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Instagram – Yet Another Platform For Advertisers

Instagram has 300 million monthly active users and plans to open up the platform for advertisers. Jim Squires, director of market operations at Instagram, speaking with eMarketer’s Debra Aho Williamson, talked about how advertisers will be able to use Facebook data for targeting and how the ad buying process will change on Instagram.

What can marketers and advertisers expect going forward?

Instagram will introduce direct-response ads, the ability to buy ads via an API (application programming interface) and enhance its specific targeting capabilities
In addition to the video, photo and carousel ad formats, the new Action-oriented ad formats will allow users to take an action directly from an ad to sign up on a website or buy a product or download an app
Instagram will maintain advertisement quality and creativity with a complex system using negative feedback rates, ad engagement rates and comments on those ads as input parameters
Advertisers will be able to use ‘Custom Audiences’ to mix their information with the Instagram and Facebook platforms to get a holistic picture of their ad campaigns

Let us know your thoughts on how to fold Instagram into your social marketing strategy.

July 21, 2015

Best of the Week | 8 Tips to Leverage Facebook for Business, and much more…

This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world.

From the Position² Blog This Week:

Tips to Leverage Facebook for Business | Position² Blog
Looking to promote your business, enlarge your brand audience? With a constantly diversifying array of internet users signing up for Facebook, a showcase on Facebook for a brand, business, company or entity has become as critical as having a website. Read this blog for 8 ways to boost the visibility of your business page.

What are the biggest challenges for digital marketers in 2015?

Best of the Week Video
What are the biggest challenges facing the digital marketing industry over the next few years? Watch this video where the speakers from Future of Digital Marketing conference share their views.

Persona Based Lead Scoring: The Mystery and the Method

Download this White Paper and learn:

Classify leads based on behavior and demographic details
Develop a consistent methodology to proffer quality leads to sales
Employ data integrity and tracking
Deploy marketing automation to improve efficiency and cut costs.?

Download the complimentary persona Based Lead Scoring White Paper now

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July 17, 2015

5 Updates from Google for Mobile Devices

The nature of digital marketing will not stand still, not with Google constantly creating new ripples for marketers all over the world. Here’s a look at what’s in the pipeline:

Purchases On Google

The much-anticipated “buy button” in Google search ads is here but it’s not really a button. Called ‘Purchases On Google’ mobile users will be able to click on search ad results and go directly to the dozen or so retailers currently participating in the test. Response thus far has been enthusiastic and positive.

“Purchases on Google will simplify our customers’ ability to search for items on Google and then buy with Staples.” said Faisal Masud, Executive Vice President of Global E-Commerce, Staples, Inc.

“Customers increasingly want to shop on their own terms. Purchases on Google facilitates that flexibility while maintaining the merchant’s ability to own the customer relationship.” says, Peter Cobb, eBags Marketing EVP and Shop.org Chairman.

By clicking anywhere on the ad the user is taken to a merchant-branded gateway landing page hosted by Google. The consumer can buy the product immediately using his mobile device.

New Mobile Shopping Ad Formats For Voice Search

Google has started to show new ad formats that include rankings and ratings when consumers search using voice. In this example rankings 1 to 3 have been displayed in the search results for the image on the left after making as voice search.

Expanded Product Listing Ads (PLAs) When Viewing The Carousel On Mobile

When users swipe to see more in the PLAs on their smartphones, Google will now expand the ads to show the full product title as well as extensions like product ratings and nearby availability. This functionality will roll out to Chrome for Android this month, and iOS in the coming months.

Google Now In-store Cards

Local Inventory Ads have been performing well so a lot more of them will begin showing up in mobile search results. Also coming online, the Google Now in-store card that appears when a user is near a store. It will show sales, closing hours, loyalty card information and more. Also, look for the Google Now price drop card. It will showcase significant price decreases on products the user has previously browsed.

PLA Deep Linking To Shopping Apps

Google is running a pilot test with a small group of global retailers including eBay, Flipkart and Zalando to deep link their product listing ads to product pages in their apps rather than their websites. More retailers will participate in the test in the coming months.

July 17, 2015

Tips to Leverage Facebook for Business | Position² Blog

Looking to promote your business, enlarge your brand audience? Look no further than Facebook. With a constantly diversifying array of internet users signing up for Facebook, having a showcase on Facebook for a brand, organization, business, company or entity has become as critical as having a website.

Eight Ways to Boost the Visibility of Your Business Page on Facebook

1. Business Overview

Make sure all the information about your business in the following checklist has been included on your Facebook Business page.

In General

Description(short & long)
E-mail ID
Phone number
Address
Map
Ratings & reviews
Vanity URL

For a Local Business

Working hours
Product price
Parking
Public transit
Payment methods
Specialties

In this example The American Museum of National History improves their Local Business Visibility by providing Facebook users planning their visit with relevant information.

In another example, Vinaka Cafe makes it easier for consumers to access this Local Business by posting information about their specialties, price range, their services and parking availability.

For B2B Business:

Year Founded
Awards
Company Mission

Insite Software added all the basic information that describes their business: the year the company was founded, the address, a short and long description, the products offered and contact information.

2. Call-to-Action Feature

Facebook has added a CTA feature that helps users take actions important to the business. CTA buttons include such basics as Sign Up, Contact Us, Book Now, Shop Now, Play Game, View App, Watch Videos, etc. Businesses leveraging this CTA feature easily drive traffic to their website.

You can track the number of people who have clicked on your Page’s call-to-action button in two ways:

Hover over your Page’s Create Call to Action button and then hover over View Insights to see how many clicks have been received in the past seven days.
Go to This Week on the right side of your Page and hover over the box that shows the name of your call to action to see how many people have clicked that week.

3. Tabs and Apps

Tabs and Apps can be found below your Page’s cover photo. You can display up to 5 tabs below your Page’s cover photo, and up to 3 apps on the left side of your Page’s Timeline.

Tabs come with your Page when you create it and direct people to specific parts of your Page, like Photos and Events.
You can add apps made by third-party developers to your Page, build your own, or work with one of Facebook’s Marketing Partners to create a unique app experience on your Page.

You can customize your tab on Facebook.

In this example Dell Software has added a custom tab displaying all the relevant YouTube videos. This keeps the user within the Facebook channel.

4. Image Optimization

In order to optimize the images that are featured on the Page you first need to select the top 9 photos you want on the Page. It’s important to select images that best represent your brand because they are automatically chosen from the Business Page’s default photo album.

5. Featured Video

One of Facebook’s latest update encourages Pages to upload a featured video and show it prominently to people selecting your Video tab. This will also be featured in the About Us section.

6. Video Cards

Create and share personalized Facebook Video Cards.

Job Well Done
Goodbye
You Can Do it
Recommend a Client

To check out this feature, log into Facebook and go to the Say Thanks page.

7. Reviews and Feedback

This feature applies only to Local Business pages and will appear below the About Us section. By activating this feature users will be able to read other users’ experiences and ratings of the business. To have a better view of the comments click on the review session in the About Us section.

8. Posting Schedule & Target Audience

To achieve maximum engagement find the ideal time your fans are online and schedule posts accordingly.

Check your Facebook Insights to see when your fans are online. You’ll see data for each day of the week. Ideally, post half an hour before they are online so your post will appear on their news feed by the time they arrive.

Facebook recently added two new targeting options for page posts: Target Interests & Post End Date.

Use Target Interests to direct your updates to a narrowly defined group. You’ll receive greater engagement. Target them by their interests, gender, age, location, behavior, etc. Once you set this up, the Facebook Business Page will appear on users’ newsfeed as per the targeted interest.

Note: This feature needs to be enabled under the general settings at “News feed audience and visibility for posts”.

When you use the Post End Date option, you predetermine your post’s lifespan in the news feed. When the end date passes, the post will no longer appear in a news feed even though it remains on your page. This is an effective way to promote events and other time-specific posts.

These tips can be easily implemented on Your Facebook Business Page and there’s no fee attached to any action.

Stay tuned for the next segment. We’ll talk about how to improve your business with Facebook Ads.

July 15, 2015

Cortex: Twitter Ramps Up Its Artificial Intelligence Efforts

The hunt is on at Twitter for engineers to ramp up the company’s artificial intelligence efforts. It calls the new team “Cortex.” After acquiring DeepMind in 2014 Google has been doing a lot of work with artificial neural networks. And Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has flagged artificial intelligence as one of the company’s key initiatives. So it’s no wonder that Twitter wants to enlist architecture and systems software engineers to work on “Deep Learning”,

Wikipedia tells us that “one of the promises of deep learning is replacing handcrafted features with efficient algorithms for unsupervised or semi-supervised feature learning and hierarchical feature extraction.” Twitter’s Cortex team will mine this specialized branch of artificial intelligence to help the company better personalize its service for its 300 million users, and keep up with Google and Facebook in the industry’s real-time personalization race.

Twitter’s job listing explains why it needs artificial intelligence and how it views the new Cortex team:

“Twitter is a unique source of real-time information, offering amazing opportunities for automatic content understanding. The format of this content is diverse (tweets, photos, videos, music, hyperlinks, follow graph …), the distribution of topics ever-changing (on a weekly, daily, or sometimes hourly basis), and the volume ever-growing; making it very challenging to automatically and continuously expose relevant content. Manually defining features to represent this data is showing its limits.

“Our team, Twitter Cortex, is responsible for building the representation layer for all this content. As an architecture engineer at Twitter Cortex, you will help us build, scale and maintain the backbone of our online learning systems, and directly impact the lives of our users and the success of our business.”

Twitter may not have the resources of Google or Facebook, but the Cortex group demonstrates that Twitter is a serious AI contender. For Twitter, AI capabilities could translate into new products and features and breathe life into stalling user growth. If the flood of content generated on Twitter every hour can by presented as a personalized feed to each user based on their interests then Twitter might just strike gold.

Let us know your thoughts about how artificial intelligence can revolutionize the digital social media world.

July 14, 2015

Best of the Week | Do You Have A Content Marketing Strategy, and much more…

This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world.

From the Position² Blog This Week:

Do You Have A Content Marketing Strategy?
If you think content marketing isn’t easy, you are not alone. For an entire annual marketing plan to be a success, you need a focused content strategy. Read this blog to build a winning content strategy!

Big Change in Video Ad Format with the Rise of Vertical

Best of the Week Video
You might expect that vertically-oriented video would present a challenge to advertisers, who, traditionally, have redeployed ad first designed for TV’s landscape screen. Watch this video for GroupM chief digital officer Rob Norman’s take on the problem – don’t think TV, think bus stop ads.

White Paper: Increase Visibility for Your Content by 4x

Today’s traditional SEO is inadequate: Ignite your search results by accelerating visibility in more places than ever before.Download this White Paper and learn:

SEO, why the way we know it is not enough
Introducing and implementing Enterprise Visibility Accelerator (EVA)
Using multi-channel tracking tools for effective monitoring
How EVA benefits businesses.

Download the complimentary EVA White Paper now

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July 10, 2015

Facebook Updates Cost Per Click Measurement

On Wednesday the folks at Facebook announced that they have modified the way they calculate cost per click. It’s part of their new marketing API. From now on, Cost-Per-Click (CPC) will no longer be measured as likes and shares, but measured as link clicks to websites and apps. Bottom line: advertisers will no longer have to pay for likes, shares or comments.

The New CPC?

Cost of the Click will shift from engagement only ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ to a specific ad objective. Some examples of the new CPC include:

Clicks to visit another website
Call-to-action clicks that go to another website (i.e., “Shop Now”)
Clicks to install an app
Clicks to Facebook canvas apps
Clicks to view a video on another website

The new definition serves ad objectives that Facebook believes are more closely aligned with the business objectives of advertisers.

What Does This Mean?

With the new CPC calculation in play advertisers are likely to enjoy a better ROI on their ad spends, because the outcome of driving traffic to their website will yield greater value. As certain campaign reporting metrics related to clicks change advertisers will have to bear a higher cost per clicks. But in the long run marketers will end up paying only for valuable clicks.

“If you think back, a lot of advertisers thought of Facebook only as a social platform and were strictly engagement focused,” Richard Sim, Facebook’s head of ads product marketing, told Marketing Land. “Over the past few years we’ve really been focused on driving business results. The transition to clicks being only link clicks is a big step in this transition.”

What Happens to Likes, Comments and Shares?

Advertisers will still be able to bid for the engagement clicks (including Likes, Comments and Shares) but under the new CPC definition this will not be tracked. A high number of engagement clicks will continue to be an indicator of valuable and engaging content.

What Next?

According to Facebook, it could be one of three things:

If you buy Ads through a Facebook interface (like Ads Manager or Power Editor), sit tight and wait for the changes to be rolled out in the interface
If you buy through a Facebook Marketing Partner, find out how they intend to implement these changes
If you buy through the API, you can begin buying ads with the updated CPC starting July 8, 2015 in v2.4 of the Ads API. If need be, you can continue using the existing CPC definition through October 7. But after that date, only the updated CPC will be available

Is this the beginning of the end for Cost Per Engagement model? Let us know what you think about this change?

July 10, 2015

Do You Have A Content Marketing Strategy?

You will find a good piece of content at the core of a successful email campaign. But that’s only one cog in the wheel. For an entire annual marketing plan to be a success you need a focused content strategy, something along the lines of what Michael Brenner has in mind in ‘What is Content Strategy and Why Do You Need it?’ on Forbes.com: “A content strategy flips the tables on traditional linear marketing by defining the process and then securing the right resources for producing a consistent stream of content mapped to buyer needs across all phases of the buying cycle. This is done for each buyer type or “buyer persona” that is involved in the B2B decision-making process.”

If you think content marketing isn’t easy, you are not alone (see below). Marketers assume they face unpredictable challenges designing a sustainable content marketing strategy. And then they have to implement it. But it may not be all that daunting.

Beyond verbal: Why you need a documented content marketing strategy?

Seventy percent of marketers say they are creating more content today than they did one year ago. That’s a quantum leap in both content creation and distribution. Marketers are learning how essential it is to have the right content, in the right channel, at the right time – every time a potential customer goes looking for an answer. Having a method to match the content creation madness helps marketers aim their energy, their money and, most crucially, their time in the right direction.

Content Marketing Institute’s research shows that marketers with a documented content strategy:

Are far more likely to consider themselves effective at content marketing
Feel significantly less challenged with every aspect of content marketing
Generally consider themselves more effective in their use of all content marketing tactics and social media channels
Can justify spending a higher percentage of their marketing budget on content marketing

How to build a winning content strategy?

You need to ask yourself a few questions before you start a deep-dive into the elements of your strategy:

Define your ultimate goals (traffic, sales, retention, awareness, etc.)
Define the target group that will help achieve your goals
Pinpoint where is the target group and who or what influences it
Establish the metric to judge the success of your efforts (links, shares, engagements, conversions, etc.)
Compare ROI with other marketing activities

Once you have filled in those blanks, follow these simple steps for a well-rounded content strategy.

Step 1: Do a content inventory

More often than not, marketers are sitting on a gold mine of unused content. A documented content inventory gives you a clear picture of where your existing content can be found, how well it performs, and what gaps remain unfilled.

Step 2: Start building a content calendar to fill identified gaps

The content calendar helps you nail down the content type, tone, audience and publishing schedule. For example, a retail solutions firm, not only wants to produce great content for potential customers interested in, say, retail operation optimization but also for potential new employees who want to know how good a company they are to work for

Step 3: Content is ‘King’; content promotion is ‘Queen’

Decide how to distribute and promote your content. How long — duration — will you keep it published (limited time, indefinitely)? What’s the reusability across channels? Planning this will help you publish and promote the right content to the right channels.

Step 4: Track and Tweak

Track how your content performs across the distribution channels and which promotions pay off. Optimize your content with an analytic approach based on agreed upon metrics.

Building and implementing a content strategy can be as easy as taking stock of existing content, filling in the gaps and then looking at the numbers coming in to tweak the content for the next round.

We would love to hear your thoughts on content marketing strategy and execution. What are your pain points? What really works for you?

July 8, 2015

Twitter’s Audience Insights

Audience Insights, a valuable and powerful tool from Twitter delivers a lot of useful information about your audience and how best to connect with them.

How to Access Twitter’s Audience Insights

To access Audience Insights, click on the profile picture displayed in the top right corner, which opens a drop-down menu. Click on “Analytics”.

Once in the Analytics section, click on the “Followers” tab..

The Insights

Twitter slices and dices your audience into different categories, showing what percentage of audience fits into which category. To do this, Twitter uses information it gleans from users’ onsite usage, as well as off-site information provided by Datalogix.

The overview at the top of the page tells you the most common interest of a user category, what type of lifestyle they follow, what type of buying style is most common, and their most commonly used wireless carrier.

Other statistics Twitter provides about your audience include:

Interests
Consumer buying styles
Wireless carrier
Education (highest level completed)
Marital status
Net worth
Household income categories
Gender

In its blog Twitter provides an overview of the potential power of the Audience Insight tool. “With audience insights, you can easily discover valuable information about your followers and the people who have engaged with your organic Tweets. You can also identify new, relevant audiences to target for an upcoming campaign. Your audience insights dashboard provides aggregate information about user demographics, interests, purchasing behavior and more.”

Audience Insights is now available to all Twitter advertisers and analytics users. Marketers may think that have the appropriate target audience ‘following’ them. Audience Insights can tell them if that is true. Twitter’s Audience Insights helps marketers analyze their audience and its response to their messaging. It gives them important nuggets of information to realign content and messaging strategy as per the current trends and information needs of their audience.

Are you using Twitter’s Audience Insights? Has it helped you learn anything about how to better connect with your audience? Share your thoughts in a comment below.

July 3, 2015