3. Cross-channel attribution
Cross-channel attribution uses advanced analytics to track various marketing touch points across channels. US adults have an average of three connected devices and they all offer crumbs of data from the channels. Consumers today easily switch between devices. They might browse and add a product to the shopping cart on a smartphone. When they switch to their desktop they expect the same shopping cart with all the history to be carried across, seamlessly.
It’s imperative that brands and companies ensure a fluid online journey that is commensurate with what the customer needs. That is the only way for digital marketers to aid conversions, establish customer satisfaction, and ascertain return visits.
4. Data Driven Creativity
Data-driven creativity meets programmatic buying to deliver a 360 degree customer experience. It’s the new world of the buying and selling of media in an automated, data-driven way.
It makes it possible to deliver personalized ad messaging on a massive scale, an experience that is in sync with the customer’s needs, thus ensuring a deeper brand engagement.
Share your thoughts on the just concluded Mobile World Congress 2015!
Contact Position² to deploy a ‘mobile first’ marketing strategy for your B2B brand now!
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Facebook Offers Digital Marketers More Data Insights
Facebook has recently introduced access to data that will provide insights on who is saying what about anything on Facebook…but keeping it all anonymous.
This new data mining service for marketers and advertisers is called Topic Data. Marketers will be able to scrape user posts for keywords and phrases so they can home in on their target audience. It’s important to note that marketers will not be able to target ads directly, but Topic Data means decision-grade data that will help marketers with their strategies and roadmaps.
Usability
Facebook is leveraging a platform to keep the data actionable, scalable and anonymous through a partnership with DataSift. Facebook is promising their advertisers that Topic Data will mean ‘actionable insights’, and DataSift appears to be the right choice claiming they enable companies to aggregate, filter and extract insights from public social conversations. The partner has as their tagline that they, “Translate data into action with the privacy-first Human Data platform”.
Availability
Topic Data is in beta, so Facebook is only available to a limited number of UK and US DataSift clients. The data Facebook is making available is also limited. The roll out will expand after Facebook can determine that Topic Data is indeed useful to marketers. Hopefully later this year the beta program will be available to a wider audience. Position2 will keep you posted.
If you are interested in Facebook advertising, Contact Position². We manage and scale Facebook advertising for super-ambitious brands!
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Changing US smartphone dynamics: A by-the-numbers opportunity
A quick look at comScore’s Q4 data spells out a digital marketing fact of life: It’s no longer a “mobile too” world out there. It’s all about “mobile first”.
- United States smartphone penetration jumped to 76%
- 3% of total US population now owns a smartphone
- 84% of all US social media users access the platform via a mobile app or browser
This does not presage the end of the desktop or the laptop. But it does underline, with data, that users want access to the Internet anytime, anywhere, with any device – but primarily with a smartphone.
And of that Internet usage? A lot of Facebook time, followed by You Tube. And making a first time appearance to the Top 15 Smartphone Apps list: Pinterest.
What are people doing on their smartphones?
Social networking, watching videos, searching for information, messaging, accessing email are all top activities on the smartphone. This spells opportunity for digital marketers, and the platforms know it. Facebook has made advertising easier to its massive, lucrative audience thanks to the mobile app it recently released to manage your ads. Twitter, with a 23.6% share, has improved ad campaign tracking tools, giving you a new and better way to manage your Twitter ads.
Smartphone sales are going one way – Up
Of the 1 billion+ smartphones sold worldwide in 2014, Samsung lead the pack. Apple, on the other hand, cornered nearly 90% of the global smartphone profits.
Here is a breakdown by brand of worldwide smartphone sales in 2014:
As smartphone dynamics change so too must your digital marketing campaigns. Mobile centric is the way to go. It’s all in the numbers.
Contact Position² for all your media and advertising needs targeted towards your mobile customer!
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Instagram Debuts Clickable Carousel Ads
Instagram is a fast, beautiful and fun way to share your life with friends and family. And it’s free. All of that adds up to 300+ million users throughout the world, all of them potential targets for advertising.
Instagram has always wanted people to browse for photos or videos and remain on the platform, not click on links that take the user off site, as is the case with ads on Facebook and Twitter. With the introduction of clickable carousel ads, advertisers now have good reason to get excited. Instagram’s carousel ads give brands more flexibility in telling their stories by allowing people who view their ads to swipe left to see additional images and link to a website of the brand’s choice.
Think in terms of glossy multi-page ad campaigns in upscale magazines. That’s essentially where Instagram is headed with this advertising tool. But here’s the key difference between magazine spend and Instagram. The ads on Instagram have the advantage of all manner of digital analytics telling advertisers the exact nature of the impact.
Cash flow
Instagram has positioned itself with clickable carousel ads to give leading brands a quantifiable way to measure the impact of their marketing campaigns. The brands, in turn, are seeking vivid ways to influence people. Clickable carousel ads are a valuable resource to, among others, apparel, automotive, and restaurant brands that need more than a single image to fully display their latest offerings. Users swipe through the series of images, much like turning the pages of a magazine. Click through rates will help advertisers determine the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. And the subsequent cash flow will keep Instagram a free and ever growing app.
Contact Position² to reach out to your B2B clients on social media now!
